ericprincessdragon

Tag: recording

  • 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

  • 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

  • Oahu Noodles

    “Oahu Noodles” is a track made up of couple of improvisations I recorded on the porch of Backpackers Vacation Inn & Hostel on the north side of Oahu, Hawaii. The first week of March 2024, I was making my way to Australia for the first time and saw flights that transferred at Honolulu airport, so I decided to book a 4 night layover, rent a car and explore Oahu for a few days.

    Through couchsurfing I had lined up a sweet spot to stay on a small boat during my visit, but the day before I arrived the stay fell through. In between a bus trip across Oregon and a couple flights over I was frantically trying to find another couchsurfing situation, researching places I might be able to sleep safely in the rental car (which is illegal and highly discouraged on Oahu!), I was able to stay for the night of my arrival with some coast guard dudes but finally ended up booking a hostel on the north side for the rest of my stay. I was bummed at first but it ended up being a great landing and shaped the trajectory of my entire trip.

    One of my roommates at the hostel was a folk musician who, nearly 50 years earlier, had nearly slid to his death while hiking a nearby trail. He told me that besides two major heart attacks he had later in life, that fall was the closest he had come to death. He told me that he slid and slid and slid until he came to the edge of a ridge with a perilous drop below. He was able to walk along the ridge, which formed a nice natural trail. Eventually, he found his way back to civilization, but that spot stuck with him.

    Now here he was in his early 70s, retired from his trade, returning for the second year to stay for a month and try to find the site of his near-death experience. Each day he would go off to hike and search for this elusive ridge. He was nearing the end of his trip and told me that if he didn’t find it this time, he’d be coming back the next year to continue his search. While he was out searching for a needle in a haystack, I was trying to get lost – driving around, meeting many dead-end roads, gates, fences, trespassing signs and so on. In hindsight, I should’ve tagged along with him, but I was content wandering around the island, swimming, eating and playing guitar in the sun, and on a rainy day – shooting video as I made my way around the island. I later cut the video to the “noodles”:

    One evening we threw together an impromptu open mic out on the porch. We started with only a cheap hostel guitar, which I drove across the island to buy strings for, cleaned up, strung up and tuned up. Eventually, with some imagination, I managed to set up an electric guitar, vocal and little synthesizer amplified with my laptop and a Bluetooth speaker. Hostel folks came by the porch to hang out, listen, sing, and jam.

    One of the musicians who came by was a fella named Dave Lee, a New Zealand-born musician who had been living in Tasmania for almost a decade. He came out to Hawaii for a surfing trip and joined us on the porch where we jammed, swapped tunes and riffs, and had an all-around good time. Dave plays bass in a Tassie band called Lennon Wells. Our meeting inadvertently directed my trip, as just a week later I would find myself in South Australia, looking for leads and opportunities to get involved with events across Australia when I saw that Lennon Wells was playing a small festival in Tasmania called Echo Fest. I reached out to the festival and offered my help, they invited me along straight away. From one island to the next, Oahu to Tasmania.

    The noodles of “Oahu Noodles” were recorded on the porch, the morning of my last day on the island. I took my little guitar/synth rig and ran it into a handheld recorder, along with my phone feeding basic drum tracks. I played through headphones until the recorder batteries died. I would be flying out to Sydney that afternoon, so this was my last chance to capture something from the island. I offered to give another roommate a ride to the airport before my flight, and we spent the afternoon driving across the island with just enough time for a waterfall hike, pictured above and below.