R.I.P. Self Doubt

Release Info

lyrics

I've already put up some depressing info about this album here. I won't repeat myself here.

This album represents a further evolution of my writing style. Thematically it's very inwardly focussed, and concerns thoughts of isolation, anger and disolutionment. Musically, it represents a refinement in the integration of guitar, and the first (released) music with a wah peddle. I play the flute on a couple of tracks, which turned out better than I could have hoped. I used to play in high school, but hadn't picked it up in years. This album is also the first to be written entirely on my laptop (seeing as my PC died. Read the rpm challenge blog entries to see where the computer troubles started.

I'm happy with the diversity I achieved on this album. There are some truly heavy moments, some beauty, some oddity and some good old fashioned rock (well not really old fashioned). I get really happy when something truly odd emerges, like 'kingdom deposed'. I remember when I first started writing 'kingdom' I had the chorus but nothing else. I thought the chorus seriously rocked, and couldn't miss out on using it, but it was incredibly hard to write anything around it. It took me 2 or 3 days of fiddling before I finally came up with something that worked. That's the problem with good little titbits sometimes. You can't let them go, but they just about kill you when you try to do something with them. Also it should be noted that Meg, my wonderful doggy, is featured at the beginning of the track.

Fantasy was the first thing I wrote on the album, and happened almost accidentally. When I first set up my nord synth with my laptop I quickly made a patch and put in some random notes in a loop to make sure the audio and midi were routed properly. Those random notes are the first sound you hear on the album, and also the first bassline you hear. It was just one of those wonderful random events - 'oh hey, that sounds cool'.

I wrote much of this album while I was living out of home. During the middle of the year I moved out for about a month, which made me very poor indeed. I broke the 5th string on my guitar, and couldn't afford to get it replaced for quite a while, which inhibited my playing a bit, but also forced me to come up with some interesting ways of playing to get the notes I wanted. The riff in 'sick' is the result of the lack of 5th string, which is why I slide around a bit when playing. I think I recorded the entire song without a fully functional guitar.

I can't tell how much of this imformation is actually interesting to people, so I think I'll keep it short. If you have any questions feel free to send me an email. I'll just add that I'm very impressed with myself for the vocals at the end of 'broken'. It reminds me of Bono.