Old Haunts Volume 1

Somehow I neglected to mention on my own blog that I released an EP of music. This EP here in fact:

 

I posted about the first song already, and I’ll be posting about the rest of them over time. I’ve been busy lately for reasons I mostly keep off the internet (I became a dad!), so things take a while.

The story of this EP is outlined on its Bandcamp page, but in short I have a lot of old songs in various states of completion. As I finish them I’m piping them into EPs under the heading Old Haunts. It’s been really fun.

The concept has a lot of parts to it that appeal to the way I think about and remember things. It’s what I’ve done instead of keeping a diary.

First there’s the music, which has its own set of facets I like to look at: when and where I came up with the melodies, the words, the recordings; when and where I continued working on them and eventually finished them. I try to keep track of that stuff, and some of it is captured in the computer files of the recordings themselves.

These first sets of songs all represent many years in the making. Like “Saturday,” I wrote it in 2000/2001, started the recording in 2005, worked on it every few years and finally finished it Fall 2017. That’s insane.

Next there’s the artwork, taking a similar approach to images. This first EP includes a photo collage (in the Bandcamp download) of my home recording spaces, and myself in those spaces, since 2002. I can see creating similar collages cohering to other ideas, and if I don’t have a picture of some particular place from the time of recording, I can go to that place and take it now.

The cover photo is the view of downtown Seattle from the apartment where I rented a room, in Wallingford, taken I think Spring or Summer 2001. That same view would look really different now. I left the image slightly rotated by mistake.. I’m not sure if that will bug me forever or if that’s somehow better that way.

Then there’s the remembering of things. I once wrote a song called “Nostalgia” and this is not that. I wrote “Nostalgia” in my early 20s while thinking about high school, around very specific emotions and impressions that maybe you could call nostalgic but that I don’t really have anymore.

This is more of an accounting, some kind of framing. Not really to draw any meaning from a set of sounds and images connected across time but to arrange them in a way I like to look at. Having a few levels to work with makes it that much more fun to work on. Hopefully other people will at least like the music!

This entry was posted in Music, Recordings, Sun Tunnels, Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink.

4 Responses to Old Haunts Volume 1

  1. Pingback: Anatomy of a song – Sun Tunnels “Fruit Fly” | Working Title

  2. Pingback: Anatomy of a song – Sun Tunnels “Saturday” | Working Title

  3. Pingback: Anatomy of a song – Sun Tunnels “I Guess Not” | Working Title

  4. Pingback: Anatomy of a Song – Sun Tunnels “Talking House” | Working Title

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