What A Difference A Year Makes: ifightdragons/blog/?p=567 In February 2013 I didn’t like my own writing voice. The prior 3 years of trying to write something that would please both the label and my soul had been a trying experience to say the least. The label wasn’t really pleased with anything, but ultimately I’m happy that I was able to make music that I loved (KABOOM!). That said, a lot of my favorite songs on KABOOM! are ones I cowrote with Matt Mahaffey, and by the end of the whole process, I had really stopped liking anything I wrote on my own, having constantly been forced to look at all my demos and songs through the “Is it a hit? If not, it’s worthless” lens that constitutes the traditional music industry looking glass. I could barely even force myself to finish the demos. So, in February 2013, with no label, no tours booked, nothing on the IFD horizon, I sat down and wrote something that I wanted to write. Something I had no illusion of being a ‘hit’ in any way, something with absolutely no radio potential and no real potential of traditional commercial success at all, because from the beginning it was conceived as an unwieldly 22-minute-long song cycle with motifs and interludes and instrumental pieces and an accompanying story booklet without which the story probably wouldn’t be comprehensible in the slightest. I wrote the story down and made a bunch of acoustic demos, and it made me happy. So, I decided that I wanted to make it for real, and that ended up being the seed for Project Atma, which launched almost exactly a year ago. Now we’re in final mixing, and just yesterday I finally got to listen through most of the material in order, and I nearly cried. It’s everything I hoped it would be, and yet so much more, because it’s things I never thought it could be, amazing atmospheres and guitar moments and bass moments and drum ridiculousness and a choir of 100 IFD fans singing their hearts out at the end. And it takes me back to last February, when I sat down by myself to write it, without a real conception of how it would ever see the light of day. And it makes me smile.
Posted on: Wed, 23 Apr 2014 12:30:46 +0000
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