ericprincessdragon

Tag: interviews

  • 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.

  • Body

    This song began on February 2, 2025, the second day of FAWM – February Album Writing Month, a worldwide challenge to write a song every other day totaling fourteen songs by the end of the month. I had just rediscovered fawm.org when signing up and found that I already had an account from 2015. Here I was nearly ten years later attempting it for the first time.

    I was traveling by van in Tasmania. I drove out to stay the night near a small town called Evandale, where I was going to meet an artist named Kier Stevens for an interview the next morning. I found a lot near a small river where people camp their RVs overnight. I got there, walked my things out to a little gazebo and made myself a camp meal – lentils, rice and tuna, pretty standard camp cooking throughout my time in Tassie. Afterwards I took a seat at the edge of the gazebo facing out towards the road, played guitar on my camp chair and watched the sunset. The melodies and words came all at once. By the time the sun went down I had worked out the changes, melodies and most of the words.

    The next day I did the interview with Kier in the park. On the fourth I recorded the original demo – I was staying with my good friend Josh, who rented a room with two beds at a little bed and breakfast up in Ulverstone on the north coast of Tassie. While he was off working during the day I set up and recorded the demo in the room, playing his 1950s jazz guitar and trying not to sing too loudly.

    Original Demo:

    The most recent demo came at the end of that visit, already into March. The bones are from the original but if you listen to them back to back you’ll hear some differences – new layers, new vocal takes, guitars, programmed parts, percussion, drums, synthesizers. Most of what came after the Ulverstone recording was done in the van, most of it in one very cold night where I felt a massive burst of inspiration and stayed up till the sun came up just working on this tune. It was too cold to play guitar so any ideas that came into my head I would program with the keyboard on my laptop. By the time I was done, the sun had risen so ferociously hot that I couldn’t sleep! That was rough on the body. The most recent mix was done on the plane flying over the Pacific in the middle of March on my way back to the US.

    I wasn’t able to balance the FAWM challenge with traveling, living out of the van, doing interviews and gigs and other recordings. All in all I think I only wrote three songs that month. This was the first and the best of them.

    The song is about something I was feeling at the time – that I needed to get more into my body. It’s been a lifelong pattern for me to spend so much of my time either focused on external activities and pursuits or otherwise internal. I am a very mental person. I spend a lot of time in my thoughts. At times I feel like my body just hangs from my head. I take care of it with basic maintenance, I try to eat well and sleep when I can, but the serious thoughtful intention I put into my body is a fraction of what I put into my thoughts, my creative pursuits, my skills, my travels, my studies, my people and so on.

    A more specific realization at the time of writing this song was that I was coming out of a period of maybe five or six months where I was deeply concerned with mortality – exploring the philosophy around death. I read several books, listened to hours of lectures, interviews and podcasts, and wrote about half a dozen songs concerning death and mortality in one way or another. These thoughts go in waves for me, something that has come and gone since I was a child, but this was a particularly deep and productive time. I feel I managed to move the ball forward. I was sitting quite comfortably with the topic by the end of it.

    But the thing I felt most strongly by the end of it all was simply this: I possess the antidote to any concern, any worry, any fear around death. I am alive. I have a body. I am a body. All that rumination, as useful as it may be for writing songs and gaining perspective, is not really all that productive in itself. What if every hour I’ve ever spent worrying about death had been spent instead just focusing on what I can sense, on being truly alive, engaging directly with life in a visceral way, using all of me and not just the words sounding silently in my head.

    I believe my death does not concern me. The only thing I should be concerned with is life. And so this song is a manifesto, a meditation, a reminder – to be present, to seek presence and stay present, to seek comfort and fullness within the body as it is. Not to get too carried away with the external or the internal dialogue.

    It’s been a year since I wrote this. I’m still largely concerned with the externals and the world of my thoughts. But I have felt much more at peace within my body in the last year. I guess the declaration stuck.


    “Body”

    I’ve been running from the void
    What did that bring?
    But sickness of mind
    And so much long lost time
    I will ditch my bags
    Try to sit still
    I’m not used to being in my body
    I’ll get used to it

    Body heals itself
    Unlike mind
    Which left unchecked grows sick with time
    And I got used to it
    Now I want peace inside

    In the body
    Coming home
    Take some time find peace inside

  • Acaso

    Acaso

    From the March album – originally written Fall 2023

    “Acaso” came together during one of the most emotionally intensive periods of my songwriting life, built around a piece of music I’d been playing with for years. It was 2014 when I returned to the states after over a year of traveling abroad – this was a piece I’d begun playing on the road but finalized and decided to dedicate to the San Gabriel Valley suburb where I grew up. I called it “Temple City Theme.” Here’s a recording of the piece I did with my friend Stephen Reed (of the brilliant band Xinxin) on drums:

    The Songwriting Challenge

    “Acaso” was written in fall 2023 during the first round of a new songwriting group led by Tim Bulster (of Tiller of The Moon – check out The Songwriting Mind episode with this talented musician). We committed to eight weeks of writing a song per week, recording demos and sharing them with the group. This became the first of four challenges we’d complete between fall 2023 and winter 2024.

    Here’s “Acaso” as originally submitted to the song-a-week group:

    (Original demo recording)

    Back in 2017, my childhood home in Temple City had been sold and my parents separated at long last. The anchor that had tethered a broken, unhappy family was finally cut loose.

    “Acaso” became my reflection on that time and process – from a free life on the road to returning “home” to serve my family through this transition and see them through to the other side. Eventually leaving to find new homes where the search and quest to claim spaces for ourselves continues.

    Here’s the version released with the collection of songs “March” performed live in my living room.

    Video:


    The unknowns been good to me
    Much better friend than certainty
    I traveled long and I traveled far
    Found myself across the world
    Now I got a call I been waiting for
    It’s time to go back home

    Hey it’s okay
    To finish what you started
    It’s run its course
    I know we’re all exhausted
    Don’t fret we’ll be alright
    This days been coming all our lives
    No more tears no more fights
    Just step through the door
    Gotta go back home
    For the last time

    At home I got a role to play
    Our folks are going their separate ways
    It got so bad they can’t speak
    Their voices move through me
    It ain’t fun but it’s gotta get done
    If we’re gonna move on

    All packed up and I’m the last one out
    Last chord needing cutting was this house
    Where we were born where we grew old
    What stood between us and the cold
    This broken home is all we’ve ever known
    But it’s time we close the door
    We’re gonna find new homes

    Every video, every recording and every day is a fresh experiment. From the album “March 2024” available on Bandcamp and all streaming platforms. “March 2024” is a collection of songs that reflect my life and travels. Recorded across various states and continents, the sounds and images for the album cover a span of six years and 11,000 miles.
    https://linktr.ee/ericprincessdragon