ericprincessdragon

Tag: rock

  • 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. 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

    2. 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

    3. 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

    4. Gutter Baby

      In all my travels, never have I met a gnarlier bunch of traveling folks than the “gutter punks.” I once got off a bus in New Orleans and immediately got heckled by one across the street yelling, “Hippie! Give me money!” Hitchhiking around the U.S. and Canada, I met quite a few – jamming, sleeping and hanging around on the streets, trying to catch lifts along the way.

      Inspired by people I met on the street around Montreal, Humboldt & Mendocino counties, this song is an amalgamation of stories I’ve heard from these folks, some of my own experiences traveling, and some inspiration for a happy ending from someone who made it out from the streets into a “normal” life.

      My first demo for this song was completed in January 2024 as part of a song-a-week challenge. Though most of it was written then, some of the lines go back to a dusty notebook I filled around 2014-2015 when I was hitchhiking around the states real heavy. I was looking for notes for another song when I found these words. I scrapped most of what I had written then, but the core idea was there – the story of a “Gutter Baby.”

      Just a baby
      Fourteen years old
      Scared to go back home
      Take your chances
      Hiding in the streets
      And learning to survive
      Starting a new life as
      A gutter baby

      Find some punks on the street
      Who take you under their wing
      They get you high and teach you to get by and you start traveling
      In every new town new trouble with the same struggles
      You graduate from the bottle to the pipe and to the needle
      Oh gutter baby
      Gutter baby

      Gutter baby
      Rabid on the street
      How did the world forsake you
      Gutter baby
      They got you hooked
      Hooked on poison hooked on violence
      Hooked on crime giving every reason
      For them to jack you up
      Gutter baby

      The cops know just who to fuck with when they spot you on their beat
      They’ll take any excuse to pluck you off the street
      They don’t care whether they lock you up or drive you to the edge of their town
      And they know that no ones gonna trip if they beat the shit out of
      A gutter baby
      Gutter baby

      Not a baby
      You’re growing old
      With dreams of your own
      Done with trouble
      All the drugs and drama
      All the death and all the trauma

      You leave it in the past
      You’re cleaning up your act
      You’re going to be a dad
      Now you have yourself a chance
      To give a love you never had
      A baby
      Your baby

      It ain’t easy to build when you’ve been beaten down
      And thought you’d be the next young punk to end up in the ground
      You’ve been cast aside abused and brutalized and didn’t know why
      But all the pain and trouble means nothing when you look in those eyes
      And see no struggle
      No fear
      No struggle
      Just a baby