busybee fluffy rambles

Transitions

I think I’ve talked about this tangentially on here, and I’ve definitely been talking about it to a lot of other folks so I’d might as well just be a bit more explanatory on my blog.

I’ve been making music all my life, but things started to change considerably when I found Song Fight! in 2001. I wrote a lot of songs for it, and most of them have been rerecorded or spruced up for albums, but many of my earliest songs have still not been properly released. Which is good, because it took me this long to finally understand how they should be recorded and released.

So, Transitions will get my earliest Song Fight! songs as well as my most recent ones, all recorded using a limited set of instruments but still exploring a wide swath of genres. I’m really pushing myself and my songcraft here, and also telling a story with my journey as a musician. Many of the songs also reflect my long, slow social gender transition as well, and many of the songs are about the feelings of being trans on the Internet in the early aughts.

It will also include some of my most recent Song Fight! songs, particularly Material Change and Valley Highway, since they are part of the story. It was also my not-quite-live version of Material Change which led to my choice of sonic palette, so of course it’s going to be on this album. (I mean, I even said it would be in the lower-third title on that video!)

Deadnames

So, Deadnames is a companion album where I’m just remastering the original versions of songs, as well as some of the previous aborted albumification attempts. It’s basically my take on the Beatles' Anthology, letting folks hear the music develop as it goes. It’s an interesting artifact, but more of a musical photo album than a music album, if that makes any sense.

Due to its nature, Deadnames was not going to be released to streaming services, aside from Material Change’s original dancepop version, which I was going to release as a single.

Notions

So, the thing is, these songs don’t really fit Transitions:

• Wait Right Here
• The Supper Club

And they also don’t really fit Deadnames, as they’re recent enough that they’re competently-recorded and clean up easily.

The Transitions treatment for Wait Right Here was going to lend itself to being combined with Birds Of Our Own, but I’m not so sure I’d want to actually do that, as that would make it an 8-minute-long song that also gets kind of repetitive (and also breaks the chronology of the album). Making it a separate track would also be a problem.

The Supper Club is just kind of a gimmicky song that I wrote specifically for Song Fight! Live and which I’m not too keen on redoing in the Transitions style. I had actually made the album version already for Songs of Substance but, uh, completely forgot to actually include it, oops.

Both of those songs would be fine to release to streaming, but wouldn’t be worth doing as singles, and certainly wouldn’t be worth trying to put onto another “tentpole” album.

The other day I had a chat with someone who was lamenting the death of the EP in the modern era (at least ones which aren’t just collections of singles that go onto other albums), so this got me thinking:

Why not release an EP?

Specifically, an EP entitled “Notions,” that would contain cleaned-up versions of:

• Wait Right Here
• The Supper Club
• Material Change [dancepop version]
• A Grand Parade
• Robot Baby

and maybe a few others. (Like I had a plan to record a medley version of After Hours for Transitions but that feels like it’d be better on Notions too.)

I really like this idea because it means overall releasing more music than I would have otherwise, frees up some brain cycles for the album I really care about (Transitions), finally gets Material Change properly released outside of a karaoke version, and lets me also finally consider some of these songs “done.”

The only other EP I’ve ever released is Radio Ready and when I released that one I thought, y'know, EPs are great, I should do them more! And that was over ten years ago.

So, yeah, I think I’ve convinced myself that Notions is a good idea (as well as doing more frequent EP-style releases rather than just like, hoarding a lot of music for years and years at a time), but what do y'all think?