On progression, production, and old demos

Before I recorded The Solomon Project, I used to churn out instrumental rock songs. Starting in either 2004 or 2005 (I can't really remember, to be honest), I began using FL Studio to arrange bits of guitar I recorded. Prior to that, I was writing predominantly piano pieces (also in FL - at the time it was Fruity Loops). I don't even really play piano, but I enjoy arranging it.

Anyway, I had finally gotten good enough at guitar to think about recording my ideas. A visit with my cousin in Washington DC where we jammed on acoustic guitar for hours in my aunt's basement left me feeling inspired, and I started writing guitar songs. After a few, I decided they belonged in an album. I recorded 10 songs in all, and called the set "Behind Closed Doors. The songs were sludgy and heavy (I played all the parts in Drop C, on flat-wound strings, so the guitar was thick with little top end). I was pretty stoked about the results, and showed my friends when went back to college in the fall.

But before a few weeks had passed, something happened: I recorded a better song. It was bluesy, clean, crisp - everything the first album was not. I knew it belonged on a different album. That song was House of Cards. The instrumental version I wrote back in 2005 bears little sonic resemblance to the version on The Shivers, but the parts were all there. It was the best song I'd ever written. I needed to do more.

And I did. My next demo album, "Waiting for Daylight," was shorter than the first one (because I ran out of ideas and wanted it done), but the production was far better than Behind Closed Doors. One of the songs, Insincerity, wound up on my EP "Just a Chill" nearly five years later with only minor production tweaks - all the audio and arrangement is from my original recording session.

Back in college that fall, I immediately began recording more songs. I was starting to develop a more progressive sound, with longer songs and more complicated arrangements. My next demo album was called "Shiver" (which is where I got the inspiration for my latest album title). The longest song on that album was an epic track called "Bleed Dry." When I wrote it, I was never happy with the production. It was just too muddy, and ruined what I thought was an amazing song. Four years later, I remixed all the original audio files, added new drum parts, and included it as the final song on The Solomon Project. I'm still very proud of that song.

Without even pausing, I got to work on the next album. This one, called "Father of Faces," was going to be my most complicated to date. I knew that before I even started writing it. My production skills had improved a lot since the first album, and my arrangements were growing in depth - some songs had as many as 8 layered guitar parts. Of course, sometimes that backfired and left me with an incoherent mess. Those songs I never finished. They rotted on my hard drive. Some day I'll dig out my old backup CDs and listen to those tracks again. But the songs I did finish were some of my best. One of them, an off-kilter, dissonant track called "Red Line," I recently gutted and re-arranged as "Redline" on The Shivers. The new track has a radically different arrangement, thicker guitar parts (but the originals are still there), and a techno-type outro in place of the original (which used the same drums and guitar as the rest of the song).

In 2006 I graduated from college. My parents gave me a new amp, and I moved into an apartment with some friends. This allowed me to begin recording using a mic'ed amp (in the past, I had been using an RP200A effects pedal plugged directly into my computer). After a few false starts (mostly figuring out EQ for the amp), I started recording "Heather's Last Breath." I originally wanted it to be a concept album about the life and death of a girl, but that never actually happened. Instead, I recorded a dozen tracks that I was happy with and called it a day. I haven't revisited any of those songs for a while, but they're really solid - so I know I will eventually.

By my next album, "Season Red Eye," I was starting to get burned out. My songs were getting more and more complicated, but I was losing my inspiration. I needed to do something different, but I wasn't sure what that would be. Still, I pressed on. I started trying electronic sounds, mixing up my usual rock and piano mix with pounding dance tracks. Two of the resulting songs, "Press" and "Holiday," eventually found their way onto Just a Chill as "Pressure Plate" and "Holiday 1999" respectively. I moved, and in the shuffle stopped recording for several months. I was pretty discouraged, and unsure of how to restart my creativity.

In 2007, I had a brief stint in a three-piece band called Cappadocia (with two friends from my job). We recorded three songs, and then life happened. We drifted apart. But that experience left me with new ideas. I gained a greater appreciation for dissonance and odd chord combinations, and was continually recording song ideas. Eventually, I started working on my next demo album. Called "Bastard Buffet," it was easily the best thing I'd done to date. The songs flowed readily, and some of the arrangements came together in only an evening or two. The first three tracks on The Solomon Project, "Break," "Candy," and "Girls," all came from Bastard Buffet. So did "(Shhh) Don't Tell." Girls was the first vocal song I ever recorded. The version you hear on the album is very close to my original demo (all the audio tracks are from the demo, in fact). The other three changed relatively little, other than the addition of vocals and the shuffling of a few parts to improve the arrangements.

In 2008, I move to Trenton for a new job. Thing in my life became rough, and I turned to music as a release. The result was The Solomon Project. The rest of the story is still being written.