ericprincessdragon

Tag: music

  • The Challenge: July 2017 Pt. 1 – Background

    In July 2017 I was living full-time at Rad Pro Studios on 123 W. D St. in Ontario, California. I had built out one of the smallest rooms in the building into my recording space – a place to practice, write and record. I slept in a long hallway in the basement, which was an echo chamber made entirely of concrete. I would drop a mattress on the floor when it was time to sleep. At one end of the corridor we had rigged up a makeshift shower – a garden hose with a drain. Rad Pro took reservations 24 hours a day and as a late night owl I was always on call, setting up and cashing out bands at any hour of the night and early morning.

    Outside the studio I was doing occasional solo and band performances and playing with my dear friends in the early days of Xinxin. In my family life there had been an upheaval. I had spent the first half of 2017 facilitating the sale of our family home and the separation of my parents – months of work on the property, selling and trashing things, moving decades of accumulated stuff out piece by piece. Four shanty dwellings my dad and I had built over the years had to be demolished. A lot of history was taken apart. I wrote about this period in the entry for Acaso.

    Through this work I ended up with some cash in my pocket, which I used to buy a laptop, interface, a couple microphones and a few other recording and music making items – all found and haggled for on OfferUp. I had gone about five years without a laptop or any means to record outside of using the Rad Pro facilities when I was in the area. Most of that time I had been on the road traveling with just a nylon guitar and eventually a very heavy resonator I bought used for $200. I had just started recording rough demos in late 2015/early 2016 on borrowed gear, and once I had my own setup I was recording every chance I had.

    By July things had settled down at the family home and my dad and I were hatching a plan to leave California and look for land in Oregon. By the first week of August we would arrive in what would become my new home. But down in California the hard work was done and the keys had been handed over to the new owners. I was waiting for the next move.

    Sometime in June I caught wind through the local music community that there was going to be a songwriting group. The goal was to write a song a day for 30 days. I was intrigued, excited and scared. Like many others I was prolific with starting songs and ideas but not very skilled with finishing them. But I was up for the challenge and the timing was just right – I was able to dedicate the month of July entirely to writing and recording every day.

    The group was hosted on Facebook and had many members – there had to have been over 30 at the start. The guidelines were laid out as such:

    “A song can be anything! The point of this is to make a habit of tuning in to the universal creative force… so do whatever you want! Just do something, and don’t judge yourself! It doesn’t matter at all if it’s good or not. It can be a completed song idea with parts, or it can just be a looped beat idea! Quality is unimportant, and collaboration is encouraged. All genres are welcome! Hip-hop, metal, ska, trippy soundscapes, funk, folk… EXPERIMENT!”

    “We’re working with this premise: Listen to the universe, come up with an idea, and get it out of you! Stop being a perfectionist! This challenge forces you to stop judging what you make. If you show up every day and write 30 songs, there’s a good chance some of them will be really great.”

    A handful of participants were peers from the Inland Empire and San Gabriel Valley music scene – people I’d played shows with, seen around the studio, had the occasional jam with. Many others I never met in person but got to know online through the challenge. The structure was simple: the first person to complete their song each day would share their link in a new post, and everyone else would reply with their own submission. If you fell behind you were invited to jump back in at any time – you’d just pick up from wherever you left off and try to catch up. By the end it came down to a hard core group of diehards, as all challenges do.

    One of those diehards was the late Chris Swanson. Chris was part of the Inland Empire scene and his songs always pushed and inspired me. He participated in 2017, 2018 and 2019 song-a-day groups. His song Woman on his final release with the band Bodegas began as a demo submitted during the 2019 challenge. He passed away in 2023. I think about him often.

    The challenge consumed my life. It was the last thing I thought about before I went to sleep and the first thing I thought about in the morning. I began to seek inspiration in everything – every conversation, every sight, every dream, every walk. I would stay up until the sun came up almost every night recording. Some nights after recording until sunrise I’d feel so inspired for the next song that I’d push through another hour or two making progress on the following day’s tune. I could barely sleep because I was so excited to continue.

    One morning I fell asleep around 7 AM after recording and woke up to the lights coming on – one of the other residents was starting his day and needed the shower. I pulled the blanket over my head and told him to go for it. I couldn’t imagine getting up at that point. A few hours later when I woke up, I got right back to the challenge.

    The philosophy that unlocked during that month was simple: good enough. Previously if I didn’t have the perfect line or the perfect riff I would hit a wall, put a song down, maybe never pick it up again. The challenge changed that. There was a huge sense of urgency. I started to realize I couldn’t always finish a song in one day – I could, but I was getting so into the arrangements and the recording process that I wanted more time with a piece. So I decided that every day I would start something and finish something. I wouldn’t always finish what I started that same day, but every song I finished that month began during the challenge. I would record a guitar part to the point it was good enough and move on. The lyrics would get to the point of good enough and I’d move on. Keep moving. Keep writing. Onto the next section, onto the next instrument, and when I got to the end – good enough. Submit it and start mining for the next song. It was the only way to stay on top of the wave.

    I was mind blown by people like Chris who were able to balance their busy schedules and still put songs out day after day. I had almost nothing but time and I was barely holding my life together outside the challenge. Others were banging them and making it look easy. This type of communal effort really boosts the accountability and inspiration.

    In the end I wrote 26 songs that month. Some never went anywhere and I’m happy they exist as what they are. Others found new life – Forty Thousand Spirits, Flower Man, Don’t Talk To Me About Pizza, Tinder Babies, Cynics In Love and Following became live staples with The Planet Of, with Tinder Babies being a fan favorite. This was the challenge that brought the most significant breakthroughs in my writing and process. It ushered in the last decade of writing, which has been the most prolific time of my life- so far.

    July 2017 Part 2 & 3 will contain the stories behind these songs

    • Ten To One
    • Following
    • Will Hide
    • Bad Kitty
    • Young Love
    • Insomniac Stupor Rag
    • Sister
    • The Witch & The Wizard
    • Sharks Not Sharks
      • Bar Rats
      • Chasing Cars
      • Flower Man
      • Cynics In Love
      • No Body
      • Tinder Babies
      • The Challenge
      • Elemental
      • Where The People At?
      • Clip Show
      • Don’t Talk To Me About Pizza
      • Face Stealer
      • Forty Thousand Spirits
      • Hicks
      • Unplugged
      • Expressing Frustration At Soundcloud
      • Destination Fever

    1. Dust / Been Missin’

      In October 2023 we began the first round of Tim Bulster’s song-a-week songwriting group. This came at a perfect time – I had resolved to dedicate the fall and winter to writing and recording, stepping away from other obligations to hold space for that. I was also on the mend from a rough break-up that happened a few months before and coming out of a depressive spell that followed (and preceded).

      Writing became the main engine for processing everything I was feeling. There was one evening where I was trying to play guitar and felt so disconnected from the instrument – there was a huge emotional block and I couldn’t stand it. I started playing with the intention of letting out anything and everything I was feeling. I spent the next couple of hours improvising a handful of songs and this unlocked something in my process. From that point forward I began to put more intention into externalizing what I was feeling, which meant connecting with my body and tapping into whatever emotions I was feeling at the time.

      Dust started on October 9th, 2023 – the very first day of the writing group. I began the song that morning after reading Tim’s first email. I began singing “I’m sorry” and then it started to pour out from there.

      I was reflecting on the past, reflecting on the period of my life spent traveling, on the people that I met and places that I went, the places that I hadn’t returned to and the people that I have lost touch with over the years. These reflections… hurt.

      I have a basket filled to the top with journals, trinkets, things I found along the way and wrote and scribbled – sketches, doodles, notes, lyrics, contact information on places I traveled, phrases and translations in a number of languages, and other things which I’m scared to look at. At the time of writing this song, the basket was under my bed, and I thought it was a good reference point for how I felt about this period of my life and about this past.

      I was envisioning the dust-sealed old box of notes, physical material artifacts from this period, and I feel cowardly, too cowardly to return to them. It just hits something deep – longing, regret – the emotions that come with a past lost, a connection lost, a friend lost, with the words that haven’t been sent or said yet, the things I’ll never get the chance to say because it’s too late. These artifacts carry all of it – and they’re from some of the simplest, most wild, most ambitious, most dangerous and reckless and careless and carefree and wonderful and rewarding times of my life. I loved those days.

      “Dust” starts here:

      Under my bed
      Tucked away are pictures and notes
      Written by a ghost and left for someday
      Someday I have the strength to reconnect

      The ghost is a past version of me. There was simply too much happening all the time, every day – too many adventures to remember it all, too many periods of motion without stopping to reflect or write regularly. Even if I went through every note and drawing, there may be more lost than recovered. I still haven’t found the strength to dive into the box.

      More than 10 years have passed
      Haven’t taken one glance
      Just let the dust take it over
      The words on the pages
      Places and faces
      Phases and names
      Feel so far away in the dust

      Going into the chorus:

      I know someday I’ll go back to the places
      As they remain, everything else seems to change
      Some friends have passed and gone
      I know now how I was wrong
      Not to connect while I had the chance

      I have returned to many sites of my early travels. I love to return to places just to soak them in – to see what I see, think what I think, feel what I feel, remember what I remember. There are places I’ve yet to return to which I still intend to. And even more so I hope to reach out and find some of the people I’ve lost touch with out in the world. Those I still can. Others are gone now – people I can only connect with through memories, photos, dreams, or if I’m lucky, their art and music. I regret not reaching out to them more while I still had the chance.

      When I’m really struggling, I tend to withdraw, hide away. I won’t reach out. I remember in some of the worst of times grabbing my phone and looking at the contact list, stopping on names for a moment, but not being able to bring myself to just ring them up.

      It’s so simple. It’s such a simple action – just pressing a button on the screen. But what if they answer? I will have to acknowledge the difficulty that I’m facing. I will have to acknowledge that I’m not doing well, that I need help. But if they’re not doing well? And what if they’re not available? What if they don’t answer and never call back? More pain on top of what I was already feeling.

      I don’t know that these thoughts would even go through my head in that moment. It’s more of a general feeling of paralysis. There’s this part of me that wants to reach out, but I just cannot bring myself to do it. And instead, I isolate. It ain’t good, but that’s where I was at and that’s where I was writing from in verse two:

      Heavy in bed, I lay awake
      Thinking of you and all my mistakes
      All the dreams I didn’t share
      The words I didn’t say
      The songs I didn’t sing
      I wrote them for you and I locked them away
      To pick up the phone, look at your name
      I wanna press my thumb
      But I’m paralyzed by my aching heart
      My heart aching, but I know that someday we must reconnect
      No matter how much it hurts, I know it
      Someday we must reconnect
      I can’t lose you like the rest
      I want so bad just to tell you I’m sorry

      The song moves from the dusty past which I’ve hidden under my bed to the present where I’m lying in bed struggling, wanting to connect, feeling unable, and recognizing that I just need to do it – I have to, before it’s too late. By the end of the song, I still haven’t accomplished the task. I leave this song as a declaration of love, of hurt, of regret, of accountability, of genuine apology. If not a request for forgiveness, at least an expression, an explanation, and hope for understanding.

      The last chorus:

      I’m sorry I didn’t call
      I had no good reason at all
      I love you with all my heart
      I’m just hurt by the distance that’s grown between us
      That’s left us in the dust
      That’s left us in the dust

      Interestingly, one of the friends I had in mind when writing this actually reached out to me for the first time in a couple years that morning while I was finishing up the recording.

      Been Missing

      “Been Missing” is the sister song to “Dust.” Where “Dust” is the somber snapshot – reflecting on the past with regret and heaviness – this is a song of triumph. When I’ve managed to overcome that disconnect, let go of the regret, and make the connection.

      I was truly inspired after writing “Dust” to actually reach out to some friends from the past. I started writing “Been Missing” after a very long and deep conversation with an old friend I hadn’t talked to in years and seen in even longer. It was a sunny day and I was just getting to the beach when I took her call. We walked and talked for close to two hours – catching up, going through all the motions of reminiscing about the past, joking and laughing and getting very serious, sharing the difficulties we’d gone through and the good things in our lives. The dogs were running around on the sand. The sun was shining. After the conversation ended I took that feeling of goodness and put it into this song.

      I tried to write in the motions of that kind of catch up conversation. The questions that come with it: How have you been? Where you at these days? What have you been up to? How did that one thing work out? Have you seen so and so?

      I want to know that the people I care about are doing well. But it’s not always that way, and if it’s not, I want to hear about that too. I want to know what their struggles are, what their dreams and hopes are, what stands in the way of those things. I want to know if I can help.

      And eventually it’s my turn. Where have I been? What have I been up to? Where do I begin… There is always lots to catch up on. Many of my old friends don’t even know where I live. People will ask me how Portland is and I’ll say I don’t know, I haven’t been there in some time. It’s five hours away from me. Sometimes I’m catching up with people and I realize my life is crazy – weaving between periods of intense travel or isolation, of staying home, relationships in and out, being intensely focused on family, or music, or work, or just being far, far away for extended periods of time. So much happens in this life and I’ll often lose track along the way.

      The part I love most about reconnecting with old friends – the discovery that though much has changed, much is the same. One friend says “No time passes in the hearts of good folk” and I am so grateful for this. When I can reconnect with someone and it feels like we’ve just picked up from where we left off. Sure there are things to catch up on, but the understanding, openness and love has been there all along – across great distances in space and time. We can still be ourselves, silly and ridiculous, deep and thoughtful. And receive each other as friends. I cherish these connections.


      Been Missin (Original Demo)

      Been Missin’ (Live from home)

      Where you at 
      These days 
      I’ve missed you 
      Since I been away 
      Tell me now
      What’s changed 
      And what’s remained the same 
      Let’s take our time
      Catching up
      Before we get to reminiscing 

      Have the years been kind to you
      Have you done the things that you wanted to
      And when you did how good was it
      Take me there I want to know what 
      I been missing 

      Where have I been
      Where do I start
      Some years happened to someone else
      And I lost touch along the way
      Between everywhere and nowhere

      Do you
      Remember the last time
      Last time it was just you and I
      I do

      In the grand scheme of things
      It was less than a blink
      But in these brief human lives
      It was a long long time

      Now talk to me I want to know what
      You want today everything that
      Stands in the way of your dream
      I love you and you know I believe

      Though much has changed
      Much is the same
      Our bits are as dumb as ever
      One second we’re on the ocean floor
      The next we’re in an uproar
      Our laughter scores the night
      And sleepless voices jam til sunrise
      You don’t stay up like this 
      But you’re not surprised
      We did the same thing last time

      Last time it was just you and I
      And when we did 
      How good was it
      We’re here today I’ll never forget
      What I been missing
      What I been missing

      P.S.

      I still struggle. I still withhold and isolate. It all goes in phases. I still haven’t opened up those notebooks, revisited those trinkets, revisited that past. And I still haven’t reached out to some of those whom I dream about and write about and think about. Some of them are gone. Some of them I’ve lost touch with, lost contact – I don’t know how to find them. And others, I just have no good reason at all. But sometimes I pick up the phone. Send a message or make a call. And when I do, it’s good. No time passes in the hearts of good folk.

    2. 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

    3. Ring Any Bells

      In our song-a-week group there are no rules about what we can submit each week other than it cannot be a previously completed song. Otherwise anything goes – an instrumental, a set of lyrics, a one minute acapella sketch or a fully fleshed out five minute production. The point is simply to write and submit something new. But in week four of the fall 2024 group, Tim brought a surprise. That Monday he sent this:

      “Here’s something I’ve always wanted to try — this week, we’re all going to write a song with the same title. I opened one of the internet’s finest random phrase generators, clicked ‘generate’ and it gave me, ‘Ring Any Bells?’ as in ‘recalling a memory; causing a person to remember something or someone.’ At the end of this week, we’ll have 14 different versions of a song called ‘Ring Any Bells?’ I vowed not to spend too much time searching for the perfect song title. This is what the void has bestowed upon us. Rejoice and be glad.”

      I was blindsided – I was already working on the song I intended to finish that week – but I took on the challenge just as many others would. My first reaction was that the title felt a bit too cliché for my taste. But I’ve found before that constraints can push you somewhere you wouldn’t have landed on your own – I talked about this in the Maytag Land entry – and this was no different. I sat with it through Monday and eventually my mind landed on past lives, which sent me back to a memory of a gal who once told me she’d had a vision of us together in a past life, in which we had held some importance. In her vision we were a king and queen and ruling together long ago. Then, as hippies do, we performed a crystal ritual in the back of a van to verify the vision. The results were inconclusive.

      I’m skeptical of past life recall – I haven’t heard anything particularly compelling to suggest we’d carry memories across lifetimes, and personally I don’t have any indication of having lived before this one. That said, I’ve lived enough of this life to feel like I’ve had several in one. I find the territory interesting to write from. This was also a period where I was reading and thinking a lot about death, mortality, and the nature of consciousness – you can see that thread running through Fallen Giant and Undertow.

      I wove in some core memories from my own childhood – sitting out in the sunny front lawn pulling petals one by one, she loves me, she loves me not, and an old birthday photo – then let myself wander into fantastical territory, imagining past lives, ancient temples, a kind of epic and magical existence I can’t claim to remember. It was a fun departure before returning to my earliest memories of this life, which are not particularly epic or magical – watching too much TV, playing video games, playing in the yard. From there back to the present, musing on the possibilities of a distant life and ultimately landing with focus and gratitude on the simple things we have today – a vision, a dream, a conversation, a connection.

      It’s quite a different type of song than what I normally write, and I’m grateful the challenge of the title pushed me there. I wouldn’t have found this one on my own. Not everyone in the group took on the title that week but in the end this was just one of ten songs written around the title “Ring Any Bells”. I always enjoy listening to the submissions and reading lyrics every week but that week was particularly interesting, what with the collective bell ringin’ and all. I’d like to share some quotes from other submission emails:

      “I gotta admit, when I read your assignment I definitely said, ‘(sigh of exasperation) goddamnit, Tim’, but I made myself have an open mind and I actually had fun with this.” — Theresa Bird

      “I too was chafing a little bit this week with the assignment but it kind of put the screws on me in a good way.” — Lazarus Pearl

      “It made me nervous and excited, which I enjoy leaning into. The lyrical theme constraint made me musically constrain as well.” — Micha Silvius

      “I love hearing all the different creations generated from the same seedling of an idea. I feel like it also pushes me to write my best songs because I know there are listeners on the other side who are going to really dig into my songs because they are songwriters themselves. It adds a little pressure to sort of bring my A-game.” — Jack Isenhart

      Here’s my “Ring Any Bells”

      You say you remember what came before
      What you stored in the core when you were four
      Before picking daisies and tearing them apart
      Saying he loves me he loves me not
      Before the melancholy gaze you gave
      That camera on your birthday

      Were you something else entirely?
      Were you the first to crawl up out of the sea?
      Seems like something you would do
      Were you a cloud before the sky turned blue?
      And whatever you were
      Were we together?

      Tell me does this ring any bells?
      Am I on the right track? Have I gone too far back?

      Yes you say you had a vision of me
      In an ancient temple I was a king
      When I spoke folks listened
      When I stood they kneeled
      You stood by my side and we lived a long time
      You were my queen and my guide
      Into the afterlife

      You ask me does this ring any bells?
      Tell me to ask a crystal if it recalls
      Me being a king and all
      I have to laugh
      Still I ask

      You say we were in a temple, I was your king
      But I was just a kid from Temple City
      Raised on TV and video games
      Before that I can't recall a thing

      I can't say that it rings any bells
      But I love to hear the stories you tell
      I know just as little of before life
      As I could ever know of after life
      But speaking on the in between
      I'm grateful you're my queen
      Hey when I call you my queen does it ring any bells?

    4. 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.

    5. Our Golden Days Have Passed

      This is the last song I wrote for the winter/spring round of the 2026 songwriting group. It was written during an extremely emotional time. I was mourning the sudden death of a dear friend – Stephen Reed – and I had returned to the LA area, the place where I spent the first 20 years of my life and a few more on and off after that.

      I took two trips down and spent nearly a month there consecutively – more time than I’d spent down there in seven or eight years, including flying home for a weekend in between. I was returning to people and places I hadn’t returned to in far too long. I knew that I had to. In this time, I had to reconnect.

      The relationships and conversations that came out of that month were long overdue. Some of my oldest and dearest friends – people I’ve known for half my life, people we were brought together by music. We played in bands together, played countless gigs together. There was a period for me from about 18 to 21 where my life revolved mostly around this community. We were studying music, working whatever jobs we had, but most of our free time revolved around each other. We played cover gigs, corporate events, fundraisers, weddings, country clubs, bars and restaurants. Beyond all that, we all had original projects going, playing bars, clubs, house parties, pizza spots and more. When we weren’t playing we were together – piling into cars to go on all sorts of adventures day and night.

      We were young, idealistic, naive, lucky. Life felt simpler then. I’m not sure we knew quite who or what we were. I know I didn’t. But somehow none of us have changed all that much. We’ve aged into our 30s and 40s now – still young, but no longer living wildly and freely and recklessly. The gigs and hangouts no longer feel endless and playful in the same way.

      I drove by Rad Stop – the first building a group of my friends began renting, which turned into many things over the years. First a rehearsal studio, then a bike shop, eventually a warehouse with many rooms used as artist studios and residences. It was one of my main home bases when I was visiting and spending time down there between 2014-2016. I stayed in several different rooms throughout the years. It was eventually condemned and demolished. Rad Pro, the successor to that space and the place where many of my early recordings were made – where I lived, kept space, and ran live sound for bands – has since moved and the original location is all boarded up. But Rad Stop is simply gone. When I drove by it was the first time I’d been in that area in eight or nine years. Where it once stood there is now an empty lot surrounded by a fence. In between the cement cracks there are weeds reaching up to the sky.

      I had a conversation with my old friend Ivan that I keep coming back to. He told me he’d been quite sad thinking about the people we came up with. He wanted to put on a concert in his parents’ backyard like he used to, invite bands from back in the day – but he quickly realized that three of the bands he thought of have all had members who passed away at tragically young ages. Stephen is just the latest in that string of three. Ivan said that they used to feel like we had so much promise, so much potential, all of us reaching for our dreams. But we’ve lived long enough to see the end of some of those dreams, the end of some of those stories. To him it appeared that those were golden days, when we were becoming. But those days are gone and now we are what has been.

      I replied: that’s bleak, bro.

      I told him I don’t feel that way. For me the growth has not stopped. I’m still learning, still crossing boundaries and finding myself on the other side of good things. I still believe in our potential – individually and collectively. We are still here and our stories are not done yet. And even in the case of Stephen, the actions of his lifetime are still ringing out in ways that are truly powerful and surprising. His work and influence on earth is not done. His story is not done.

      But still I was definitely feeling Ivan’s sentiments. It seemed like many people I visited with were struggling – with their work, their living situations, their relationships and the grief of losing our friend.

      Friends told me they wished I hadn’t left. They asked if I was coming back to stay. I told them no. Leaving one gathering, a friend asked if I was heading back to Oregon. I said yes. He asked when he would see me again. I said I don’t know.

      I’m writing this at home. I just stepped out the front door and into the forest. I feel no worry for tomorrow, little stress from the day. I’ve managed to find myself in a place I genuinely love, living a relatively simple, but fulfilling, interesting and peaceful life in a small town by the sea.

      But I carry complicated emotions around it. Deep gratitude for this life sits right alongside shame and guilt when I return to that place and those friends. In order to find this life for myself, I had to the old life behind.

      This song became a meditation on these feelings, these thoughts. Giving into some of the bleak and fatalistic feelings of the time and all that comes with the idea that our golden days may have passed.

      “Our Golden Days Have Passed”

      I left pieces of my heart in chunks down below
      Hit the road to save my soul
      To build new life I let the old one go
      I didn’t mean to abandon you
      I didn’t mean to abandon you

      Is it too late to say I love you too
      Is it too late to show my face in this place
      Where we once built a home now it’s an empty lot
      Gone without a trace fenced up and blocked off
      Now there’s just a few weeds reaching up J
      ust a few weeds reaching for us

      Our tribe was broken up spread out and beaten down
      And I feel like an alien when I come around
      Until we’re face-to-face and we start digging in
      We’re all struggling

      What started with a dream ended in death
      The best of us is gone we are what’s left
      Becoming has past now we are what has been
      Stuck in the present
      Our golden days have passed
      Our golden days have passed

    6. 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

    7. World Is Abstruse

      This song began with one image in the summer of 2021. I was driving past a local liquor store and I saw a woman getting out of her car. Across her car door was a very large sticker – almost as wide as the door itself – that said “TRUMP WON” I only saw her for a moment but I got an immediate sense of this person: confident, proud, unbothered. Everywhere she goes she is presenting that opinion to the world. I can’t think of a single opinion I hold that I would feel compelled to place across a vehicle for all to see at all times. That takes a certain kind of confidence. The first lines came to me in that moment.

      Parked at the liquor store
      Propoganda on her door
      Proud to be salty and free
      She’s not alone
      Just one of many many
      Living in a twisted fantasy
      We can call it a lie but she’s living in a separate reality

      From that image the song became an exploration of something I was seeing everywhere – people living in what felt like genuinely separate realities, unable to agree on even the most basic shared facts.

      It got me thinking about perception itself. Take something as simple as color. Two people can point at the same object and both call it red. But is what I see when I look at red actually the same experience you have? What if the color you experience as red looks the way green looks to me, but we’ve both learned to call our experience by the same word? We’d have no way of knowing.

      People aren’t simply lying. They aren’t simply deceived. On some level they are genuinely inhabiting a different reality. “We can call it a lie but she’s living in a separate reality.” If we can’t agree that red is red and blue is blue, how are we meant to find common ground?

      Parked in the arm chair
      Screaming into the chamber
      Silently yet violently so
      He’s not alone
      Just one of many many
      Acting out a twisted fantasy

      The character in the second verse was written as the counterpart to the lady at the liquor store. Where she is out in the world, moving confidently with her ideology on display, he is stationary, screaming silently into an echo chamber. I was thinking about local Facebook groups, the constant infighting, people repeating the same talking points as everyone else on their team with complete confidence – like parrots. They don’t seem to be arriving at these positions through any independent process. They’re finding the newest opinion and repeating it loudly and proudly. “You can watch the monkey do, you can do just as they do.”

      Underneath all of this is something I think about as the world of man versus the world as it is. Picture a flower on the side of the road. It wasn’t planted, it wasn’t watered, it doesn’t belong to anyone. It’s just a flower existing as it does for its lifetime – whether or not we describe it, name it, argue about it. That’s the world as it is. The world of man is the layer on top – the words, the symbols, the ideologies, the parties and clans. That layer only exists within human consciousness. It has no physical or material reality of its own. And yet people are dying and killing in the name of it. Seeking answers from the universe, asking the great unanswerable questions – that I can understand. But outsourcing understanding of reality to a pundit, an influencer, a politician is just dumb.

      Speaking of dumb, I first titled this song “The World Is Obtuse.” I thought obtuse meant difficult to understand. It must have been almost a week of working on the song before I finally looked up the word and realized the word I was reaching for was abstruse. I was embarrassed. I realized – not only is the world abstruse, difficult to comprehend, but the word itself is difficult to understand. I was being obtuse.

      The world is abstruse and humans are obtuse.

      This song and My Opinions came from a similar place and around the same time. Songs written out of fatigue, frustration, disappointment, worry – from watching people I knew personally, friends and family, fighting online over talking points and ideological battles that seemed so removed from actual life.

      Meanwhile, I was living alone with my dogs in the forest on the rural Oregon coast. Without need for any of that conflict in my day-to-day life. I was simply looking after myself, the dogs, the house and spending most my time in nature. It wasn’t until I opened Facebook or took a drive into town that any of that nonsense entered my world.

      The World Is Abstruse

      Parked at the liquor store
      Propaganda on her door
      Proud to be salty and free
      She is not alone
      Just one of many many
      Living in a twisted fantasy

      We can call it a lie but
      She’s living in a separate reality
      We can call it a lie but
      She’s living in a separate reality

      We have to imagine
      As she’s cruising down the street
      The grass may be blue while the sky is green
      There’s no way to know it
      It’s only a sight for her eyes
      For her it may be red
      For you it may be blue
      Red lies blue lies it’s purple in disguise
      For you it may be red For her it may be blue
      What is the truth
      The world is abstruse
      How could it be so plain to see
      Yet it’s lost on the majority
      The world of men tells of parties and clans
      But to me it’s all make believe
      Look around
      Life is here now

      Parked in the arm chair
      Screaming into the chamber
      Silently yet violently so
      He’s not alone
      Just one of many many
      Acting out a twisted fantasy

      We can call it a lie but
      He’s living in a separate reality
      We can call it a lie but
      He’s living in a separate reality

      What is the truth
      The world is abstruse
      Seeking answers from the news
      Yeah that’ll tie your noose
      You can watch the monkey do
      You can do just as they do
      Cause it’s a man’s world
      And we’re living in a zoo

      Seeking answers from above
      That I can understand
      Seek the answer from a man
      You’re being a dumbass
      Seeking answers from above
      That I can understand
      Seek the answer from a man
      And you’re being a dumbass

    8. Werns

      Werns

      I wrote the first verse of this song in January 2024. Just as the song suggests, I was chilling at the beach watching my dogs dig. I can picture it vividly – sitting on Battle Rock Beach on a beautiful January afternoon, the dogs were digging and just making me laugh. I was filled with joy as I am in the simple moments with them. I think I wrote down the first few lines just as they are, and within a few days I started singing and playing this funky guitar melody to those words. The original demo was me just working out the melody with no more than four lines. Originally I had an extended melody for the intro and ended up keeping a compressed version of it for the demo I recorded. From there I didn’t develop the idea at all until January 2026, despite the song making it to several lists of “need to finish” song ideas and several rounds of song-a-week groups.

      This was a classic example of an idea that began without a premise – just a moment in time. As simple as the moment was and as simply as I wrote it down, I didn’t have a vision for the song beyond just describing that experience. I’ve lived half of my legal adult life with my dogs. They are such a major part of my life, as close to me as any human. Returning to develop this idea, I decided to dig into one of the most astonishing facts about the relationship between humans and canines: the sheer timescale.

      Far from Chihuahuas, we relied on them for protection and warmth, for aid in hunting and tracking, for safety. I believe there is something quintessentially human about this relationship – our ancestors chose each other and evolved together. Dogs have been on every continent, they’ve been in space, they’ve been present in every civilization. And now here we are. We call them man’s best friend, our closest and longest standing evolved companions. I feel this when I’m with my dogs. I feel it when I’m not thinking about it, and when I do think about it sometimes I feel a rush of love and honor. I feel so human and so connected to our history, our ancestors. I cherish my dogs. We carry them to the day they pass and carry them with us until our time comes. As we wander the beaches and forests of Oregon, and beyond – they live the majority of their days in the wild and spend little time behind fences, collar and leash. Often on our excursions we don’t see another human. Like our ancestors wandering together side by side.

      This song became a tribute not just to my dogs who I adore, but a statement on the humility I feel in their presence – acknowledging our ancient past together.

      P.S. The title is just one of dozens of silly names I’ve arrived at to call my dogs.

      “Werns”
      Chilling at the beach
      Watching my dogs digging
      A face shaped hole then they dive right in
      They got me laughing

      They give me a goofy sandy look
      Their tails wag in the breeze
      The bond we share is an ancient one
      We’ve been together so long

      Before we named our Gods
      We had dogs
      Before we wrote, before we spoke
      Any language known today

      They kept us safe out on the hunt
      They kept us warm in the cave
      We shared our food and buried their dead
      They’ve been family for so long

      Before we planted seeds
      Before we built cities
      From the cave to outer space
      We’ve come a long way together

      Chilling at the beach
      Watching my dogs digging
      The bond we share is an ancient one
      Tens of thousands of years long

    9. Maytag Land

      The song was mostly composed, arranged, and recorded within my van amidst travels down to Los Angeles in February 2026.

      The song began from a Reddit prompt: “Write a song about the happy land where socks are escaping to. But try to write it in a minor key, and add some twist.”

      It’s rare that I write from a prompt but I always appreciate prompt writing for pushing me to write something that otherwise most likely never would have been considered. It provides a kind of safe distance from what I’m writing – I don’t have to feel too attached. It’s a pure creative exercise with just enough structure to give me a direction and enough flexibility to be creative within it.

      I found this particular prompt interesting and a bit curious. I struggled at first to find an approach that made sense to me. I started writing about the many socks without pairs I’ve got in a drawer and a few other things that felt too concrete. Eventually I removed myself from the story and focused instead on it being a sort of recruitment song – from the socks to the listener. As I wrote those lines I started to view them as refugees, escaping a harsh reality to a place outside of time where they will not be used and abused, ripped up, chewed up and thrown away. For the darker twist, I wrote that there’s only one way in and no way out.

      As a jumping off point I started from visualizing the laundry room at my house, which was once the studio, but now the cat room with, like the song says, litter boxes and a catio door.

      This is an example of a song where I essentially wrote most of it away from the instrument. I started with the lyrics and then began to hear them set to a melody. The majority of the melodies were composed without even touching a guitar – I sang them into a voice note while driving. It was my second night on the road, waiting out a storm near Bakersfield, where I was set up in the van working out the melodies and harmonizing them on guitar.

      I had no concrete idea for a musical arrangement at that point. I kind of imagined it being arranged for piano, or sort of toy piano – almost like a song that would be in a children’s show. But ultimately the song took on a more straightforward guitar and vocal arrangement. The melody was set before I even touched the guitar though. There are several different movements in the song and everything was driven by this changing melody.

      Here’s the response I got from the Redditor who gave me the prompt:

      “This is GREAT! Cool 70s-like sound, carefree and well-done lyrics! ‘Join us in the dryer and shut the door behind you’ 😅 And the dryer sound in the end. A fantastic choice. Thank you for making my prompt into something so nice! 😊”

      I gave them a counter prompt in return: Write a song that tells a story in reverse chronological order – starting with the end, then the middle, ending with the beginning.

      I’d like to do something with that eventually. But for now, here’s Maytag Land.

      There’s a place
      Down the hall way
      Past the litter box and catio door

      A magic space
      There’s only one way
      In and no way out

      Where all is warm
      And all is fluff
      Theres treasure there
      And softness in the air

      Everyone’s an individual
      Not a single pair
      And you can join us there

      In Maytag land
      Come join our clan
      We’ll throw a sock party for you
      Be one of us
      We are not lost
      We have each other

      Just get into the dryer
      And shut the door behind you
      Those socks, you thought were lost?
      We’ll reunite you
      The bills and coins that disappeared are waiting for you
      Your guitar pick?
      We got that too
      You can play a little doodle loo

      In Maytag land
      Come join our band
      We’ll play a sock party with you
      Be one of us
      Join our chorus
      We’ll sing together

      La la la

      In maytag land
      Time sits still
      We don’t grow old
      And don’t grow holes
      Never stepped on never trashed
      Never ripped up by the cats
      We’ve left the cold hard world behind
      And we can’t go back

      Come join us in the dryer
      And shut the door behind you