Album almost done, my soul yearns for the fields: a retrospective

05/18/26

Howdy folks, i'm currently listening to what is probably the final mix of my album and everything sounds really really nice tonally (thanks to my most honorable producer ethan, who has been putting up with me for i think about two years!). The album has been cut in half by the way. After my last post and the events which made my macbook unusable (which i will not describe due to their harrowing nature), my body started rejecting any further attempts to continue recording, so i just gave up and threw out the last six songs which would have comprised Side B. Honestly i'm really fine with the tonal shift that results from that exclusion. I think it makes the album more honest. A lot of the tracks from Side B were things i wrote later on after i'd entered a state of full-on delusion which served to obscure the true nature of the feelings that were occurring over the five-year cycle this album contains, which were simply heartbreak and grief. There were diversions, harrowing confessions, projections, and even a beautiful heartfelt resolution for a last track, all of which i decided were not true to the actual theme of the album (conveniently at the same time that my macbook broke). Not saying i won't someday release them still!! But thru this serendipitous pivot, i have decided i won't hide what this album means to me. It's not an elaborate theological treatise as i have wildly claimed, it's not an abstract stream of consciousness poem experiment that "seems to have a meaning but doesn't" (what was i even trying to say there?). This album is about a relationship that hurt me very deeply during a time when i was vulnerable because i was grieving the loss of my mother. It is about grieving one loss amidst another loss, and how hurt informs further hurt. The details won't go any further than that, but i think it's important to soberly recognize where my delusional language starts and ends here. I talk a lot of bullshit. I am a HUGE fan of hyperbole. Pretty much everything i've written about this album thus far has been disproportionate to what it actually is, which is a quaint and vaguely sad indie folk album written by another aimless twenty-something. That said, these are songs i love and cherish to the ends of the earth, and i believe they absolutely deserve to exist because they're parts of my soul, and i believe when people share parts of their soul, it genuinely feeds the well-being of society and the collective unconscious.

However, i really do not care about promoting this album. This website, which i know for a fact gets way less traffic than other neocities sites because i don't update very often at all, is pretty much the only place where i will ever talk about it. I don't like social media or the internet. And at certain points in my life i would have said that the true music community exists in the real world at diy live events in your own hometown and THAT'S the only place where creativity can truly thrive and the internet is just a hindrance to that - and i still essentially believe that is true - but i don't even like my irl music community anymore. Nothing personal to y'all, but i spent my time there and it was (sometimes great and beautiful but otherwise) profoundly exhausting and rife with petty conflicts and casual substance abuse, and it was always very, very difficult to connect with people in a way i felt was genuine and good. Probably about five or six fit that description. One of them was a good friend who passed away unexpectedly and their passing pretty much cemented my exit, though they did always encourage me to keep seeking out positive connections and have faith in the community and the general goodness of other people, especially when it was hardest. I still think about their encouragements and how, maybe, i just need time away, and i will need it for a while. Maybe once i move to the cabin-in-the-woods of my dreams, i'll find a new community and make beautiful new things. They say appalachian folk is in its renaissance right now. Hell, i'm interested in film and writing too. Who knows what'll happen. I can't help thinking that it's so, so obnoxious to be talking about all this as if anyone's gonna read thru this and be like "woooow, this truly is the mind of an artist, so inspiring", but then again, this is how i have genuinely felt reading/watching a great many artists (many of whom even more verbose than me), some examples being david tibet, travis miller, jandek, bjork, carrie brownstein, jessica pratt, adrianne lenker, dan barrett, ravenna hunt-hendrix, kristin hayter, brit marling, jim o'rourke, maryanne amacher, lights, imogen heap, many old friends from the florida scene like rugh, flora, and daisy, and even some of you neocities folks. That, of course, is just off top tho. I don't claim to be "on the same level" as everybody else in that list; i merely have no choice but to accept that creative acts are reciprocal and participatory, and the inspiration and seen-ness others give to me is something i must make an effort to return.

Honestly, writing all of this right now feels very strange because for over a year, i have detached myself almost entirely from the practice of music making or being in the music community. I haven't been to a show (local or touring) since last winter. I used to devour like hundreds of new albums per year; this year i've listened to probably two. And clearly we see how much inner turmoil it has caused me to try and finish my album. My mind has just been completely elsewhere. It is hard to describe why, but i do believe it is part of the natural waxing and waning of things and the natural "torrential wind-whipping of my mind" (which i'm self-quoting from the last entry bc that was a badass and very accurate image i came up with). Though it's surreal to have so much distance from it now, music used to be my entire life ("music is life, that's why our hearts have beats" etc).
For a while now i have been thinking about and wanting to write about my old friends from music club, the student club i was a part of for most of my college years, who introduced me to the sprawling worlds of both the online music community and our local music community. They changed my life and are held in my heart forever. It was such a rich and exciting time when i could meet a dozen college kids every other week in an overly sterile conference room tucked away into the third or fourth floor of the student center, and we'd spend our evenings talking about the hanatarash, the caretaker, boards of canada, lingua ignota, arthur russell, steve albini, kanye, fantano, nardwuar, the flenser, the quietus, rym, and whatever was the most obscure youtube live performance or tunes-to-tube rip we could possibly dig up that week. There were many debates and disagreements, and then there was the kid who picked a new victim every week on which to infodump about jazz and socialism, but for the most part each of them were very kind, very talented, and very much my friends. We had impromptu jam sessions at the parking garage; watched many artsy films; built a minecraft server; tinkered with old electronics and tape loops; traded vinyl and cds. It was so beautiful and new. I even felt, powerfully, like it was my literal destiny, that these people and this university conference room would lead me to where i was always meant to be - my first band, my first Official Release, the mastering of all the technical abilities i envied and awed at for years. And yes, all of that did happen. I had a campus radio show (good luck digging that one out of the depths of the internet bc i'm Not linking it); i got my first electric guitar and pedalboard; and then, i was in a band i loved for three years. It just didn't pan out like i imagined.
It's not like i ever actually expected (or wanted) to headline pitchfork music festival or even FYA fest (lol), but i wanted so desperately for everything to last, and it just couldn't. I just couldn't. I could say all kinds of things about "toxic community culture", how streaming services and instagram reels killed the industry (it did and it didn't), the financial burden of having music as a hobby ("and in THIS economy"), how the skramz and shoegaze movements our band was a part of were immature and noncommittal trends lacking almost any real fervor or innovation, how mental illness can wreak havoc thru many countless artists' lives and both yourself and people you love can become unrecognizable, how hard it is for ANY band to get along and stay motivated for 3+ years, how hard it was to connect sincerely and how hard it was to lose people i had connected with sincerely. But at the end of the day, i was just tired. My body fought viciously against all the beatings, all the late nights, all the labor of transporting gear and driving for hours and trying to stay in-practice. Near the end, i was experiencing a very particular psychosomatic (?) problem where my hand and arm muscles would just lock, and i wouldn't be able to play anything, and i had to practice the exact same riff for hours and hours to try and loosen up the muscles again and it would just make it worse (that, and my skin was breaking out in invisible rashes). The only other time i've ever heard of something like this happening was in a julian lage interview, and julian lage is a far better guitarist than me, so it was all the more infuriating that my body was rejecting tasks that were technically not that hard.

So many things happened for me to reach that point, and most of it will stay personal and hidden under lyrical metaphor. But i think, for a long time before it actually ended, i just wanted to move on. There was immense grief in coming to terms with that; just as there was immense grief in trying to finish my personal work, which actually spans far longer than the lifespan of the band, but so much of it has to do with that same time period that it has just become far too painful to continue. So i cut it in half and i'm cleaning my hands of it. That's the Real backstory. Life goes on after grief. My life is going on, thanks be to God. I have so much going for me now, so much hope and so much newness that i never even conceived was possible for me, that it really does not bother me to leave the music world behind. That said, i can't help feeling that the love i had for that world and those people is not gone. If that love was gone, i would have abandoned this stupid ass solo album a long time ago. Even now, i imagine that i'll keep writing more things eventually, even if it's just ambient instrumentals or dungeon synth. (I always wanted to make a dungeon synth album.) Then again, maybe the album is just for closure, a final farewell. Maybe my urge to promise an eventual return is compulsory, empty, just a manifestation of my guilt of having let down people who once believed in me. That, too, will go away with time. If there is anything i can say to anyone reading this who is also an artist, i would say: let yourself leave if you want to. Let yourself go do other shit. Let yourself follow the voice of the Spirit away, far away, never to return*; that could mean a different genre, a different medium, a different community, a different lifestyle entirely, but if the love in your heart and the goodness of your soul is telling you to go, then do it. Just do it with kindness; don't destroy what needn't be destroyed. Honor what was and what it gave you. Honor songs you were once proud of that you hate now. Honor places you can't return to. Pray for people you don't talk to. Let pieces of your past stay alive within you, in things you say and do, in the art you create, in the love you give to all you have now and all yet to be seen.

For the sake of honoring things, i'm going to share with you a secret demo of a song that regrettably did not make it to the final album, which is literally just a proof-of-concept recording off my phone. This is the last song i ever wrote for the album or in general. It is also the most personal song i have ever written, probably.