The Process

For this album, I decided to not go about how I normally did things, and see how that went. Usually when I write music, I come up with the music then add lyrics that reflect the tone of it. This time, I decided to go lyrics first, then music. More specifically, I first wrote a line or two or just a title in my journal. That gave me a direction and a theme for each song. Next, I went through song by song and thought about what part of the story I wanted to tell in each, and then just started writing. I didn't know if it would work or if I would write too much or not enough. Surprisingly though, I didn't have to cut or add much, and everything worked out pretty perfectly lyric wise.

After finishing lyrics, which took actually a couple months, I went to the task of writing music. To accomplish this, I set aside one day a week to lock myself in my studio and I recorded video of what I would come up with as a way to remember it all once I was done. As I approached each song, I would think of how I wanted this song to sound, even down to instrumentation and how it would sound next to the song before and after it. And I knew that I would try to repeat musical themes throughout, much like The Wall.

Writing the music took quite a while, and once that was done I made some crude demos to flesh them all out and make sure they were all structurally sound. I think I went through a couple rewrites, and lots of happy accidents happened along the way.

After demoing them all, I tried to lay down some final tracks. My original plan was to lay down guitars and vocals and get a drummer to do play real drums on the album, but that didn't happen. I finished what I thought would be final tracks, and went back to listen and decided I hated it all. I realized that I would have to start with drums FIRST then build upon that. So I built drum tracks using samples, loops, and a MIDI keyboard and went from there. It was the best call I made and finally got me somewhere after being stuck it seemed for the past 2-3 years. Once I built drum tracks, the guitars and vocals came easily and I had re-recorded everything in just about a month. I even had my wife play violin and piano on some tracks.

The final piece of the puzzle was my friend Kyle Snyder. He and I had been in a band previously back in our hometown and he had just moved to Nashville. I told him about the project and asked if he would play guitar on it and help me with mixing since I knew he had worked in a studio previously. Not only did he play some amazing lead guitar on the album, but he also did all the bass work and mixing as well. He was a tremendous help.