Badlands (2006)

Badlands is the first album where I thought I might actually be capable of writing good music. One of these songs (“Deserter”) would show up as the opening track on the second Lower Stacks album Love In All Directions (2018). That version is nearly all instrumental. This one is sadder and slower and has singing. I think this one is better.

As I was arranging the songs together I noticed that there was a near-alphabetical order to the tracklist, so I changed the song titles of the songs that weren’t in alphabetical order so that the overall album was in strict alphabetical order. I don’t know why.

“Clean Cut Kid” is me trying to write a White Stripes song. “The Gift” is a song I recorded after hearing the Velvet Underground song “The Gift” for the first time. “Dive, Dragonflies, Dive” I wrote on scraps of paper while working at the Madison Public Library listening to Trout Mask Replica.

A note on the cover art for this post… This was one of my first creations using MidJourney. I liked it so much that I’ve taken to calling the figure on the cover the Emperor Cowboy, and he’s become the unofficial mascot of this entire project. I even had stickers made! They turned out nice. Gemini guided me through how to add text using the free version of Canva.

Listen to full album on Bandcamp.

Read about the other music I’ve made in the Music section of the Works tab.