How The World Will End

Songs tend to fall into two broad categories: personal and impersonal. Personal songs are often very specific and convey a strong emotion from the writer; your love songs or heartbreak songs, for example. Impersonal songs are cryptic, open to interpretation, and not seemingly related to the writer's experience. That's not to say that impersonal songs aren't strongly emotional or heartfelt, but they are certainly different than a first-person narrative. Of course, there are a million subcategories to be found, but I tend to place songs into these very, very broad categories.

I've never considered myself to be a good songwriter. I've been attempting to do it for 12 years now and am always my worst critic. I've always written personal songs, mostly about me, mostly about heartbreak, mostly awful. When I started writing songs for Ghostbeard in 2007, the majority of them were impersonal, that is, not directly about an episode of my life. They were stories about people told from a fictionalized narrator, with a few common themes and imagery used in each one. It was very detached and very different from what I've always done, but I loved them. For the first time, I had written songs that I would be happy to play for people. Those songs were released on What's The Word Bird?

As I began writing some new songs in 2009, they all turned out to be very personal. More personal, in fact, than anything I had written previously. Those songs were released on Stochasticity. Both albums available to download for free.

The songs I've written recently are still very personal. I have a lot of issues in my head that I constantly struggle to deal with an overcome, so I suppose these personal songs are a way of working them out. I'm uncomfortable listening to them, though. Maybe someday when my life isn't so screwed up and my head starts functioning properly, I'll be able to write a good ol' fashioned love song, but until that happens, here's a new song I recorded on Halloween.





I recorded it with a Tascam US-122mkII audio interface and a couple of cheap vocal mics. Since I don't have a bass guitar on hand, I ran my guitar through octave and chorus pedals with some EQ and a little distortion to get the bass sound. Enjoy! (and ignore my late-night ramblings about the categorization of music, I already disagree with it)