ericprincessdragon

Category: Notes

  • The Challenge(s) – Overview

    Something that comes up across many entries on this site are songwriting groups and challenges. What this means is essentially an organized period of group or individual songwriting with set deadlines and accountability. Participating in these groups and challenges has been essential to my creative development over the last decade.

    Writing requires that I maintain a level of close connection with myself. More specifically, writing songs has become a process of connecting with my emotions – allowing myself to feel deeply and reflect, while opening up to whatever creative ideas come through that connection. Often I am too occupied, stressed, exhausted or distracted to allow this process of feeling for long enough to externalize it in a meaningful way. These groups provide a gentle but firm push to return to feeling and creating. The accountability, the community, the deadline – together they consistently push me beyond what I could usually summon on my own.

    I do write all the time and finish songs occasionally on my own. But I’ve found that doing regular blocks of intensive writing like this brings a necessary balance to my creative life. I can go months without the focus to sit down and finish things, and then reach a point where all the inspiration, insights, little notes and voice memos I’ve been accumulating come to a head and make their way into raw material for these intensive periods. Something about the group brings enough of a social atmosphere, spirit of support and accountability that changes what I’m able to do.

    Over the last decade I have participated in the following challenges and groups:

    Note: I will be updating this list over time with hyperlinks to entries detailing the background behind each of these challenges and each of the songs. Some of the songs have their own entries already and will be linked in the list below.

    July 2017 Song A Day Challenge – The one that started it all, 26 songs written and recorded during my last full month living down in Ontario, California – mostly recorded at Rad Pro Studios.

    1. Ten To One
    2. Following
    3. Will Hide
    4. Bad Kitty
    5. Young Love
    6. Insomniac Stupor Rag
    7. Sister
    8. The Witch & The Wizard
    9. Sharks Not Sharks
    10. Bar Rats
    11. Chasing Cars
    12. Flower Man
    13. Cynics In Love
    14. No Body
    15. Tinder Babies
    16. The Challenge
    17. Elemental
    18. Where The People At?
    19. Clip Show
    20. Don’t Talk To Me About Pizza
    21. Face Stealer
    22. Forty Thousand Spirits
    23. Hicks
    24. Unplugged
    25. Expressing Frustration At Soundcloud
    26. Destination Fever

    July 2018 Song A Day Challenge – Second round of the song a day challenge, recorded at home in Port Orford, OR

    1. An Uplifting Indie Pop Song
    2. His Royal Mop
    3. Little Dreams
    4. Easy Quick Song
    5. 13th (Unlucky Day)
    6. Monster
    7. Unplugged
    8. Eight Plays (For the Ukraine)
    9. We Thirsty
    10. Water > Gold
    11. UFO
    12. Hearing Loss
    13. Missed Connections
    14. Men And Ladies
    15. Trash Day
    16. Mind Game
    17. Tails
    18. Stanky Town
    19. Our Lucky Ears
    20. Crow
    21. Expiration
    22. I’m Silent (As CO)
    23. Tree Sap
    24. Tongue Dry As A Bone
    25. Songwriter’s Hangover
    26. Casual Encounter
    27. Milk & Cookies

    February 2019 Short Songs – Song A Day Challenge –

    1. Not Doing Anything
    2. Ol’ Moon
    3. People (Scary)
    4. A Walk In The Park
    5. Dreamer
    6. White Glow
    7. One Way Staycation
    8. Been Here Too Long
    9. King Struggle
    10. Man Children
    11. Wah-Wah
    12. Demon Girl
    13. Jet
    14. V Day
    15. Me & The Gang
    16. Everybody’s Band
    17. Birds N Bees
    18. Somewhere New
    19. Da Hero & Da Foe
    20. Something Different
    21. iBabies
    22. Go On
    23. Om Busted My Lip

    July 2019 Song A Day Challenge

    1. New Moon In June
    2. Salt Of The Earth
    3. Arms
    4. Them Good Days
    5. Keanu Shrinks
    6. Big Goals
    7. Family Tree
    8. God Damn Those Dudes
    9. Shortie
    10. Bane
    11. Let Me In
    12. Fickle Tickle
    13. Little Cocoon
    14. Walk Far (You’ll Find Him)
    15. It’s A Trap
    16. Dirty Bleeding Heart
    17. Rude Bear

    Tim Bulster’s Song-A-Week Groups

    Round 1 – Fall 2023 (Oct 8 — Nov 27)

    1. Dust
    2. Mints
    3. Undertow
    4. Halloween
    5. Another Day Another Dime
    6. Acaso
    7. My Opinions
    8. Been Missin’

    Round 2 – Winter 2024

    1. Gutter Baby
    2. Pretzels
    3. The Funky Jake
    4. Paradise
    5. Can’t Abide
    6. Summer

    Round 3 – Fall/Winter 2024 (Sept 8 — Dec 21)

    1. Off The Wall
    2. No Box
    3. Climb And Fall
    4. Ring Any Bells
    5. Heaven Is Wasted
    6. Bringer Of Badness

    Round 4 – Winter 2024/25 (Dec 8 — Jan 13)

    1. Past Times
    2. Perfect Time
    3. Good Company
    4. Venom
    5. We’re Sinking

    Round 5 – Fall 2025 (October – Nov)

    1. Only The Lucky Grow Old
    2. Needle Out
    3. Sweetheart
    4. Gregory
    5. Nazare
    6. Heart

    Round 6 – Winter/Spring 2026 (Feb 1 — Mar 9)

    1. Only Murder
    2. Something Beautiful
    3. Fallen Giant
    4. Werns
    5. Maytag Land
    6. Our Golden Days Have Passed

  • Musical Snapshots

    Recently I’ve been developing a concept I’m calling the musical snapshot.

    The idea is this: whatever I play or compose or improvise in a given moment is an expression of what I’m feeling at that time – some instinct, some inspiration, some emotion I may not even be fully aware of. I couldn’t have played or composed that particular idea at any other time, in a different place or state of mind. So any piece of music I write is essentially a snapshot of my creative and emotional state at the moment it was made.

    Of course there are other factors. The environment plays a role – the people around me, the conversations happening nearby, the ambient noise or quiet outside. What I’ve been practicing or listening to at the time makes its way in. So many things influence the expression, both consciously and subconsciously. But the core idea holds: the music captures something true about that moment, whether I understood it at the time or not.

    This means that returning to any musical idea is like time traveling. There’s a time capsule waiting – a connection back to a past version of myself, back to wherever I was, whatever I was feeling. When I listen back to an old voice memo or an old recording, I’m hearing something that past me left behind. And when I write about it now, I’m entering into a kind of conversation between that past self and whoever I am today – with hindsight, perspective, and hopefully a bit more understanding than I had in the moment.

    I arrived at this idea while thinking about the storytelling potential of a live set. I started arranging my songs not just alphabetically or by project or theme, but by the period of life they describe. I’ve written enough songs now that many different periods of my life can be told in song – different places I’ve lived, relationships I’ve been in, periods of travel, periods of staying still. Looking at them this way I started to see stages my life, with certain chapters more fully written than others. My childhood, for instance, is a notable gap – only recently have a couple of songs started to cover that territory.

    While thinking about performing songs in biographical order, I started to think about the fact I’m most always most excited about my newest song (finished or in progress) – and I landed on this idea that the newest ideas are closest to who I am and where I’m at at any given time. If I wanted to give an audience the most present and authentic version of myself, I should open with my newest song.

    Then I pushed the idea further. If the newest completed song is the most current snapshot, what’s even more present than that? Improvisation. Whatever I play in the moment, unplanned, is the most accurate expression of where I am right now. That’s what led me to the concept of opening a set with an improvisation – before any prepared material, before any rehearsed songs, just whatever comes out in that moment.

    In the performances I’ve done since developing this thinking I’ve been playing my newest songs in roughly reverse chronological order, keeping the spirit of the snapshot idea in mind. But the full biographical storytelling set – I haven’t fully realized yet in a live setting yet. This is all fresh territory, concepts I’ve only arrived at in the last few months.

    As for the retroactive writing process itself, the best example currently in this archive is Acaso – a song written about the house I grew up in, which integrates a piece of music I originally called Temple City Theme, an instrumental I wrote while traveling that I eventually dedicated to the city where I was raised. It’s a slightly different flavor of the process, but the essence is there: old music, new words, a conversation between two points in time.

    The clearest examples of this process in my catalog are the Alice songs – recordings made during a period living in an Amsterdam squat in 2014, which I’ve been slowly writing about from the distance of a decade. That’s a whole entry of its own – coming eventually.

    For now this is the framework. Many of the entries on this site were written this way – old music, new words, past self meeting present self somewhere in between. When you read them, that’s the conversation you’re listening in on.

  • March [2024]

    March is a collection of songs and videos self-produced between February and April 2024, beginning at home in Oregon and continuing as I traveled between Oregon, Hawaii, mainland Australia, and Tasmania.

    These tracks cover a span of six years and a distance of 8,000 miles. Some took months of creative teeth-pulling to put together. Others were written and recorded in a few hours — one in the moment of creation. Recorded across states and continents, across different moods and seasons and lifetimes. Edited, mixed and arranged on buses, planes, in forests, cliff sides, spare bedrooms, a van, a dome, and probably more odd spaces that escape me now. They are united in that they were completed in the month of March.

    Everything you hear and see was self-produced. The audio was mastered and videos re-cut for final release in April 2024, shortly after joining a recording session with some crazy hippies at MONA Museum’s Frying Pan Studios in Tasmania.

    1. Acaso

    Built around “Temple City Theme,” a piece of music written on the road in 2014 and dedicated to the San Gabriel Valley suburb where I grew up. The song became a reflection on returning home after years of travel to help my family through the sale of my childhood home and my parents’ separation – and the ongoing search for new homes that followed. Written during the first song-a-week challenge, fall 2023. Full entry and lyrics →

    2. Scroll Hole

    A short song about a recurring experience: reaching for the phone to open the tuner app and emerging twenty minutes later from an Instagram spiral with nothing to show for it. Written in March 2024, recorded and filmed in the guest room of my friend Alex’s family home in Adelaide, South Australia – an all-nighter with my face buried in a camera lens. Full entry and lyrics →

    3. Sweet Sleep

    An instrumental piece from a series of horn-driven compositions I call Dokie Okie. Cut together with video from a rare snow day at home in Port Orford – the snowfall lasted about twenty minutes, but I grabbed the camera and ran through every room shooting until it stopped. Full entry →

    4. Gutter Baby

    A character study drawn from people I met traveling around Montreal, Humboldt, and Mendocino counties, with roots in a dusty notebook from 2014-2015 when I was hitchhiking the states heavy. An amalgamation of stories heard on the street, some of my own experiences, and a hard-won happy ending. First demo completed January 2024 during a song-a-week challenge. Full entry and lyrics →

    5. Cloudsurf

    A beat made with the Jamstik MIDI guitar, cut to a rainy night drive into Old Town Bandon, OR.

    6. Somewhere New

    Written five years before the March release, this one captures the feeling of marching into the unknown. Shot in the Canary Islands — La Palma and Tenerife, the home island of my great-grandfather.

    7. Miles Away

    Written on a drive home along the southern Oregon coast, coming around the bend at Humbug Mountain when the ocean suddenly snapped me back into the present. A song about autopilot — all the time that passes while you’re somewhere else. Recorded at sunset on the cliffs at Sister’s Rock, playing until it got dark and cold. Full entry and lyrics →

    8. Real Life

    Written and recorded on a day of hitchhiking outside of Swansea, Tasmania. A sketch that became a song about sitting with uncertainty and staying open to what it brings.

    9. Oahu Noodles

    Two improvisations recorded on the porch of a hostel on the north shore of Oahu, the morning of my last day on the island. Recorded guitar and synth into a handheld recorder through headphones until the batteries died- caught a flight to Sydney that afternoon. Full entry →

    10. Beaten Track

    The tale of a relationship going from a joy ride to a runaway hell ride. The wavy keys are a Jamstik running through a borrowed Nord Stage 3.

    11. Can’t Abide

    A song about choosing time over money, work that means something over work that pays. Written in a couple of hours, finished before I even knew it. Full entry, video and lyrics →

    12. Been Missin

    he sister song to Dust. Written after a two-hour phone call with an old friend I hadn’t spoken to in years, walking the dogs on the beach in the sun. About the moment the reconnection finally happens and you discover that though much has changed, much is the same. Full entry and lyrics →

    That’s all folks! March wasn’t necessarily planned as an ‘album’ – I simply set out to release everything I finished within the span of a month (or two) and these were the songs and videos I managed to finish in that time. I’m certain some of these songs will find new life in future arrangements, recordings and releases. Stay tuned!

  • Website – Visions

    Hello, reader of these words. I am rebuilding this website with a specific concept in mind – creating a place where I can share my work directly and catalog my work, life and recordings.

    I doubt the practicality and relevance of a “www.com” website here in 2025, but my sense of fatigue and conflict around platforms like ig/faboo/spotify have grown too discomforting to ignore. I want to share my work in a medium that doesn’t feel ethically questionable, even if I am limiting the potential ‘reach’ of the work. I will continue to use said platforms to share minimally, but I will point people to the website for the majority of what I do.

    My motivation to create has little to do with reach in the first place and I have simple ambitions when it comes to my music, mainly that I wish to continue the process of creating music. I don’t feel the need to make instagram reels in order to create music. Whether I share online or with just a select few people as I normally do, I am constantly writing, recording, making videos, practicing and playing.

    As the fleeting sense of desire to share strikes me, I will make posts here. Overtime I’d like to build a catalog of posts featuring songs, stories, pictures, videos, memories. Thank you for reading these words.

    epd