busybee fluffy rambles

This is pretty typical for me; often the spark for actually producing a non-OST/Novembeat album comes from recording a track and then deciding that it will be the “tentpole” of the whole album. On Refactor it was Deer Drinking from the Catacomb Stream, and on Songs of Substance it was Behind a Mask. Other albums have just come together as a matter of temporal circumstance, such as Novembeat albums being, y'know, Novembeat, or my various OSTs being either “I just did a bunch of game jam music” or “I guess I should actually release a production portfolio so I can try to get some actual paid work” (as was the case for Instrumental).

What isn’t typical for me: for Transitions, I’ve fully rerecorded (and rearranged!) every single song on the album. Most albums have been collections of songs that were more or less ready to go in terms of overall production, and most of the work is just rerecording the rough bits or finishing up songs which were in a prototype state. If any songs do get fully rerecorded (or properly recorded for the first time), they’re ones which already thematically fit the album that was already coming together. And my prior albums have been… let’s say thematically loose, which also hasn’t been the case for Transitions.

Another thing of note: Even though Valley Highway is what finally sparked the recording of the album, it isn’t what started the album project. Material Change was. Or, specifically, my 2022 Song Fight! Live-ish performance is what made me want to do at least some of the album as chamber pop (inspired primarily by Miracles of Modern Science, one of my absolute favorite bands). This is an idea I sat on for a couple years, and as time went on I realized more and more that I just wanted the whole thing to be chamber pop, and that this would be a perfect opportunity to dust off my oldest songs that all absolutely needed to be fully rerecorded to begin with.

As Transitions came together, I realized that the chronological ordering of all of those old songs already gave them a good flow, both musically and thematically, and as such I also ended up finding it very natural to record the rest of the songs in order, with I LOVE YOU and Valley Highway serving as bookends.

Then as a side thing, I realized that the original versions of the songs should get released as Deadnames, a sort of “Beatles Anthology,” with the original and various scrapped album versions also in chronological order. But Material Change was such a weird outlier for that because Material Change was recent enough that its demo version was something I’d normally release on a full album with some polish. So I thought the demo version would go on Deadnames and then a polished-up version in its original style would be released as a single on its own. But then I had a bunch of other weird misfit songs that were also overdue for a release and didn’t need much work, so I ended up taking a little side trip and did my usual album-release process for Notions, which ended up being a full EP with the original dance version of Material Change as its tentpole (and working on it was also a nice break from Transitions).

So anyway, I recently finished Five Minutes, which was the last “classic” song of mine that was to go on Transitions, and the second-to-last song I ever entered as fluffy porcupine . The last one, Run Faster, already got fully rerecorded for foodsexsleep, the first album I released as Sockpuppet. So Five Minutes is already a perfect little conceptual transition point for me.

(Like the name of the album!)

Five Minutes is very thematically-similar to Valley Highway (both being songs about moving on after a pivotal moment in my life), and is in E major (not-quite-resolving to a suspended B7 chord at the end), and Valley Highway starts in E-minor and resolves to E-major. So I thought that those two songs would sound very redundant with one another, and having Material Change in between them would be good. Maybe I’d have a little sound-designy thing that provides a little transition for the gap between them; I was thinking of doing an interlude which sounded like tuning an FM radio with the live “stations” being snippets of some of the songs I’d done in the intervening 18 years. (I even bought a cheap portable radio to sample for this purpose.)

But then I did one of my quality-pass listens today, and…

Five Minutes flows perfectly into Valley Highway.

And Valley Highway has to be the last song on the album. Not just thematically: it’s specifically produced to be the final track, from a sound design standpoint, and by being the one song where the ending breaks from the sonic conceit of the album (both by there being heavily processed vocals in the outro, and a very final sound of the recording equipment being shut off at the end, yes that is a very deliberate choice on my part, there’s a lot of super deliberate but subtle things throughout the album that I’d love to talk about at some point).

And if I play Five Minutes → Material Change → Valley Highway on guitar the flow is just wrong.

But Five Minutes → Valley Highway feels so right.

And there’s nowhere else on Transitions that Material Change could possibly fit.

Fuck.

I really want to do the chamber pop version of Material Change. I’ve had it planned out for over two years! It was the entire impetus for this album. But it no longer even fits on the album that was originally meant to support it!

I think what I will do is release Transitions with the 11 songs that it has, and then later release the chamber pop version of Material Change as its own single. Or something. There are a couple of other misfit songs that I want to brush off but which didn’t fit the theme of Transitions, and maybe I could do another EP of those.

I could definitely use others weighing in on this. I’m too stuck inside my own head to make any decisions right now.

But I’m probably going to do the misfit EP thing.

Maybe I’ll call it “Misfits.”