Hello there. My name's YorkeDaddy, and I'm in a two-man band called cloudcover. I'm here to take you along with me on a journey. I strive to craft something remarkable, and I will be chronicling this story here in this journal. Whether you want to come along or not is up to you.
Entry 1: Beginnings
Before we can really get down to business, there are some preliminary tales I must tell.
My name's Bryan. I'll be 19 later this month. I am a college student at Indiana University. I truly believe that I was born to analyze the inner mechanisms of the human mind and emotions, and so subsequently I am pursuing a career in the field of Psychology. I also have a passion for translating these emotions into song.
I was 14 years old when I was given my first guitar. It was one of those crummy starter guitars you could get at any Wal-Mart; a knock-off of a knock-off of a Les Paul, it was about as valuable as your average gumball machine, maybe even less. It was a gateway, though, sending me down the path of the modern musician. There was, however, a long way to go before I could even be considered competent with the instrument.
I spent the first year or so as a "guitarist" by teaching myself how to play as fast as possible. You see, my favorite bands at the time were the likes of "August Burns Red" and "All That Remains," and my dream was to be able to shred and thrash like the guitarists of those bands. To be frank, I never owned a tuner nor did I ever make an effort to have one. Subsequently I spent a good portion of my initial existence as a guitarist simply teaching myself how to strum quickly in tandem with fast fingering in order to create a "shredding" sound, all while on an out-of-tune guitar.
Needless to say, that was essential a fast-track to nowhere and while my friends thought my 'skills' were sick, I would be laughed out of the room if I was ever faced with someone that actually knew how to play guitar. A year or so after I got that guitar, however, my dad got a new job. I didn't know it at the time, but this was the best thing that could've happened to me as a musician.
Going to a new high school as a Sophomore is a terrifying proposition, but it's something a lot of people have to do. The initial fear will go away after a couple weeks and everything's back into the monotonous repetition of life. Over the days in my Health class, however, I met a dude named Schuyler. To this day he's my best friend.
One of those days (I do not remember the context very well), he casually proposed that we start a band. My response was positive, and I was excited to show off my wicked shredding ability that I had developed, naively thinking we'd be some sort of epic metal band that would take rock stations around the country by storm. Little did I know, our music tastes clashed pretty heavily. I loved The Mars Volta and Slayer. He loved The Beatles and Badfinger and had never really heard anything outside of those genres.
Our first "practice" session as a band didn't exactly go as either of us planned, I suspect. Partly because my guitar was drastically out of tune and I did not know how to play any chords other than power chords in drop D. I had some learning to do.
Over the months I learned simple chords and how to actually play guitar, thanks to Schuyler's guidance and me being motivated to be able to actually make music at some point in my life. Eventually, after endless practicing, we decided to record one of the songs we had become...decent on. Upon naming our band "Minute Detail" (minute as in small, not as in the increment of time)...well, behold, Schuyler and I from 2010 (listen at your own risk):
Pretty...interesting, eh? Well, everyone's gotta start somewhere. After spending a few months recording songs in this manner and planning out an album full of covers, we realized we wanted to take a different direction. We were going to write an album.
At this point I don't think either of us were entirely sure what we were doing. I certainly had no idea how to write music. Schuyler knew and he crafted some solid stuff here, but we never really took any interesting direction with the songs and our method of recording and the software we used were so horrendous that the production and quality of the tracks we made were just not going to cut it.
But still, we kept working at it. Our album was finished at some point in 2010, and was titled "Surface Tension". We were immensely proud of what we accomplished and finished. The fact of the matter, however, is that we needed a lot of work if we were going to ever make anything that's going to get us noticed.
(One of the highlights from "Surface Tension").
Without dragging this out too long, the next two years involved us writing songs here and there, but mostly trying to get a real band together. To make a long story short, the band we formed didn't last too long. We were essentially right back where we started...Schuyler and I, wanting to make powerful music but not really knowing how to go about it.
Well, at this point I was starting to actually become serviceable with a guitar. I actually knew chords, and I was starting to discover that I had a bit of talent for writing songs. The talent had always been there for Schuyler, but I think the turning point for us of sorts was when I finally started writing decent stuff. A couple band name changes later, and we were calling ourselves "cloudcover". We were starting to put our past work behind us, and we were ready to really make something special.
It was our senior year of high school. We finally had a good program to record our music (Pro Tools, which is what most professional producers use, as far as I'm aware). We had a theme to unify our music by (growing up, graduating high school, Schuyler's girlfriend at the time was leaving for a year in China), and we had both become fairly decent at our respective instruments (I was a strong guitarist, Schuyler was a wizard with a bass, our voices had both fully developed and, while not great, were certainly serviceable for what we were trying to accomplish).
Over the ensuing months, we crafted a rather powerful concept album that was eventually named "Memento," partly because that was what it was to us: a token of remembrance. It was a rather beautiful piece of work in my opinion, and it got us what we were so hungry for: noticed.
(One of the highlights from "Memento")
I will always remember it as one of the most exciting points of my life. An indie blogger found Memento, and he reviewed it. And he
loved it. For once, we knew that someone outside of our immediate friend group thought our music was good. This was assurance that we were capable of making something truly great. However, while Memento was good, we knew we were capable of better.
The indie blogger's review that motivated us to continue making music.
The problem? I was moving away to Indiana University, while Schuyler was moving away to Purdue University. We would be apart. We no longer had the ability to spend months upon months working on an album. I wasn't sure where we'd go from there.
Over Christmas break, we were both back in our hometown. Spontaneously, we decided we wanted to write another album. Over the course of two weeks, we hastily created "Enter Humanity," another concept album that was quite a bit different from "Memento". I felt like we were progressing as musicians, but at the same time Enter Humanity did not have the emotional power that Memento had. I knew we were capable of something incredible.
(A highlight from "Enter Humanity")
And that's where we are today. Under the band name "cloudcover," we have two albums under our belt. Both have their strong points, both have their weak points. We never really received any attention from our second album, and our first album was only noticed by that one indie blogger. Frankly, though, it's not simple attention or fame that I crave.
No, I want to make something that touches people's lives. This entire journey I've gone on is all meant to hopefully someday culminate in an album that people will listen to over and over and will impact them. I want to make something people will
talk about. I know we have the ability to, and that's what this journal will function as. All summer, we've been working on something that we hope will be miraculous. I want to chronicle the journey, the adventure of crafting an album that's more than just an album. Hopefully you're all willing to tag along as we try to craft the next Indie Pop masterpiece.