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.

this EP would be both the last of the old era of the band and the first of the new era. i had worked on all of the songs in solitude, save for one, and upon the falling out between kurt and i, it would mark a change in the dynamics of what was once, at least in theory, a band. from this point forward, it would be a casey-led initiative parading as a band.

this was really all it was anyway - i wrote the songs and arranged the parts - but there was a sense of camaraderie to it all. i still held the guys' opinions very highly, especially kurt's. if he wasn't into a song, i could tell it needed some work. he didn't necessarily provide detailed feedback (and i didn't necessarily ask), but his vibe alone was enough to either deter me or to push a song further to see where it could go. i lost that starting at this record, for better or for worse.

lyrically, many of the songs deal with isolation, depression, loneliness. thru only fault of my own, i had begun to distance myself from all of my friends, and these songs, though grim and depressing in their own right, were written at just the beginning of that very dark period.

these tracks would be the first written and released after getting into radiohead in earnest, and i think that is pretty apparent. they are a fairly eclectic bunch, ranging from the very electronically tinged to the only slightly electronically tinged. most were written on the piano first, as i'd just commandeered my own proper piano in july of 2012. these would be the first recordings you hear that particular piano on, extending all the way to the studio recording of "music for a motion picture" some five years later.

coldplay was also on the soundtrack for that summer, whom i so shamelessly riffed on with "era nostalgia".

in listening now, it's funny to see how different this release really was from my previous output (until this point, only "this is only a test" and "jett"). this was an about face by all measures, with almost every track being heavily piano driven. also notable is that every song that features drums on this release has MIDI-programmed drum machines. it was really an ease-of-use thing and not a stylistic choice. i guess i felt it was close enough to the real deal, for these tunes at least, and was just easier for me to bang out a song entirely in my bedroom in the middle of the night.

notable too is that all of the guitars were recorded straight in, and without any decent amp modeling software (that i would later use extensively), you can hear how shrill and cheap the guitars sound. at the time, i wasn't necessarily focused on each individual stroke of the brush, but rather what the painting at large would look like. it took me a while to really understand that in order to arrive at the painting you want, you need to put careful consideration to each and every stroke.

radiohead inspired me to use instruments in different ways for sure, but mainly inspired me to approach my songwriting in a different way. no longer was i shackled to making sure things would translate to a band setting, i was free to allow each song to meander as it may, and to be fleshed out in ways i hadn't even thought of before. each song could be its own statement, its own world.

that vision did not get fully fleshed out here in any sense, but it began here. many of the songs i was working on at the same time would not see release until another EP a few months later - the aptly titled "swan songs, too" - but this was another one of those prolific periods in terms of my output.

only one of these songs, "footprints", was revisited later in a proper studio setting, but seeing as how that track lost its soul in the process, i can't help but wonder how much of the beauty of these songs really lies in the times they were recorded and the circumstances surrounding them.

"walls" has a few funny stories around it - mainly that brian gerard had made a comment about time signatures, about not having songs in weird times or that it was difficult to write in odd time signatures. i remember purposely writing that song in 5/4 to make a point to him, almost like "see, wasn't hard!" i also had one friend tell me (he was a "cool kid") that he fucked his girlfriend to the song (also a very "cool kid") which i was very confused by (who wants to hear ME during sex?) but also very flattered by and honestly probably stands as the best compliment i've gotten about my music other than mel's initial reaction to "diet coke" of "such nostalgia....how u do?"