The first album
I Am The Moon is finally making some creation plans
Happy new year! We made it. Congratulations.
I started this blog on a whim at the end of August, during a difficult time in my life where I had been already suffering from near-constant pain for months, and spending increasing amounts of time at home. At home with my guitars.
I later discovered I have a pretty bad case of spondylolisthesis, a spinal condition that has - at least temporarily - greatly affected what I can and can’t do in my daily life. A large part of the battle has been mental. I find myself living in a relatively new place with few friends, increasingly rootless, and constantly navigating what seems like a series of stressful occurrences to myself and those I love over the past few years.
I started the blog primarily because it was increasingly apparent to me that I wouldn’t be physically able to be in a band for a while. I would desperately love to be in a band and/or to jam with other musicians, but because I am shy, different, and don’t know anybody here, as well as recently being not able to stand or travel much, I had to rethink. I decided to start a solo project and record an album of original songs. The process would hopefully be carthatic, providing me some much-needed focus and direction, and hopefully would be a stepping stone to becoming more active in music.
I Am The Moon was born.
I published 64 posts between Aug 27th and December 14th, mostly filled with videos of me playing covers, and original songs that I’d like to work on and record. I have shared this only with friends. The most immediate benefit to me was to show people a side to me that they probably didn’t know. A mediocre guitar player who wasn’t afraid to be mediocre in private-public.
I’ve now rehabilitated myself to a point where I can engage with the task of recording, and we’ve moved house which also massively helps. So now the focus changes. I will still record videos of myself playing, and occasionally write short opinion pieces, but I will also be documenting any progress I make with my own album.
The first album I’m going to make is a punk prog-rock sci-fi fantasy protest album.
The working title is ‘Dark’ but I (at this point) doubt this is the final name.
First I need to teach myself how to record music. I have a basic Scarlet duo interface which enables me to plug in a microphone to record vocals and other analog instruments like acoustic guitar, and other instruments via direct input. It came with a free version of Ableton Live. I’ve also got my new Korg Volca Beats, and between that and drum samples from Ableton, I plan on initially running without a drum kit. We’ll see if that needs to change …
I put my new practice / home recording space together in the garage of our new house …
I have 3 notebooks containing lyrics, poems, and fragments of lyrical ideas, scribbled incoherently and without much care. I decided to tackle this later, once I had an idea of how many songs I potentially had to craft.
I started by organizing my recordings in a google drive, thinking about ‘songs’ I could work with. Finally, after some scribbling, scratching, thinking, and dribbling, I came up with my a list of songs that I had at least a guitar riff and a lyrical idea to work from (yep, a ‘song’ is a low bar in the early days). I found I had a lot, as much as 3 albums worth of potential stuff (we’ll see, I bet most of it is crap). Initially, I have organized those 45 songs like this
45 songs. Wow. And I need to finish teach myself how to record them. And I need to put rhythm sections to all of them. And most of them I need to finish the lyrics for. Oh, and most of them I need to finish the guitar and other instruments, too. Daunting!
That’s when the procrastination really kicked in. Because in order to do this I’m having to get outside of my comfort zone, and learn a bunch of new skills.
So first, I made a new collection of “I am the Moon” emojis and proceeded to create my own dance videos with them. Ahem …
Fabulous. Then I spent a while putting together ideas for album art. I thought the aesthetic should be somewhere between a robot playing guitar …
and teen wolf …
(These collages were created with some help from Google Lens, suggesting images based on my own in the top left corner. I think they capture what I’m trying to achieve here, from broken guitar necks to holding trophies with arms aloft.)
After a lot of organizing and far more procrastinating, I wrote out the master list of ‘songs’. Orange on the left is the first set of songs I intend to tackle. The middle green column are poems that I could set to music (I paired up riffs I have come up with to each of the poems. I imagine this list will continue to be refined constantly.) The red right column are a set of songs I intend to tackle later. They are similar to the orange songs but also sufficiently different. We’ll see - I imagine once I set down to actually finish and record them, quite a lot will change. But that’s the plan for now.
Finally, I feel ready. Better get busy.