A Brief Summary of My Upcoming Record

I guess that I really haven't said very much about my record, Bloodlines. It comes on on December 21st... so I figured I would give some background information on the album.

Bloodlines is... this is a hard thing for me to describe because after I wrote the record, I didn't even know what it meant. Whenever I write, a lot of times I don't know how I feel until I see it all there on paper, and even then I have to interpret that into what must be going on in my head. Anyway, after a lot of that process, I played myself the rough demos of each track and I realized that it wasn't fitting into any category of mainstream music right now. So, I decided to sort of set up my little LP camp in the empty grey area that's only inhabited by like... Adele, Florence and the Machine, and Bjork. The lyrics are really deep and confrontational, but its something that the mainstream crowd can enjoy too. It's a very mellow record, but its like laid-back to the point of apocalyptic 'Well, I guess I'll just have to sit around and wait to die' kind of thing. It's very cool and diverse. There's my typical style in there, but I mess around with some different genres in writing styles too. If I had to describe me as a musician, it would be like if Florence Welch and Jack Johnson had a musical love child. And I think that vibe really reflects on the record.

The record actually started when I wrote the first single, "Temperance." My parents had just gotten divorced and everyone kept telling me "Oh, it isn't your fault! This had nothing to do with you! It was a completely separate adult decision," and all this junk, but inside me I still needed a reason for why this could be happening to me, and I wanted to blame myself just to fill a void inside me so I could be sort of sad all the time, but still be able to function. That's why it was called Temperance- holding back from something frowned upon.

Songwriting actually started as a venting method for me, so when I was sad, I could write a really mean, emotional, and angry song about it and just have the feelings out of me. After "Temperance," my work started forming a concept album- I wrote a treatment, kind of. It's not a story, but more of a theory.

When you're first born, you have your entire family come to see you and be there for your first days. Of course, grandparents and uncles and aunts and cousins all have to leave you eventually. And as you get older, aren't you really just being further and further separated from the caring and safety of the people who will always love you? You leave your parents behind eventually, whether it's through moving out or blocking out- you leave your siblings, and eventually you're all on your own. From that point on it's a struggle to find someone else to save you from the solitude and to repeat the cycle. 

My theory was that my separation time lapse was much shorter than everyone else's- I wasn't seeing one of parents at any given moment. They were gone- the separation was halfway active every day of my life. And I was barely even in high school when I wrote that first song. 

The liner notes on the album are going to be really focused on the A Censored Sunlight Theory of Separation. I want a picture of a very happy looking family on the first page, and have one family member disappear with each page until you have just me sitting there. 

Don't get me wrong, I am so not as sad and deep as I appear on the surface. This was a very sad record to write, and it was a very sad time for me. I'm done with it now, but the emotions will always be there in music that I couldn't be any more proud of. 

(((xxxo)))
Nick