THE LONG-ASS STORY BEHIND THE ALBUM:

Ever since I was 15 years old, I harbored a dream of writing, recording and releasing a collection of my own songs into the world. This album's release marks the fulfillment of that dream.

Starting off on the electric guitar at 13 years old, I dabbled with the genres of punk rock and thrash metal before finally falling in love with the acoustic guitar when I was around 19 in the year 2012. By the beginning of 2016, I had seen two short-lived part-time jobs come and go: A few months as a janitor at a moldmaking shop and a miserable two years as a cashier at a Dollar Tree (seriously, FUCK that place!)

Much of 2016 was spent at home, suffering with vocal chord paresis and a constant headache condition, which rendered me unable to use my voice OR do anything strenuous for extended periods of time. During this time, I started playing guitar a lot more frequently and this was when I finally started writing songs I felt seriously proud of, but besides my health, I was also jobless and dirt-fucking-poor. Despite my obvious and God-given talent for guitar, I was an outcast and an unknown in the town of Brockport, NY.

Once my health improved significantly, I realized I had to make people aware of my presence and talent somehow. I made numerous attempts to raise money for a PA system (with which to use for live solo acoustic gigs) online by performing live, unplugged acoustic sets of classic rock and retro Top 40 covers right there in my family home, which were live-streamed via computer onto YouNow. Despite sharing the livestreams with 50-something-odd friends and numerous local music groups on FaceBook, all the while encouraging people to donate to my PayPal every chance I got, my balance of $0.00 remained. From this experience, I learned the hard way that people on the internet can be extremely petty and cheap bastards!

Disheartened at the realization that almost no one was willing to support my dream with money, I shopped around for any job I could get my hands on. At long last, a short-lived gig at a metal factory brought in the funds for the equipment I needed to gig with, but as an unknown, opportunities for live acoustic gigs were extremely limited at first. Things improved in this area marginally as time went on, but despite a small, but growing presence in the Rochester music scene, I was still many hundreds of dollars away from fulfilling my dream of recording an album of original music.

In 2019, I even went as far as to attend a 5-month HVAC program at a trade school to land some kind of good-paying day job with consistent work. Unfortunately, I found out (again, the HARD way!) that the demands of the conventional HVAC tech/HVAC installer work schedule do NOT mix well with the professional musician night-life. In the wake of this realization, I held out as long as I could for a different day job that would allow me the free time and flexibility I needed to go do my solo acoustic gigs at night. Finally, at the beginning of 2020, I caught a break when I started working as a helper at a small home remodeling business, but matters quickly became further complicated with the COVID-19 pandemic coming into effect on March 11, 2020. The forced isolation and crippling loneliness begot from the pandemic's restrictions caused me to lose inspiration for writing original music. After seeing many other musicians doing this same thing during this ridiculous time in history, I returned to performing video concerts live from my bedroom, which were live-streamed on my YouTube channel.

Now that I was finally making decent money for the first time in my life, my priorities began to shift. At some point, I was going to need a vasectomy operation (that "having kids" bullshit is for the BIRDS - do NOT try to change my fucking mind!) and also a backlog of savings to lean on once I finally managed to move out of my parents' place. Despite being heavily tempted to put the first chunk of my savings from this job towards these two things, I prayed fervently regarding what direction to take my musical endeavors. Finally, I went to a Christian prophet at one point, who told me that I had been sitting on a dream for far too long and that it was time to start bringing that dream to life. Being deeply moved by this, I contacted Wicked Squid Studios in September 2020, who practically jumped at the opportunity to start bringing the vision of my album to life.

Life became increasingly more trying and complex after numerous bouts of insomnia, the process of releasing all of these songs individually as singles, finally finding the love I always wanted, moving to New Jersey and starting the next chapter of my life as a married man, but after putting the finishing touches on all these songs and getting them to sound as close as possible to how I first heard them in my imagination, I can confidently say that it's finally time to drop the album in its entirety and let it speak for itself.

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HUGE SPECIAL THANKS TO:

Jesus Christ (My Lord and Savior) - Not only for blessing me with
every ounce of talent that I have, but also for sustaining me in the worst storms of my life!

Alison Beattie-Torok (The love of my life) - For always taking good care of me and helping me become worlds happier than I ever was before ❤️

Every person who was generous enough to invest into my dream and/or put something in my tip jar at one of my gigs - Few of you that there were.

Everyone at Wicked Squid Studios and Barber Shop Studios who helped bring my album to life

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BREAKDOWN OF ALL THE SONGS:

"Inseparable" and "I Heard the Door Open" are both about the joy of finding and following Jesus, but whereas the former deals with enjoying his presence, the latter deals with being delivered by him from one of life's terrible storms.

"Hollywood Schmollywood" is all about growing up watching Hollywood's coming-of-age movies with high-school-aged protagonists and being led to believe that 18-years-old is the major turning point where you find love, land your "forever friends", all of your hard work starts bearing fruit and you finally begin to get your life together. Then you turn eighteen yourself, look around you and realize you were just told a big, fat, fucking lie.

Also, I always loved movies as a kid (still do as an adult) and even grew up wanting to be a filmmaker (George Lucas' original Star Wars Trilogy was probably the biggest inspiration behind that one), but quickly realized the obscene amount of money it costs to make a good movie in this day and age. That didn't seem to be in the cards for someone who was practically penniless. But since the movies I watched growing up made it sound so simple and easy to make this dream a reality, I touched a little bit on this disillusionment with the first verse.

"Fool's Gold" is interesting in the sense that at first, the lyrics were simply a work-of-fiction I concocted for no other reason than that I thought it might make for a cool song. When I first came up with the main riff on guitar, I knew I had something special on my hands, but also that it needed lyrics. After much time spent racking my brains about what the subject of the song should be, I suddenly asked myself this question:

"HOW badly would it suck if I dated a girl for three or four weeks, I was really into her and she seemed like she was enjoying me too, but then right before things could get serious, she pulled the "I think we should start seeing other people" card. Then not even two weeks after ending things with me, she was in already in a new relationship with some other dude?"

The bulk of the lyrics and guitar work were written in 2016, but several months later and at the age of twenty-three, I found myself in my first real relationship with a woman (one who was almost twenty years my senior, if you can believe it). Funnily enough, this relationship played-out and ended almost exactly like the storyline of this song. Ironic, isn't it?

Like "Fool's Gold", the bulk of "Last Day of School" was also written in 2016. It was largely born out of a desire to write something that almost everyone could relate to. Nobody I knew enjoyed going to school growing up, but I especially hated it with a passion! After coming up with what I knew was an anthemic and infectious main guitar riff, I concluded that bitter lyrics wouldn't have worked for such a tune and that it needed to be a happy song. And so, "School's Out" is to Alice Cooper as "Last Day of School" is to me!

I am aware of the differences between the single-release version and this album version. I always intended for gang vocals to be on the choruses, but at the time of recording the single version, I was overwhelmed and exhausted by the struggle of juggling work, musical endeavors and my social life that I simply settled for the three-part harmony on the single version out of laziness and burnout. Later on, I regretted this decision and decided to fulfill my original vision of the song.

"Besotted" was largely written around a terrible and long-standing infatuation with a girl who worked at a burger restaurant. During this time of my life, I was desperately lonely and extremely attracted to her, but ended up devastated in finding out that in the end, she was taken. Afterward, I was trying my damnedest to move on with my life and explore other potential dating candidates, but for as much as my head knew that that girl wanted NOTHING to do with me, I couldn't seem to get my heart to accept that. Eventually, she treated me like garbage and after having been shown her true colors, I finally found the emotional strength to get over her.

I am well aware the vocals are far from perfect at points and I left them uncorrected on purpose, because I believe they better reinforce the notion that it's being sung by someone who is singing through tears and just barely holding it together (in other words, a broken soul).

"Endless Hangover" may suggest from its title that it's about drinking to the point of drunkenness, but it's actually about my on-and-off struggle with insomnia throughout my life. Like "Besotted", the flat notes in the singing were not corrected, because I felt it added to the character of the song (that feeling of being so tired that your ability to focus is limited, you're unable to do things right, etc).

The bulk of this song was actually written in 2017 and the lyrics focus on a chapter of my life from that same year, wherein I was working as a laborer at a metal factory/machine shop right after breaking up with my first girlfriend.

Long before this, I had succumbed to the awful habit of going to bed at 4 AM and waking up to start the day around noon. After getting that new job, I had to suddenly transition from that to being "up and at 'em" by 6 AM to be at the workplace by 7 AM. That resulted in much insomnia for a time and was not fun. Because the overall feeling from that experience seemed like a hangover that just kept going on and on, I decided to write a song about it called "Endless Hangover".

"The Smell of Cut Grass" was an attempt to write a "summertime anthem", but to do so in a way that only I could deliver. "Summer Breeze" by Seals & Crofts was especially influential to the writing process of this song, because that was the song that made me want to write my own song about how much I loved the season of summer and everything about it. Problem was that there had already been a million-and-one songs already like that. That said, I kept wondering how I could set my summertime anthem apart from everybody else's, when it finally occurred to me that no one had ever written a song about how wonderful the grass smells right after mowing the lawn. Therefore, sometime in 2019, "The Smell of Cut Grass" was born!

Besides being a love letter to lawnmowing with a tractor-mower and touching on a love for summertime, it also serves as a critique of people who get up every morning to go to work, then go to random house parties to get blackout drunk or excessively high, make it home somehow (whether by getting a ride from a friend or whatever) - then wake up the next day to do it all over again. "Let me sit and let the sun cook my skin" was my feisty way of saying "I don't want that life for myself and I'm not partaking in your shenanigans".

The theme and lyrics of "Everybody's Falling in Love...Except Me" were written all around what I just knew was one of the slowest and saddest guitar hooks I had ever come up with. Remember those friends you used to see all the time and who used to make every effort they could to see you until they fell in love and lost themselves in romantic relationships? This song is about every time in my life I was cast aside and left behind by those "friends".

The sheer intricacy of the guitar work really fucked with me on this one. Don't get me wrong, I'm damn proud of the fact that this song was birthed from my imagination, but I hope to NEVER write anything this difficult to play and sing simultaneously EVER again!

"Cyclone" is all about what it sounds like: The devastation of a natural disaster as well as the aftermath in which restoration and reconstruction of the damaged area is planned and hope for a better future is expressed. For me, this also represents something deeper, because it serves as a metaphor for all the times in my life I had to walk away from something I did not want to walk away from in order to start over and rebuild so as to create a better world for myself. Perhaps you too have experienced this same scenario in your life and will relate to it in that sense.

Beyond that, I had wanted to write an "epic" song (one that surpassed the 7 minute mark) for a long time. Not just in the traditional sense of longer-length, but in the sense of having multiple sections and each with their own different theme - all in one work. One day I happened to find myself in unfamiliar territory, plugged my guitar into an amplifier that wasn't mine and began playing by stream-of-consciousness. Thus, the riff that repeats itself most throughout this song was born. In time, I decided it was good enough to be part of something bigger and continued to build upon it until the final product arrived.

"Spring Along" is another incognito Christian song (expressing love for Jesus all without actually using his name or anything). Largely written out of a desire to ensure the album had at least one more happy song on it, I did my best to keep the structure simple and make it all about worshiping my Creator and enjoying the presence of His Son.

At this point, I feel like that's about all the information I have to give you, so I hope you feel like you have gotten to know me better after reading all of this. Thanks for your time and enjoy the album!