WDIMTY LOG #1: Writing An Album Is Weird

The Title. That’s it. That’s the post… Kidding, but it very well could be. As a musician, writing an album is a really weird process. For a majority of musicians, whether you’re a singer, pianist, trumpeter, guitarist etc., you learn from your predecessors. Guitarists will listen to Jimmy Page, Jimi Hendrix, Slash, Wes Montgomery, Tom Morello, Claudio Sanchez, Tom Schultz, the players of the past, and learn their songs. Pianists will listen to Herbie Hancock, Mozart, Bud Powell, Chopin, or contemporary pop players like Charlie Puth and Alan Walker, and learn their tunes and nuances. A smaller percentage of THOSE people will go on to write music and record it. And when they get to that stage, they too will realize how weird writing an album can be.

You see, to me, writing an album is a two part process. It’s channeling the emotions and feelings you have through your instrument while you simultaneously channel your musical background and idols into it as well. The latter can be consciously or subconsciously, and that’s the wild card of it all. Take for example the album I’m writing; WDIMTY. It spawned out of heartbreak, out of a relationship that I felt should have lasted longer. I did the first that felt natural to me, I wrote about it. I wrote for hours on hours in a few notebooks and tried to parse through my emotions and feelings as best as I could. I realized that a lot of it ended up turning into poetry, so I started writing putting music to it. The lyrics were drab and dreary, and that didn’t inherently stem from any particular artist or poet, but the instrumentation is a whole different story. It pulls from Fleetwood Mac, Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers, Avantdale Bowling Club, Coheed and Cambria, The Story So Far, Paramore, and bevvy of others.

The act of writing the album became therapeutic. It answered a lot of questions I had on the relationship, about myself, and about the larger picture, and it really helped me zoom out on the situation at large. That in and of itself made it complicated to show people the music because it was opening up a lot of vulnerability. It was as if I was bringing them into a therapy session.

It’s also challenging finding your voice on a project. This album is uniquely my own experience, but I’m not the one singing on this album. I got plenty of my friends singing on it and also accompanying the album with their instrumentation. It’s an experience unlike any other I’ve had. It was interesting marrying all those artists I listed above into my sound and realizing where some of my musical idiosyncrasies came from. Making an album is weird because in a way, you find out who you are.