Shadow

A bedroom, dimly lit in pink tones, with a barely visible person in a white shirt looking back over their slouched shoulder at the camera. The room is full of instruments, with a number of smaller ones hanging from a rope stretched across the ceiling.

This ended up being the last song on Listen, which was one of the albums from my (in hindsight, terrible) plan to make eight Ganglion albums at once.

This song is getting its own page for two reasons:

So I can send it to Nikita.
There are some videos of me tracking the drums and vocals and other stuff that I kinda wanna put here someday, to help forgive myself for needing to learn how to write songs.

Interlocutor: "Wait, what do you mean, forgive yourself for needing to learn how to write songs?"

Well, I think this song kinda sucks. I mean,

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Black and white photo of a drum kit, barely illuminated. Well, that's a lie — it's three drum kits combined. Something like a dozen snares and toms, another dozen cymbals. In the background there are guitars, a very large balloon, mic stands, big long tubes that look a bit like organ pipes, and bare trees indicating late winter / early spring out the window. The point being: this is too many drums. This is a drum kit for someone who hasn't figured out how to play with tone — how to pull a good tone out of any drum — and who instead makes a lot of incoherent noise.

…Maybe this would be easier with a timeline.

2006
: I turn 20. I think knowing how old I am is useful to understand, like, how much opportunity I've had for self discovery: not enough.
2007-ish: Get a jawharp, realize I can play that part of Shadow's theme from FFVI, record it and start working it into a song because that's how my sense of humour works. Also, jawharp sounds good when you boost the bass frequencies.
2008-ish: Song is basically done. Start working it into my live set. It works really well in that form.
2009: Finish and release Listen, feel kinda good-ish but also meh-ish about all the songs.
2010: Feel increasingly meh about everything I've ever done. Move to Edmonton, stop making music entirely.
2012: Move back to Calgary. Record a new album. And another. And another. And another. And another. All in like 6 months.
2013+: Realize that the approach I'd taken to songwriting before 2010 was shit, and that coming back after taking a long break, I'd unlocked some ability to write good songs. Feel good about all my 2012+ music, feel awful about all my 2010- music — like, deeply ashamed that I'd made this music and shared it with people and tried to make it such a big part of my life.
2014: Record what ends up being my last music for roughly eight years. Don't even finish that album. My relationship with Freyja ends up blocking me from having the time, space, or feeling of safety needed to write or record songs. For a while, that's fine — I'm doing other stuff, like getting really good at programming the computer.
2020: Take over the FoC Podcast, doing some sound design inside the episodes. Dig out old music to use for sound cues, especially some 2010- music since that tends to work better, because those songs are less traditionally structured and don't have vocals and are more varied and weird and are more intensely interesting in short bursts. Hmm.
2022-ish: Start recording some music specifically for the FoC podcast, including Wormhole and then Never. That feels really good, and it's… easy.
2023: I have a weekend to myself, so I write & record Don't Do Math. This feels AMAZING. I think this might be the best song I've ever written. It feels like I've grown in the time since 2014. Not as much as a grew in the break between 2010 and 2012, but still.
2023-2025: Lu asks me to make music for various projects of theirs — some of which will someday see the light of day, heheh. I record Jerk, and a few other smaller songs.
2025-2026: I start revisiting some of stuff I made back in 2010- and… it's actually… fine. Like, sure, it still hurts. But, how else was I supposed to get to the point where I could make stuff I was happy with? I taught myself all this shit. I taught myself how to find melodies and how to structure songs and where to put the microphones and how to do a vocal take and when to not play drums and when to cut a song from an album because it didn't fit or wasn't good enough. The music before 2010 is all music where I hadn't yet learned ALL of these lessons. Each song is me figuring out some part of this everything. And then I took a break, and let all of those lessons sink in. Then in 2012-2013, I recorded music where every song/album benefited from every lesson. Then in 2014, I started trying to learn some new lessons, and was interrupted. And now, in 2023+, I've had the meta growth: I can choose, when making a song, whether I want to use the song to learn something new — to take risks and make something that will come out badly, all mashed up by me clambering up the side of it — or whether I just want to make a straight-down-the-middle banger.
2026: I'm working on a new album. Some of the songs are bangers, some of them are are mash. I should always do both: some songs to just feel good about, and some songs to just feel good being bad and learn from.

A brightly lit photo of a chair surrounded by drums, noise-makers, guitars, stompboxes, and other musical gear. In the chair, blurry from long exposure, is a ghostly figure sitting upside down — feet where their head should be, head down on a big throw pillow on the floor.