Projects

It has been one year since I released my debut album, Erase This, with Luke Conard.

I don’t usually celebrate these kinds of anniversaries. And had the album not been released only four days before my birthday, I probably wouldn’t have remembered the date. But Erase This isn’t really like any of my other projects.

First, there was the budget difference. With Taking Leave, Tom Milsom and I did everything. Studio time was extremely limited and hurried. Our instrument choices were limited to what we had on hand. We mixed and mastered the EP ourselves. And all of that shows. For Erase This, I was determined to not be limited by my own talents or musical knowledge, or lack there of.

So I invested a great deal of money in the writing, recording and production of Erase This. In the end, well over $10,000 that I have receipts for, and probably much more in small PayPal payments that I never recorded. I hired the best producer I could find, Christian Caldeira, who originally was just supposed to fill in for our absentee drummer. Without Christian behind the mixing board, Erase This as it stands today, would not exist.

I hired some of the best songwriters I knew to work with me. I know my own strengths, and my own weaknesses. I am a very strong lyricist, and wrote every line on Erase This. But my melodies lack… well, melody. The majority of the music on Erase This was written by Jason Munday and Raven Zoe. But some of the tracks, or elements of some tracks were written by Eddplant, JB Dazen, Tom Milsom or Ted Hu. All people who seriously know their shit.
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Over 280,000 views on YouTube. Over 3,000 digital singles sold. With an additional 4,000 full-length albums sold. All for a song I was ready to delete one November night in 2009.

I was in the middle of working on my debut album Erase This. I had written this fun little track about dailybooth photos, relationship statuses and two teens wanting to escape their opprosive, dull little town after losing their virginity to each other.

I ignored the song for a few days after I had finished writing it. It was kinda nerdy. Kinda fun. I don’t write nerdy. I don’t write fun. I write serious songs with concepts and story arcs and casts of characters.

After getting over myself, I emailed the lyrics to a group of about ten different musician friends. I told them I’d given up on including the song on Erase This and asked if anyone wanted to work together on releasing it as a one-off single.
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This entire post is a response to the article “What Happened To You?” written by Kristen Franklin… who also happens to be my beautiful girlfriend. I started writing it as a comment and then decided I wanted to share it here. Go read her article first if you’d like…

I still pretend and day dream a lot. It’s fun. I know my day dreams aren’t real, and that my life is not all that grand. But I’m happy with my life, so the day dreams are just… entertainment.

I think we all lose a little of that wide-eye’d-ness as we get older. Because we’ve lived through more failures than successes, usually, and we no longer imagine it’ll be different the next time around. We no longer belive we can be an astronaut, or a rock star… or a lion.
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