Almost anything can be a metaphor for songwriting. Prying open a jar of pickles? Yes. Playing Russian Roulette? Sure. Tending to a plant. Why not? If writing songs is inseparable from life itself, then it must fall somewhere between meditating and giving birth, at the equator of zen and utter pain; the middle path between the sacred and mundane.
by Max Colbert
“The moon looked pale and wan, as if it shouldn’t be up on a night like this. It rose unwillingly and hung like an ill specter.”
This is a quote from early in the third chapter of a book called Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams. This is a book that I don’t like very much but loved in 8th grade. Before I was in a band, before I played an instrument, before I even listened to music, I loved the stories of Dirk Gently. So, when my friends and I started a band in middle school, I suggested this line as a name, and, being in middle school, misspelled specter as “spector”. This was, more or less, how the band started; as middle schoolers who couldn’t play our instruments, misspelling words, and deciding we liked it better that way. And this is, more or less, how the band has stayed since then.
by Heath Church
When I play a song for you, I want to create an experience that sticks with you. I want to take you to a place in your mind where you feel accepted and understood in a unique way that you haven’t before. That’s what music does. It understands us. I think everyone needs a chance to feel understood.
by Iris Johner
It’s lost and heavy-hearted that I decided to settle down on my own in south Portugal in November 2017. After three years of travels around the world and a summer back to my hometown realizing time was flying and driving my dreams away from me, it appeared to be the perfect deal for a start over – as the one place I would most likely call home.
Back in the late ’80s, my parents started up a rainforest conservation project in Cameroon. They had their adventures getting there, having driven the whole way with all their gear in a Landrover. They almost got lost in the Sahara desert and crossed Chad, which at the time was in the midst of a civil war.
Their project was based in a remote village called Oku, in the north-west province of Cameroon. It revolved around working with local people to protect a remaining island of rainforest on Mt Oku, home of the Oku tribe.
Write a story about what inspired my first EP? Nothing might be better suited to represent the songs on the EP then the stories of Bucharest at night, haunted by all the life consumed by the city during the day.
It was the summer of 2016 (going into my junior year of high school) when I had switched from Fort Lauderdale High School to South Broward. I was in a cover band at the time with some kids I’d known from earlier on in my childhood, but I never felt too close with them.
I always wanted to be in a band where I was playing with genuine friends and making meaningful music with help from all parties. So I went searching (with the idea of finally writing music, while making friends) in my new school’s band program, I joined the jazz band on guitar and piano, while also joining marching band and regular band on the tuba. Right off the bat, I met two kids that I liked and wanted to start a group with.
by Gregc
This had to be done. I found myself following Halloween, sliding toward the trifecta of winter holidays; in the suburbs. I was alone, maudlin, grateful, full of ideas, beliefs and memories.
by Ethan Hall
Ethan Thomas Hall’s music is characterized by isolation, poverty, and perversion. No other artist quite captures the modern struggle of the straight white male to such a scathing and saucy degree, completely DIY and unsigned proletariat pop.
I began with a classical training from age eight on violins made by my grandfather, from a half size to three quarter, then to his “number 2” with a finessed fiddleback grain in high glaze. His Luthier’s hands I remember as large and gnarly as they would trace the creases of my palm to elucidate future prospects. After ten years of scales and arpeggios working my way through graded texts filled with compositions by the gifted and deceased, a final concert in the embers of 1990 marked the occasion of my last musical performance on stage, aside from dreams.
Barely 12 months passed before my own strange sounds were committed to cassette tape for the first time, born of a natural necessity to do, and it was this background of prescribed exam pieces that gave me something to react against.