Hello again! We’re back with another entry in this journal, as we continue the tale of how this yet-unfinished album came, and is coming, to be. Only this time, it’s Schuyler! By the way, we will be updating this journal on a Tuesday/Friday pattern so expect two new entries every week.
Entry 2A: Pick Your Poison
So how does a group that’s not at all new to writing music begin to approach a new album? Especially when time is a factor, and the canvas on which to work is only the size of a two-and-a-half month collegiate summer? Give me six hours to chop down a tree, and I’ll spend the first four sharpening the axe!
When Honest Abe said that, I’m sure he wasn’t talking about crafting an indie album, but he may as well have been. You simply can’t go into a musical project without some sort of plan (unless you’re going for that specific feeling *ahem “Enter Humanity”*) without wandering through the songs like a musical nomad. And with years of serious musical development under our belts, we wanted to create an album that is cohesive above all else.
We kept this at the front of our minds while searching for a direction that felt right. We soon found that, while Memento had been a “concept album” in the sense that its songs dealt with similar ideas, it didn’t tell a story. It was a group of emotions, blended and sprayed over fifty minutes of audio; an impressionist painting of two young men on the precipice of the beginning of their lives.
But we were ready to attempt a realist painting. We wanted to somehow combine the emotion, drama, and story of high opera with the relatability, genuinity, and openness to interpretation of independent music. We wanted to create an album with songs that could stand on their own as great songs, but also astound the dedicated listener when taken in as a whole. Songs that lose nothing for being part of a story, but gain everything when played together.
As we narrowed our sights on an album direction, we found that we really wanted to create a sort of epic. We searched for a topic that could allow us to explore our own sound unhindered, but still be something that we’ve never done before; a topic that would let us mix mournful truth with reserved joy. We did not want to create a Quadrophenia, a Ziggy Stardust, a 2112; we didn’t want to save the world with a guitar or blow up spaceships with our power chords. Rather, we wanted the album to be the common-man’s epic. Each track an uncensored entry in the secret diary of a normal guy in a dark and mysterious world. Showing, not telling, what is happening in the protagonist’s mind and in the world around him as his story develops.
The prospects of this approach enthralled us so much that we immediately took to it. There was so much room to explore lush and interesting themes: human consciousness, ethics, sacrifice, love, awakening, politics, tragedy, hope, light, joy, darkness, and despair. And the list goes on. We could not think of any other topic that would allow us to so freely write the themes that interest us and the music we love. And with any epic journey, there was room for great and elegant holistic metaphor. One day the album we were writing was about a fight against an Orwellian society, the next it was about the love life and real problems of a confused nineteen-year-old, and the next it was about waking up to find yet another tragedy on the news and another sense of emptiness in the heart. In its most basic form, this album is an opportunity for cloudcover to create a story that is different and personal for everyone who listens.
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