I will be releasing all the music I have created in my dismal life slowly over the coming weeks, exclusively on bandcamp, in order to clear out the archives and turn the material over to the world. Most of it is not pretty or even good by most measures, but every single song has had a part in my growth as a human being and for that alone I feel they deserve at least the opportunity to be heard and dissected.

at the time, this was the third concept album i had written. it was by far the most cohesive from the jump, in that the concept was a major factor when writing most if not all of these songs. for the prior two, the concept was something conceived later in the writing process and either shoehorned in or retroactively fit to the songs.

the concept was pretty simple - it was written from the perspective of someone who had died, written about his life and what it meant to him and those around him. what those people might say once he was gone, what he may have wished they had said.

it was a dry run of what i believed might be my own eventual death, whether it be by city bus or by my own hand. it is a document of a teenager grappling with mortality. grappling with suicidal ideation. it was much easier to write about these thoughts and feelings from the lens of someone that had passed away from disease or some horrible accident than to say (or think) "this is an album of songs talking about how i think the world would feel if i killed myself and what i would want to say about it".

the recordings are interesting, to say the least. many of them were done rapid fire - drums in one day, guitars in another, vocals the next. we were taking a school trip for our jazz band to florida and i wanted to have the album done to listen to on the way. a handful of songs had been recorded prior to that, so i kind of rushed the rest. not a whole lot of thought was put into the process, not a whole lot of critical editing or mixing was done. i was copying and pasting presets and faders from one song to the next. that combined with some weird thing that happened with the vocal tracks (they are noticeably off by fractions of a second at points) makes this a rough listen. but the trilogy of death's march/prelude to the end/death's march (reprise) make this entry into my catalog worthy of inclusion here.

most songs are simple in nature, with a rhythm guitar riff and a lead riff. and most of the songs are similar too in structure, most if not all lack a bridge section. this was a period of time where i was very "meat and potatoes" with my writing - not bothering with a whole lot of thought put into the song as a craft, more just as each song telling its story and nothing but.

in hindsight, i may have fleshed each song out a bit more, both in just the recordings and in the songwriting. almost all of these tracks hold a spot on the list of songs i wish i had the energy to revisit. but this record holds a special place as being the only one that i actually recorded top to bottom as it was written. especially true considering the timeframe. at that point, i don't think a single "record" i had planned had made its way to being recorded top to bottom even. later records that would be recorded in actual studios would suffer from the lack of time and money needed to record the whole initial vision, or i would change course mid-process. the is truly the only record that was recorded in full as it was written, for better or worse.