#patternsintraffic

My first original music since 2015 will be released one week from today, on June 1, 2018. It is a six-song EP called Direction, and I have put all of my creative energy into it for the better part of the last three years.

Direction is a themed EP that explores the concepts and meanings of the words that represent the six relative directions: forward, backward, up, down, left, and right. This is made pretty clear if you peruse the tracklist:

1. Forward 2. Backward 3. Right 4. Up 5. Down 6. Left

A themed EP is an idea that I’ve kicked around for a long time. I stole it from Sleeping at Last’s Ryan O’Neal, who has been releasing awesome themed EPs and albums for years now. I always thought it was a really cool songwriting challenge to start with a topic or category and build songs from there. Sometimes, when we have the technology at our fingertips to explore unlimited options, the best way to spur creativity is to impose some restrictions on ourselves.

The idea of using direction as a motif for a set of songs came to me about two years ago while taking a long drive. Before I reached my destination, I had already come up with the six song titles, started brainstorming different interpretations of those words, and started making connections between some of my existing songs and ideas and how they could fit into this framework.

The recording process for this EP was much different than Silhouetting. Rather than completing each song before moving on to the next, I exhaustively demoed all six of these tracks and then recorded them all at once. I laid down all of the drums and keys during the demoing process and then recorded bass for the entire EP, followed by guitars and finally vocals. Since I did the demoing with MIDI patches, I wrote most of the parts on a Novation Impulse keyboard that I added to my little home studio in the years since Silhouetting was released.

The result of this very different recording process is twofold. I think that the EP is much more cohesive than Silhouetting since all of the tracks were being worked on simultaneously. The music that was influencing me while I was writing and recording was mostly harder rock, so these songs have a more aggressive, driving quality to them. There are no acoustic guitars on Direction, which is a pretty large departure from my first album. (There is piano, though. Always piano.)

I also think that the songwriting and musicianship is a leap forward. By writing the parts on piano, I came up with a lot of chords and melodies that I would never have arrived at if I was strumming a guitar. In fact, there are a number of chords throughout the EP that I had to improvise how to play on guitar. By arranging all of the parts before recording any performances, I was able to come up with some more intricate interplay between instruments. And another few years of experience with musical arrangements and theory didn’t hurt either.

Why hello there. Welcome to May of 2018. The new EP is done. Recorded, mixed, and sent off to be mastered by a professional who is almost certainly questioning my decisions and/or abilities right now. The artwork is in progress. I fully expect this new music to be in your ears by the end of this calendar month, and I am sufficiently excited and happy about that! It looks like it’s going to be arriving almost exactly three years after Silhouetting. Six songs in three years isn’t exactly the clip that I would prefer to work at, but you can’t rush art I guess. I got married and did a bunch of other life things in that time, so it wasn’t all watching reality TV and playing Nintendo Switch. I’ve already started demoing for the next release so that I can get some more music out without such a big lull next time!

I haven’t been posting here very often, mostly because I’m not a fan of putting out incremental “updates” that don’t bring a lot of value or insight to the table. But, as I promised a couple of weeks ago, I am back again with actual PiT news! Don’t ever accuse me of breaking my promises (about this, anyway).

Over the past few years I have gotten married, changed jobs, learned how to install backsplash, and played some video games. And throughout all of this I’ve been slowly but consistently plugging away at new material. I’ve actually made progress on a few different batches of songs over the past few years, but I have one batch in particular that is almost ready to pop in the oven. I have finished writing and demoing an EP that I am very excited for you to hear. I don’t want to spill too many of the beans at this point, but I’m going to be exploring some new sonic and thematic territory with these songs. I am using a songwriting and recording process for this release that is very different from what I employed while creating Silhouetting, and I think the result is something a bit more cohesive.

At this point, I’ve finished with drums and bass for the entire EP and I’m ready to move on to guitars. Then I will have to sing this bad boy and do the mixing and mastering. I’m hoping to have these songs ready to release into the wild in early 2018. Hold me to that so I don’t get lazy, would you?

More info to come and possibly some recording updates along the way!