Aye yo!

New album!

So these tunes were started late 2018 early 2019. It took maybe 6 months to shape them into what they are now. Actually, lemme go check on that. I looked at the file dates and it looks like I started shaping these in early Feb 2023 so that's about 4-5 months. I have probably 100+ songs to shape up and finish so at this rate it's going to take me 4-5 years to where I am releasing songs I wrote within the past 6 months. I am getting better at making songwriting and production choices that make the process faster but change is glacial. Like I finally figured out that I need to carve out 100-150hz for the bass to be heard on the bluetooth speaker I use to check my mixes on. Usually that means I can hear it in my airpods which are not known for decent bass. Anyway, Let's move on. I finally got diagnosed with ADHD last year so if it's obvious to you that tangents can take me away from my original point then good for you for figuring it out wayyy before I did.

ok first song:

Living in a fantasy: This one goes hand in hand with another song on the album. I won't say which but they both have the same chords. I came up with a chord structure I love and tried it maybe 8 different ways. I kept working on each version until I ended up with 2 completely different sounding songs. I didn't make a conscious choice to make them different. I just kept following what it sounded like and seeing what my subconscious wanted to add to these songs. Even now when I hear them they do not sound like to my ears at all. The lesson here (and I am saying this to myself) is that you can completely steal from someone else and still make it your own. So don’t worry that someone else will notice. It’s not a ripoff if it’s coming from your nondecision making place.

I love the drums on this. That beat comes so naturally to me that I can play it reasonably in time with very very few edits to the drums. Unlike other beats where there’s a lot of chopping up to make it sound like a decent drummer is on the track. (I’m not a good drummer but boy do I love playing drums).

I spent a lot of time shaping these words to make sense. I usually hear a line in my head then lay it down and listen back. Often my first choices are so cringe. Like “will you be cool when I put up a fight” was originally “will you be cool or put up a fight” and that sounded super rapey. Then when I switched it to the narrator's point of view that was way more interesting since it’s a dude saying it. This song also was way longer. Keith tells me my songs are often too long so I chopped it down before I even sent it to him.

Also, I fucking HATE when dogs jump on me. That had just happened twice that week when I sang the line “keep that goddamn dog away from me”. It should have been cathartic but instead it's just kind of bringing me back to that awful powerless, unsafe feeling (I’m avoiding saying “Trauma” here because I dislike the overuse of the term in pop culture but this is the term my therapist uses and I think devalues its meaning). I often explore the bad feelings I have in my music. But I’m pretty sure that doesn’t make things feel better when they come up. But it’s better in that it’s out there and I can accept who I am a little more. And that’s a big chunk of what making music brings me is closer to self acceptance. I make what I make and I need to feel happy that I can make stuff and not feel bad that I can’t make stuff that appeals to more people or meets the standards I want to hit.

At the end of the song is a clip of my baby girl that I recorded as a drop for the how neal feel podcast which I sprinkled in I think one more time on the record.

2 tengo miedo - means “I’m scared” in spanish. And I do hate when people say “I’m not going to lie”. I get that it’s supposed to sound like they are being honest but really what I hear is “I usually lie but in this rare case I will tell the truth”. Also “tengo miedo” is more fun to sing than “im scared”. It’s hard to put some english (billiards term! And a pun!) on those syllables.

This song was not intentionally meant to sound like someone else’s song but by the time I was almost done I realized I kind of came really close to a famous indie rock song. I’m not gonna say which one. You’ll have to figure it out.

My baby girl sings on this one. In the last chorus she’s layered in with me.

Keith says I did a reggie and the full effect thing with the synths at the end. I dig some of the reggie ideas, never liked the sound. I was going for that Rentals/Blue Album B-side/I just threw out the love of my dreams kind of vibe. That’s how you do synths over fuzzy gtrs. The cars did it well too. Most every punk and indie band of the late 90s early 00s did it badly.

3 I dont care what theyve got on me: I recall this song coming together really quickly. Hearing all the parts as soon as the chords came out of fingers. The drums sound a little like samples to me but I swear they’re real. I have no idea how I got that snare sound. I must have tuned it in a unique way and changed mic placement. It’s all there on the track if you solo it.

I dunno why but writing about fraud and crime comes so easily sometimes. I love love love crime movies. Probably since Goodfellas had a huge impact on me as yoot.

Big homey Dov sent a voice recording to our whatsapp group and it’s at the end of this song cuz it made me laugh and I wanted to give you lay-down-in-the-dark headphone listeners some ear candy to discover.

4: I was watching a movie depicting an extremely stressful and lonely situation and it hit me: This is what my inner childhood body feels like. Alone, lost, no one to help, no one to protect me, no one I can trust. “There’s no hope, no love, no safety, no belonging.” Those lyrics just came out. There was no need to think about it. It was all there. In the pre-chorus I am saying “Coño” which if you google will say It’s used as a vulgar term for vagina. That is not how I know it or use it (or like it). I use it in the Miami way which you say when a bad situation presents itself. Kinda like, “son of a bitch” or “ain’t that a bitch” or “damn, bro!”. When I lived in Miami it would often get shortened to just “...ño” which, to you non speakers, you say with an extra Y sound on it like in “onion” so it’s more like “conyo” with a lot of accent on the “ny” the worse the situation is like a smashed big toe or shat pants or dropping your cortado on your brand new car seat covers.

5: round 3 with beth - I’m already running out of steam here writing these liner notes but I think I recorded the guitars and they felt like something I had done before so I chopped them up and came up with a new chord structure and rhythm. I then played them back over the new idea and layered them up. I’m about 60% sure of this but don’t feel like opening up the ableton session to see what really happened cuz as the saying goes “art is a lie that tells the truth”. I heard that quote this week and I like it.

6: pay me in guitars - I usually write music before melody and lyrics. This title came to me when I had to pick a file name to save what I had recorded. It’s a good title. I am saying “crack” the way Kurt does in Lithium with that weird A sound “Crayck”. That’s a nice lil nod to my teenage man crush.

The end was so hard to mix correctly. It was initially a crazy wall of sound that to me sounded awesome. I could hear all the melodic ideas in there. But when I took a break from it and came back weeks later it was just too much noise noise noise. So I cut most of that out and played up one of the 20 guitars I layered because I came up with some jazzy chords that sounded awesome. I don’t know what they are called but I know I’ve seen them used in Radiohead guitar tabs. You basically take the high octave and flatten by a half step. They’re sad and dissonant and sound best on not super distorted guitars

7: walts got a hernia - I think I stole these chords from a song my friend keith wrote. I realized they were a staple of pop punk and don’t think I’ve ever used them before. Also, for one brief moment there’s a riff in there that might be the same as maybe one of the biggest pop punk songs of all time. I only realized this way after the fact. Funny how the songs you love sneak their bits and bobs into the songs you make. I recorded all the guitars in one go. I had the session up on my computer (I usually have a song open at all times so that when I have to work I can indulge my ADHD and hit record and see if anything comes to me).

Story: IIRC Walt came over to hang out and made me touch his gorgeous man abs to see if the weird thing he was feeling was a hernia. After he left I went to the basement studio to probably check work email and instead hit record. All these words and vocals and melodies came out with zero forethought in one straight take…. As my favorite rappers say “off the dome”. And I can hear the difference in the melody and lyrics. It’s got spaces and fills and call backs I have never used consciously before.

I tried rerecording the vocals a few times but nothing ever came close to the natural laid back delivery I had the first time. I realized that what I had was actually cool. So it stayed and I made it work with some clever edits you can’t hear.

8 yesenia - I was listening/watching so much of the bodega boys when I wrote this. I was picturing Mero’s sassy Yesenia character and my desires to court the gorgeous and stop-your-clownin’ Dominican woman I imagined.

OK I’m all out of energy. I’ve been writing for an hour straight. The rest of the songs are all stuff I wrote for the How Neal Feel podcast. Why aren’t they all on their own release? Well I spent 2 fucking weeks prepping probably 80 fucking songs on 6 different albums (where I created unique artwork for each) I wrote for podcasts/commercials/shows that happen to be 30 seconds long or less.

So why didn’t they get released?

And now we get to modern tech platforms ruining art.

First: if a track isn’t 30 seconds or longer and you can’t get paid for a stream.

Second, they will not allow an album where the average song length is less than 60 seconds. So at the end of this record it had to go. I get why they have to do that but still. Fuck them. How about instead of a blanket policy you allow some carve outs for people not trying to scam the system by uploading 30 seconds of noise with the same song titles as other artists? I mean clearly this can be fixed if humans are incharge and not algos.

They would say, “there isn’t a single streaming platform that has ever turned a profit. Do you know the cost it would take to hire and train that many people?”.

I say fair point.

But then let me counter with: that’s cuz y’all made a shitty deal with the major labels when you set such low streaming rates that now kinda fucks all artists except the top 1%.

The whole system is screwed up and I get the economic realities the companies have to deal with. Hopefully AI can help automate some of this and a feller like me who makes music every day with an addiction like dedication can make a modest living from his art one day. “From my lips to gods ears” as my dad likes to say.

I honestly dream about waking up and having a solid 6-8 hours every day to make music in between bouts of building stuff, painting stuff, playing games and what not. And enough to live near a warm ocean with waves. I think I’d really like surfing. That would be just the greatest. So share this with people that might like it. The more listeners I get the more music I can put out and maybe one day this can be my full time job.

Jah Bless.