Novembeat 2017

Just a little introduction to the album.

Just a little tune that popped into my head that morning.

Inspired by the name of the previous track, I decided to go on a spelling spree.

The notes of the musical scale can spell words.

Not very many, though.

This day didn’t go so well, so I was looking forward to a better one.

I decided to make some disorganized fun.

This is a song about a pawn shop bunny
going around as if it’s made of money
trying to buy some milk and honey
but it doesn’t quite care.

Shout out to the Cupcake Royale in Capitol Hill, Seattle, WA, and the restroom cooling fan that was making this really cool grinding noise.

(It has since been fixed.)

It was cold out and my leg was hurting and I had a cat sleeping on my lap, so I decided to have some fun with a sonic soundscape that captured the feelings of winter cuddles.

On this day my cat and I were cuddling a bunch, which made the pain in my leg a bit more tolerable. My other cat wanted to get in on the action, so she wrote a song with me.

I had trouble sleeping due to the increasing pain, and this music wafted into my consciousness.

I was in excruciating pain, both in my leg and also now in what felt deep inside my left shoulder. I could barely think straight.

I woke up barely able to breathe, and went to the hospital.

It was an embolism, from a DVT in my leg that threw off a clot.

I composed this track from a hospital bed, using GarageBand on my phone.

The pain from the previous four days turned out to be due to a clot in my leg that was growing rapidly, and part of it broke off and went to my lungs, giving me a pulmonary embolism. Because of the clot I had to cease taking my HRT and start taking blood thinners. I was told I may not be able to get back on HRT ever again.

I was happy to still be alive but not looking forward to the impending hormonal crisis.

But I am still around, and defiantly making music.

I was feeling aimless from my recent health issues, and felt like nothing was going anywhere and nothing was worth doing anymore.

I was spending way, way too much time reading Twitter instead of doing anything productive. The senseless repetitive noise of everything around me was more than I could take.

The first song I wrote on this day was not very good, but then I was noodling around and came up with this better song. It made me think of a wood elf in a forest grove or something.

Without HRT I was losing track of time and my mental state, and every day was running into each other. I wanted to be kind to myself after my near-death experience but I also wanted to be productive. And everything felt the same as everything else.

I started composing a tango song but it just wasn’t coming out very well. So I scrapped it and worked on a second take for the day.

A little scrap I had lying around, which was begging for a fuller orchestration.

It seems like every album of mine these days needs at least one semi-algorithmically-generated weird-time-signature experimentation.

And Werner just wouldn’t shut the heck up while I made it so I decided to record him meowing.

Oh and there’s scissors for percussion.

Met up with some friends at a coffee shop, took up way too much table space while I composed this attempt at making something Lemon Jelly-esque.

The lack of hormones was really starting to get to me. Constantly tired, constantly struggling to wake up in the morning, but this music project kept me going.

At this point I was just completely falling apart, due to basically going through menopause and feeling worthless, useless, and futureless.

I had been without hormones for a week and a half and my emotions were all over the place. Everything would set me off and I would cry and I was not in a good spot. So I wrote this thing to capture my feelings.

I attempted to self-medicate my ongoing depression with some THC.

I may have used a little too much.

I didn’t have the energy to clean my home but I made a piano-and-cello tune to help me clean myself, at least.

Pachelbel’s Canon is the bane of every cellist’s existence.

I took a little trip down to my platonic cuddle-buddy’s home and I composed this while lying on his lap. It was nice.

Back in the early days of Song Fight! there was an occasional contributor who entered under the name Mouth Reliant. I felt like doing a tribute to his style for some reason.

The dark days were getting to me.
The depression was getting to me.
On Black Friday weekend I upgraded to KOMPLETE 11 and decided to play around with some of its presets.
This came out.

feeling like drowning, no escape

I really liked Stranger Things, or at least its soundtrack.