Music
My dad bought me my first guitar when I started college. After graduating I moved to Minneapolis where a friend installed beat-making software (Fruity Loops) and music recording software (Adobe Audition) on my computer. It changed my life.
My recording project with my friend Gabe Pope (Zane Bishop) is called Lower Stacks. You can find our albums Starlit Parlor (2010) and Love In All Directions (2018) on music streaming platforms.
My solo project is called Slax. I have over 300 songs to share, covering a range of genres. But I wrote (and still write) most of my music on guitar.
Cheap Desk Sessions (2005)
I compiled this after returning to Madison from Minneapolis. I recorded at a cheap desk I’d found on the side of the road, so I called the album “Cheap Desk Sessions.”
Some of these songs (e.g. “The Trapeze Artist” and “Crawford Is For Diplomats”) were part of my “3-string experiment,” where I only had 3 strings on the guitar that I tuned strangely. “Take Out Your Multiplication Tables” shows me playing with how to add multiple tracks on top of one another, an important step in learning to write more complex compositions.
Listen to full album on Bandcamp.
Listen to “The Trapeze Artist” or “Take Out Your Multiplication Tables” below.
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 breatk the structure you’ve learned works well?
“Boxcar” was an experiment in restraint and it’s a song I still like to this day. “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, which you can hear in the song below.
Listen to the full album on Bandcamp.
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.
Listen to “Clean Cut Kid,” “Deserter,” “Dive, Dragonflies, Die” and “The Gift” below.
Nuclear Orange Tree (2006)
This album will always be connected with Badlands, because the songs were recorded at the same time and I used to burn it onto the same disc as Badlands when I’d give it to friends. What started as a hodgepodge of carry-over tracks ended up becoming one of my favorite albums.
Two of the tracks (songs 2 and 3) were from an impromptu recording session with someone I met on MySpace, a friend of a mutual friend. I didn’t write those, but I play guitar on these versions and set my mic up and hit record. “Teal” was a song written by my friend Rigo, and this is a cover. The cheap mic I’d used for a long time stopped working and I purchased a mic that somehow worked worse, which you can also hear in the recording quality of some of these tracks.
Nevertheless, I still love this album. I re-worked “Lovebird,” adding a blues structure in the verses, and it’s one of the best songs on Starlit Parlor. I think “Lavender” is one of the best love songs I ever wrote, including a solo at the end I made up live and recorded once. And “Sunrise” is one of the best things I’ve ever done. So a lot of fond creative memories listening to this.
Listen to the full album on Bandcamp.
Milwaukee (2007)
Deciding to leave my teaching position in Milwaukee was one of the best creative decisions that I ever made. It reminds me very much of the time that I find myself in now, a transitional state between work and graduate school, when my creative work is a kind of bridge to a new identity.
After living in Milwaukee for a year, I moved back to Madison. I started posting the songs I recorded in Milwaukee and my old work colleague, Gabe Pope, saw them and reached out to play together. We built a friendship, and a recording project called Lower Stacks.
Looking back on it now, one of the things I like most about that time is that I really leaned into the instrumentals. Five of the twelve songs have no lyrics (though one does have “found sound” samples from movies). I was learning how to be a better craftsman with my guitar, so I didn’t feel the need to sing as much. Here you’ll find early versions of “Gonna” and “Chatty Blues,” and “Falling From Space,” all of which would appear on Starlit Parlor, but I’m going to share two here that don’t appear elsewhere: “Gambling Man” and “It’s Been Awhile.”
Listen to the full album on Bandcamp.
