Congratulations on your album. It sounds like you had a lot of fun.
I did! I had a lot of fun experimenting and doing different shit, trying things and seeing what would work to make the emotions come to life.
How long did the recording process take?
It was split up over time. My friend Jarrod Alexander who played drums on the record flew out from California and we did the drums over maybe four or five days. Then I had shit to do, and didn’t come back to getting the core tracks down until months and months later. So it just sat there as drum tracks for a while.
One song called Joyriding didn’t come until much later so I had to play drums on that, which is why if you’re listening to it you might think, “These drums aren’t up to par!” Some of the later songs are all just me programming too. I would say close to a year all up.
You were really interested in the limitations of recording and working with low-budget recordings.
One hundred percent. Some of my favourite recordings are demos. To me that was the original intent: the song in its purest, most honest form. For me at least, my favourite things off records are the mistakes. I love to hear that, knowing that a human was in a room making this and they’re not perfect. That human element, I attach to. When doing this record that was a promise I made to myself. No matter what it needs to be pure in heart. As much as I may want to go in and do this a hundred times and tweak this and make it 100% perfect, it can’t be. Nothing’s perfect because I’m not perfect. There are some guitars and things on there that I tried to rerecord and ended up scrapping the recorded version and using demo guitar tracks.
You put so much into these songs. It must be confronting to display them to people.
In making them I didn’t feel like I was writing a record to put out. I just wrote songs because I needed to in order to keep my sanity and keep my mind off of how I felt physically. At the end of I was like, “Oh my god, I have a record, I guess I should put it out.” The good thing about that is that I never censored myself in the writing of it. It’s like letting people read a diary.
Were there any songs that you thought about keeping them back and saying, “this is just for me”?
There are! There are a few that I kept just for myself. A few I wrote just for my kids. I thought it would be really awesome if each kid and my wife had a theme song. Like a character in a movie where every time they come in this song plays. So those songs are just for me. We have this amazing thing called Sonos. You put portable speakers in different rooms and then there’s a box that you hook up to your wifi and then you can control from your phone what songs play in all different rooms. So I have that and whenever my daughter Lily comes in, if I feel in the mood, I hit the button and her theme will play. They are super into it. I would say second to the Frozen theme song.
There are some love songs on the album, for example She’s The Prettiest Girl At The Party And She Can Prove It With A Solid Right Hook.
That’s a true story. That was one of the earliest times I hung out with my wife. We were at this party and there was this drunk girl that she didn’t like. It just so happened that the drunk girl was walking around the party asking people to punch her in the face. She asked a bunch of people, they all said no, but when she finally got to my wife she couldn’t even finish the sentence and my wife cracked her so hard in the face. That was when I knew she was going to be my wife.
BY MATHEW DROGEMULLER
