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shoppingshoppingshoppingshopping · 15 days

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Listen/purchase: I'm Sorry That Happened so Fast by Local Teen

OK new album write up time.

Well, it looks like I screwed up the release date and set it for september 2023 when it was supposed to be september 2024. so the question is will it always be out of order for the rest of time or will i be able to fix it at some point?

cdbaby as usual has awful support and still hasn't gotten back to me to fix the date. why is support so bad everywhere? anyway....

I was doing all the boring technical stuff as i thought it was ready and then cdbaby rejected my files. apparently they don't take 96k audio. so now i am opening up each session and having to re-render at 44/16. Which is a total drag cuz now i have to relisten to the entire album again. I love most of these songs but i am also so damn sick of them now after hearing them 1000 times.

all these songs except the neat neat neat cover are from 2019. Meaning I started them then. Many were just chords and maybe a melody. A few had lyrics and were mostly done except needed clean up and a mix.

ok so first song,

away from home: this one I think I had almost everything except lyrics. All those were recorded this year. This album took forever to put together. I think I finally sat down and decided to finish it right after I released the last one. Lemme check. Oh crap that was december 2023! Damn I take forever. Or not. I know what I like and i get pickier as time goes on. I guess this is just what it takes.

I am finding I have less desire to polish old songs that don't have much to grab me. Like one of the ones in this pile was this really cool bass line and drums. I've spent maybe 20 hours trying to shape it into a song and I haven't figured out yet how to do that. There are a few like this. A few albums back I wouldn't give up and would eventually find it. But I dunno. It's just so much effort and pain. When I have literally 100s of songs that will come together easier when I finally get to them. So I'm wondering why bother.

Another lesson is that album of unfinished songs I put out. A few of those will come on my spotify shuffle and now I can hear exactly how to finish them. So the lesson there is wait. It might come. If not? that's OK. This is life. Ya gotta let go sometimes. There is pain in making music/art. It's uncomfortable. The hard part is figuring out what kind of torture is good and what isn't.

Anyway, Away from home has lyrics about a violent cartel crime situation. I love crime movies. I just rewatched michael clayton again for the 10th time? it's so good. Pulp fiction too. Which took a while to pull me in but after the overdose I was in all the way and didn't want to leave it. Butch's girlfriend isn't as bad as Bill Simmons says she is. In fact she's just fine. John Maclane yelling to himself in the car felt a little forced very "acting".

BTW it's taking at least 20 minutes just to open the 3rd song session. I think there's over 250 tracks in there.

Listening back. Away from home chorus is sooooo good. I couldn't stop myself from recording this really jazzy harmonies. My music theory talk sounds like I know something but really I aint shit but I think there's like 9ths and 7ths and diminished somethings in there.

I played the broken cello I got from craigslist free on this. Some wood glue and a jerry rigged "clamp" using ratchet tie downs and it's playable. I have no idea how to play the cello but I was able to get some good sounds out of it for this song.

2: use a hoe

this is kinda funny. i found an earlier version of this. Spent MONTHS on it. Then towards the end of wrapping up the album figured I needed one more song. Went into the next batch of unfinished songs and found this version. I thought it was so much better. It was completely done except for some clean up and much needed mix changes.

lyrics are about some of the poor folks I spent a lot of time around when I lived in florida. when people say "i don't get trump voters" I always think "Ah you never spent any meaningful time with different kinds of people."

this is one of the negatives of tiered experiences like fast pass at an amusement park or anything not general admission at an event. a society is better when different people mix in positive ways over a shared enjoyment.

It's funny that this is bragging now but my florida experience gave me bonds with fresh off the boat Hatians, Cubans and pretty much all of latin America, not to mention kids whose family have definitely been at a KKK BBQ before (or maybe it was just a rumor that everyone that lived near moon lake was KKK. I dunno. I was too scared to go) and just all sorts of people with lots of debt, loyalty to the strangest things, strong family bonds hidden under resentment and the types of folks the media just never ever shows you.

Lower Middle Class life just isn't romantic. There's a fair amount of substance use, lots of humor, missing teeth and bad tattoos on even worse skin. That doesn't make for good streaming content. One lady I knew had no front teeth and her car was literally infested with roaches. You'd see them crawling all over the seats at any time of day. how the florida heat didn't kill them? I have no idea. Also if her car was like this what was her trailer for of kids like?

Who are they going to cast to depict her in a show? Glenn Close? She has the face of a shoe that only rich people know about.

i'm solid to maybe upper middle class now but those folks still exist inside me like guardian angels. They write a lot of my lyrics. I get them but i also resent them for not doing what i would do. not that that's right, but just reporting from subconscious.

When I was 16 working in fast food, I worked with a 40 year woman named BJ. She said it was short for something like "Billie gives the best blow jobs". Kids, the 90s were wild. or maybe just florida or both. This lady also was kind of illiterate and her kid names on his birth certificate was "BRAIN" no Brian. I hope she's doing well but I doubt it. The world has changed in a way that hasn't been protective of folks like that. That's just sad. I liked these people. We worked together as team. There is a special bond you gain when working on a time crunchy environment. I hope they made it out of poverty OK or least didn't go lower.

3: send the girls over

This was one of those songs I couldn't stop writing. It was so inspiring. So many ideas and lyrics. I saw a songwriting friend recently and told him I wanted to be better at lyrics. Then I went back to finish this song and saw that I'm not crap. I can pull it off sometimes. Cuz I am so proud of these lines:

so you didn't want to lie yet we did watch it grow that thing upon your face that drips when you get cold that looks down on the poor turns up when you get old through which you soon will pay for sticking it where it surely doesn't go

Keith Hopkin of The Blue Album Group and Asobi seksu sang on the woah parts. I love his voice. We used to be in a Weezer cover band together.

So did my nephews, probably the missus as well. I had anyone that came over sing on those woahs for a few weeks.

I just love this song. Listening to it now the "I knew it was you part" still gives me chills. I also played the trumpets on this. I don't know how to play at all. Yet I was so inspired that when I hit record and blew my heart out and ya know what? the right notes just came out! I WAS FUCKING FEELIN' IT! God is good, man. I'm tellin' you.

That's the magic of music, man. It can make you do stuff you can't usually do. It's like a super power. I can feel my version of god in this moment. Thank you universe for the gift to stick with this craft and to keep trying to make songs I like. And thank you for the love I get to feel for myself when I hear what I made.

Ok now I feel exposed.

I'm pretty sure there's 250+ tracks in this. It became impossible to work on because it uses more resources than my computer can handle. But nevertheless he persisted.

4: come on baby

there's a version with 3 other parts not in this one. They were more metal/butt rock than I like. So I wrote all new parts. And then ended up redoing everything. Vocally I was trying to find the right voice then heard a DFA1979 song and thought "oh I should try that".

My les paul through my orange tiny terror is the perfect guitar tone for this kind of song. Its my favorite amp/gtr combo just because when it's right it's just perfect. It's just not always right for each song.

5: why start now - a classic vibe of "why bother? let's get ta slackin'". feels very 90s to me.

I love my funky bass lines. I feel like I should show them off more cuz I do some pretty cool stuff sometimes.

You know what's very un 90s? The amount of self love I have for my work as I write this today. It took lots of therapy, will power and the desire to change to get here. Don't get me wrong I hear the "you suck" voice daily. Just now I thought "you're being really honest here. We feel vulnerable. don't do this" then another voice said "no one listens to your music and never will so who cares?". Then another voice said, "just be in your creative space and flow. this is a gift to have this. so many people wish they could make things. you're lucky".

This song had a completely different feel. Then I went on a dancehall trip with my spotify deep dives and realized I should try that. Re did the drums. Then realized lots of other stuff needed to be redone but cause it didn't work with my new groove. so yeah, this is a dancehall song. for me.

6: neat neat neat - i made this in like a week towards the end of my last album. it came together to quickly. i put it on there but then went i went to release it Landr was like "no covers otherwise you can't make any money from ANY of the other songs on the album".

So I am putting it on this one since I am using CDbaby to release this one and they won't ding all the other album tracks if they get lots of youtube streams.

Keith Hopkin sang on this too!

7: What we are

I have a slight headache. I probably have covid. this morning I had a million great ideas for a new song I am working on. I was also so excited to do all this admin work to release my new album. but now I just feel so scattered and can't wait for this to be over.

first line is something i remember steve albini saying in an interview when asked about movies or tv shows. talk about yucking someones yum! i often have to turn steve off in my head when i am watching something mediocre. i can see the acting and just how silly it all is.

i used a lot of 1176 compressors on the first version of this. ended up removing nearly all except on the gtrs. i dunno why but that thing never worked for me. I have friend that loves it. I don't like his drum sounds. but i get that it's a classic sound.

8: use a hoe slower

spent a long time trying to get this one to work. i like it's chill vibes.

Do I sing about being dead or alive a lot? I think I sang something similar on another song on this album. I dunno. I make a lot of music. I'm bound to repeat myself

Ok i'm done. I just did a proof reading pass about a week later. I definitely have covid. I toggle between dizzy, tired, confused, hungry and inspired to make dance music. I've started 3 tracks with beats and basslines and then stop. That's fine. It takes a lot of practice to get good at a new genre.

#punk #punk rock #indie rock #brooklyn bands #alternative #localteen #one man band

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