About the album

Dead Silence

In the fall of 2008, I was slogging through a musical dry spell. Sure, I had lots of demos – unfinished riffs, pieces of songs, arrangements – but nothing was sticking. Absolutely nothing. I didn’t have a single finished song. My next “album” was supposed to be called “Womb.” A new beginning, I guess you could say.

But it wasn’t anything, and honestly, it was starting to get me down. There are only so many times you can listen to a cool riff or verse before you start thinking “why can’t I make this work?”

Mainly, I was feeling stagnant. Sick of what I’d been doing up until that point. I mean, I had songs, but no vocals. I didn’t sing. No matter how cool the songs sounded to me, whenever I played them for someone else (and that wasn’t very often), they would almost always say something to the tune of “wow man, that’s cool – you should join a band or something.”

Not helpful. I don’t have the time to be in a band. I tried that for a few months, and it was hard enough when the three of us were living in the same city. Now, I was in Trenton, and I didn’t really know anybody. And my new job was absolutely destroying me. Not the best time to start a band.

Besides, I wanted to BE the band.

I tend to record joke tracks from time to time. Little experiments, or songs I don’t really consider “mine.” Sometimes, I’ll record vocals for these. Really, those were the only sort of vocals I was comfortable recording. Ridiculous stuff, really – nothing you’d ever want to show anyone else.

But one of those jokes actually turned out kind of decent. I sort of grew attached to the sound of my “singing,” if you could call it that. But there were still no real songs for Womb, and I wasn’t getting anywhere. Oh, I kept on recording riffs. I made arrangements, fiddled with drum loops, bass lines, and synths. Nothing was gelling. The fall of 2008 was starting to look pretty unfulfilling.

She Lives for Chastity

I had this power chord riff lying around on my hard drive. It wasn’t anything special. In fact, it was based on an earlier song I’d written back in 2005, when I first started recording tracks. Every now and then, I’d listen to it for no particular reason. It was kind of catchy, I guess. It wasn’t exactly a surprise that I eventually tried to record it. I threw this dissonant pedal riff in as the intro, and I double tracked the chords. Very standard stuff, and I certainly wasn’t breaking any new ground with it.

Do you ever find yourself doing something, unsure of what inspired it? It happens to me all the time. It happened this time. Listening to the bones of this bland song I was working on, I decided to record a scream. Or maybe it was a wail. Anyway, I’d never sung it before, and I didn’t even know how it would come out. It was at the upper limit of my range, and I didn’t even really hit it properly – but I liked it.

The song was “She Lives for Chastity,” and that scream is what convinced me to finish it. I wrote the lyrics in a few minutes, and sang them in a few takes. The song was basically finished in an evening. Of course, I changed a lot before it was truly complete. In the beginning, I had spoken word bits mixed in with the final chorus, no solo, no piano in the middle section, and the mixing was all wrong. Even after I’d finished it, I still found myself coming back to it again and again, trying to make it better.

The Album Takes Shape

Now that I had one song under my belt, I started to feel confident. Hey, maybe I can do this. Maybe I can make a really cool album. And while I’m at it, let’s make it a concept album! That would be pretty cool.

I started to pull my demos together, looking for interesting ideas. I had a lot of demos, so I was pretty sure I’d be able to make a full disc out of everything.

Almost none of the songs I worked on for my initial album idea made the final cut. I just couldn’t make them work. Songs like “Black and Brown,” “Serial (Like Some Damned Soap Opera),” “Should Have Listened to Ann,” “She’s a Revisionist,” and “This is Our Last Stand” all fell by the wayside. That isn’t saying I hated those songs. Some of them I still hope to finish some day. But they were all wrong. I couldn’t make the vocals work.

Hell, I didn’t even know how to write a song I could actually sing. Most of those tracks have vocal takes that are downright embarrassing. No one but me has ever heard them.

And just like that, I was discouraged again. This happens to me all the time. I find a spark of creativity, make something I’m happy with, and then cannot for the life of me replicate that success on future attempts. It’s like I can’t predict my own creativity – I’m incapable of forcing a good result. Either it works or it doesn’t. It wasn’t working.

Give It Up

One of the cool riffs that actually made the cut was nicknamed “Craig.” That’s a bad habit of mine: naming my tracks random words or phrases that don’t have anything to do with anything. This particular song had no lyrics, but the drums were really punchy, crunchy, and had this snap that really made me smile. The guitar was simple and heavy, and the beat was a little off-kilter.

Craig eventually became “Stuck in My Head.” But that wasn’t until later.

See, I was trying to record one song, when another came to me. Just a few words. I played a couple of power chords – nothing special – and, laughing to myself, sang “she says I can’t get it up.” What the hell kind of song is that? A song about not being able to get it up? Hey, I thought it was funny. But I didn’t want to stop recording the first song, lay down a new set of bones (click track, empty channels), and record this new idea.

For some reason, I did. But it kind of sucked. See, the song was so simple it just fell into place, but the second half wasn’t working. The vocals were flat, and it sounded like I was bored. I got discouraged, exported the mix, emailed it to a friend, and forgot about it. I burned a CD for my car, and I listened to it a few times throughout the day.

You know what? I wasn’t going to leave this one unfinished. That night, I went back into my recording room and redid some of the vocals, tweaked the arrangement and the mix, and the end result was “Give It Up.” I sent it to the same friend. He liked it. I liked it too. I wasn’t so discouraged anymore. But I still only had two songs.

Out With the Old

At that point, I was still trying to make a concept album. I mean, I had two tracks that kind of fit a "story," if you wanted to call it one. That could make a good album, right? So, I tried to record more songs to establish the narrative. But I’ve already told you that it didn’t work out as planned. These songs just sucked. One song in particular, “Serial (Like Some Damned Soap Opera),” was terrible. I had loved the arrangement before I tried to sing to it, but my vocals destroyed it.

Eventually, I started to think I might be better served pulling songs from my older collections (demo albums) and recording vocals for them. I didn’t even know if it would work. To start things off, I took one of my favorite songs, “Break,” and burned it to a CD to listen to in my car. It was from my previous set of demos, and still fresh in my mind. The trouble was, I had already tried to record vocals for it. I’d written a ton of them, and I was really proud of them. But I couldn’t sing them. There were too many syllables, and things refused to gel.

One day, while driving (and this was over a week later, mind you), I decided to listen to Break. When it got to the chorus, I swallowed (I was still very reluctant to sing at this point, even alone in my own car) and belted out a few words. “Set me free.” That sounded kind of cool. But what would go with it? Oh – how about “Father, won’t you come and save me?”

Later on that day, I took a stab at recording the lines. With some delay and reverb, they actually fit into the mix. The song still sounded cool, but it had some emotional content. There was a story there, even if only a little one.

The rest of the song came together the same evening. When my brain is in lyric mode, I can spit out lines with just the right meter and pace without much effort. But how to sing them? You know, I’ve always loved the sound of glottal fry – that gravelly, rachety sound your voice makes when you speak so low the air barely escapes your throat. So, I tried that. It sounded kind of creepy. Unsettling. And very personal. It didn’t even sound like me. I think that’s why I loved it.

Before it was done, Break went through quite a few revisions. One of the last things I did was change the ending. Originally, the song ended with a solo and a long fade out. But I wasn’t happy with it, and several people who heard it commented that the ending seemed kind of tacked on. So I axed it. Now, I had three songs.

Girls and Candy

By that time, I had ditched the concept album idea. I just wanted to get a collection of good songs together and make the best album I could. Old songs, new songs – whatever.

“Candy” and “Girls” were both songs from the same demo set as Break. I call them demos, but they really weren’t. Production-wise, they changed very little in the transition to the new album – the vocals were the only new thing. And even then, Girls already had vocals. I really didn’t change that song at all. Before this album, Girls was the only song I’d actually sung on, and I wasn’t sure I wanted anyone to hear it. For one, the lyrics were very…antagonistic. I’ve always liked to write stories with an edge – nothing happy. But that song, well, it was downright mean, angry, and unlike me entirely. Listening to it, you get a picture of an artist that simply isn’t me.

But I liked it, and in the end, it had to come along. And Candy too. That one was pretty easy to finish. Initially, I tried to redo the arrangement, reorder everything, but it made the song fall apart. I left it the way I had originally written it, and I’m glad I did. Sometimes, in trying to fix things, you just make them worse. At least that’s how it is with me and my music.

Incidentally, the song was originally titled “Candy” because of these two, creepy spoken-word bits I’d snuck into the mix. They were so quiet I doubt anyone would have been able to understand them, but they inspired the title. One of them, which came in under the intro, said “Do you remember out back behind the wood-shed? You were five, and he said it would be fun. Well, was it?” Sick, yes, and there’s a reason it never made it into the final version.

In With the New

For some reason, I tend to feel like a slacker and a cheat whenever I add lyrics to older songs for a newer album. I say this as if it’s happened a lot, but “The Solomon Project” was my first album with lyrics. So, this is a new problem for me. But anyway, I felt bad about reworking Girls, Candy, and Break for this album – as if I were taking the easy way out. I mean, they’re all my songs, and no one has really ever heard any of them before, so the point is moot. But it mattered to me. For my own peace of mind, I needed to record some new material for the new album.

I wrote the lyrics to Ministry when I was bored at work one day. I scribbled them out on a few scraps of paper and jammed it into my pocket, hoping I’d be able to transform them into a song. But I wanted this one to be different. Mellow, perhaps. Or at least not screamy and loud. I wanted it to be sleazy, metaphoric, and even-tempered. Basically, I wanted the song to float with a light buzz.

The next new song I recorded, “Such a Mess,” was something I never thought would make the cut. The riff was simple beyond belief, and not even that interesting. But something made me want to record it, and I did.

But it didn’t work. It fell flat. I reworked the arrangement for an hour or two before suddenly, it clicked. The result was thick, heavy, and rocked absolutely. I even managed to record some vocals. But no chorus. I just couldn’t come up with anything that worked. Finally, I decided it didn’t even need a true chorus. I liked the heaviness of the riffs. By itself, the guitar track sounded like a bad recording of a boring riff. But in the mix, with the lead guitar playing octaves all over the place, it just fell into place.

Cleaning Up the Stragglers

There were two songs that I fought with for months without getting anywhere. One was “Stuck in My Head” – the song I was working on when I took a break to record Give it Up. The other was a fourth track from my previous demo set, titled “(Shhh) Don’t Tell.” Both songs were giving me absolute hell, and I had no idea how to bring them into line.

Stuck in My Head bothered me because of the singing. Some days, I would like it, and other days, I felt embarrassed whenever I listened to it. And there were a few lines in it that just weren’t working. And the mid-section didn’t fit. The lead guitar was all wrong. You get the idea. It was a mess.

The other song, Shhh, was difficult for the same reason as Break before it: I’d written and recorded a different set of vocals for it initially, and they didn’t work. The new ones never sat well with me either, and the result was that I never felt comfortable with the way the song came across. I tried recording them again and again, using a different style each time, but whenever I listened to the result, I wound up liking the first set better.

In the end, some pretty big tweaks to the mixes of both songs brought them to a place where I was happy with them. (Shhh) Don’t Tell is one of my favorite arrangements of all time – I seriously love the guitars on that song. It was killing me, hating the vocals, worrying that this great song was going to wind up in the closet, never to be heard by anyone.

The final song on the album, “Bleed Dry,” is an instrumental I recorded back in 2005. But the mix was downright awful. Here, I had this epic, heavy song that I wanted to love, but the production sounded like ass. Flat, muddy, quiet – nothing a truly rocking song should be. The problem was, I had recorded it so long ago that I didn’t even know what to make of my project file. The mixer channels were all wrong (I have a system now, which I stick to: Channel 1 is drums; channel 2 is bass; after that come the guitars; then, the vocals and other sweeteners. All my samples are pattern clips. All my patterns are placed as clips.), and I couldn’t make sense of it. I wanted to leave it as-is, but it was seriously flawed. It took me months to finish remixing that track. Honestly, it was painful. I was tempted to abandon it, rather than mess with those files again. But I stuck it out, and I’m glad I did.

Final Thoughts

Is this album perfect? Definitely not. Am I happy with it? Absolutely.

The production on “The Solomon Project” is my best work to date. Listening to it, you’d never know I record all my inputs on cheap cables that ultimately run through a crappy sound card in my computer. You’d never know that I’ve never once been to a studio, or had anyone else work on my tracks. I love to be in control of my creativity, and this album is something I made completely on my own. Very few people even heard it while I was working on the tracks. The few friends who did gave me some valuable feedback, much of which I at least took into consideration as I worked on finalizing things.

When you listen to this album, you’re listening to a set of songs I lived in completely for months. I know these songs better than anything. I’ve probably heard them more than a hundred times apiece. I’ve listened to this album so much I’m sick of it.

But you know what? After a week or so, when I put it on in my car, I’m ready to rock again. When you listen to it, I hope you feel that – because I made it for you. “The Solomon Project” is my album, but without other people to listen, it’s not worth a thing to me.

So, thanks for listening, guys – I hope you enjoy it.