Embryonique (2005)

One of the best things to happen to me as a songwriter was to make music using FruityLoops. A friend I worked with in the Twin Cities added the program onto my computer and soon I was creating all sorts of songs with the program.

It feels crazy to me now, but after the first few songs where I simply dropped sound samples onto the song’s stucture, I realized that you could draw notes and create your own melody. So I added all the notes into nearly every song by hand. There were no created sequences that I dropped in.

I’d start by creating a time signature for the song, then a tempo, and then I picked an instrument to work with first and started adding in notes. But it was so much fun! A couple times I just treated the cursor like it was a paintbrush and washed it across the grid of the song’s structure and listened to what it produced. It was such a free and inventive period in my life.

It also taught me how to structure a song. How do you start and build and end? How do you layer instruments? How do you repeat sections? What do you do when you decide to break the structure you’ve learned works well?

“Boxcar” was an experiment in restraint and it’s a song I still like to this day, but I like all these songs. “Falling Into Water” has a fun, surging melody. I like how I created two separate piano melodies that sounded good on their own and then sounded even better when I melded them together.

Listen to the full album on Bandcamp.