Fan-made Cosmicity videos 3 of 3: And finally, I quite like “Fate and Time” existing in Spanish (very cool) and the seemingly unrelated yet fascinating visuals that go with it…
Fan-made Cosmicity videos 2 of 3: This one rules because Cosmicity is misspelled AND the live picture is not a picture of me. Still, glad they like my music!
Fan-made Cosmicity Videos 1 of 3: This one’s actually kinda nice. I’ve been told I should critique the font choice for the lyrics (admittedly MySpace-esque), but come on! They liked my song enough to make a whole video. I say instead, thank you. :-)
The selected beats (the best of my 30 Beat Experiment) have turned into proper songs. Here, at last, is a track list for the upcoming, brand new, full-length album:
This Is So Lonely
Malabsorption
I Must Want It This Way
Reproduction
Any Love That Comes Along
Strange Game
The Pattern
Sealed In
Alive Again
Voight-Kampff
I know I’ve been vague about a release date up to this point, always saying only “2011”. Well, now I’m saying November 2011. That’s Cosmicity’s traditional release time (end of…
NEW! Just finished these custom Cosmicity Logobot™ ProKeds®. Now available on Zazzle! Plus shirts and stickers and an iPhone case. Check it!
Christmas
I’m working on a new original Cosmicity Christmas song. I wanted to have it done by now, but I don’t. What can ya do? Life gets in the way sometimes. (For the record, previous Cosmicity Christmas songs include “Late Night Winter” [as Christmicity], “This Is Your Crappy Christmas Present”, “This Is Your Crusty Christmas Present” [as Turd Ferguson], and last year’s cover song/re-imagining “Master, It’s Cold Outside”.)
What’s notable about this Christmas song is that it’s deeply depressing. I know, big deal… kinda my thing lately. But for Christmas, I fear it may cross a line. Christmas songs are about joy and the holiday spirit. They’re fun or warm or loving… or all of those things. However, this song is about a little girl who doesn’t get any of that stuff, and how sad it makes me on her behalf.
My wife has warned me, quite correctly, that by putting the song out with these lyrics, it will not be well-received. People won’t be able to connect with it, and even the few who might, probably won’t want to.
So, why release it? For a while, I thought I might not. Maybe I’d finally written a song that truly shouldn’t be released - just a private, synthpop journal entry. But then I couldn’t help feeling like, maybe, just maybe, there’s a reason. Could there be even one person out there who thinks they’re the only one that gets THIS sad at Christmas? Maybe they’ll hear this song and realize they’re not alone… that sometimes Christmas just sucks for certain people. And maybe, in that connection, they feel less alone? I don’t know. I guess my hope is that there’s something like that.
But for everyone else, there will be an instrumental. I want all of you to know that I’m in full support of you just downloading the instrumental and leaving the version with lyrics behind. I’m putting this song out because I want to share it, but if the only way you feel you’ll enjoy it is in instrumental form, that absolutely works for me. Stay tuned for the links, hopefully in the next week or two.
-cosmicity
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
When I was young I used to think my songs could change the world.
As I would compose a new song or sit down to write new lyrics, I’d always imagine that someday someone would hear that song and it would change the way they saw something. Maybe by relating to what I was singing about, they would feel less alone. Maybe by hearing how I’d struggled or coped with something, it would change the way they think about it. Maybe just by putting my feelings of loneliness in the music, others would recognize those same feelings and somehow actually feel less alone?
It’s the kind of thing that a lot of composers say during their big interviews with Rolling Stone or whoever still writes about music these days. I’ve seen similar comments many times. But there’s actually another standard answer to the standard industry question of “what motivates you to write a song”, and I’ve always hate Hate HATED reading whenever it was puked from some idiot’s mouth. ”I just write the music for me, and whether or not anyone likes it is of no concern to me.”
That statement, and its variations, used to make me insane with rage. How could you possibly think that? First of all, it’s selfish. You don’t think of anyone else when you’re writing the music? What kind of a self-involved asshole are you? Second, it’s a lie. You absolutely care if people like it: if they don’t, you will go broke from lack of sales and/or interest. Third: it’s an ultra-mega lie. If you truly didn’t care whether or not anyone liked it, and it was totally for you, you wouldn’t release it. Hell, you almost wouldn’t even need to record it. You could just listen to it in your mind all alone in some empty room smiling to yourself contently.
But now, here I am. I’ve been to hell. I want to say I’ve been to hell and back, but that’s just not accurate. The way things are, I don’t think there’s really any coming back. My choices now are a) give up and rot in hell or b) figure out how to make lemonade in hell. I’ve chosen “b”, but it was a close call. Still, seeing as how I’ve left so much innocence and optimism behind, I’m not the same person I was just a few years ago. Not even close.
This isn’t an exaggeration. Ask anyone who’s known me long enough to make the comparison and they’ll admit it. Oh, sure, they physically can still tell it’s still me, but they don’t know me anymore. I look older. I’ve got bags under my eyes that don’t ever clear up. I’m going prematurely gray. But that’s actually the little stuff. In conversation, I can’t find my smile. No quick, funny responses. Optimism is non-existent. Believe me, I’m not trying to be like this. These things are just missing now. And I really do miss them.
Which leads me to the other day. I was having a conversation with a co-worker that I don’t see too often and he was inquiring about “how the music is going”. I said that I was working on a new album. He asked about how the last one went (the ASCII Cupcake EP.) I said “not great, but that’s okay because I pretty much just wrote that one for me, so it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks.”
WHAT?! I said WHAT?! WHO AM I? I’m those assholes. I’m those self-involved, self-important assholes that I have always hated. At least, I was in that moment.
I was using it as a defense mechanism. I went to hell, I sent a postcard, and the simple fact is that not many people enjoyed reading it. But it’s no excuse. So here it is, the real truth: I did care. I did want people to like it, they did not, and it felt really bad.
But it was also somewhat unavoidable. I write music from the heart. I write about what I’m going through. That’s where I was, and there was no changing that fact. Could I have packaged what I’d composed in a better recording? Given more time, I think so. Could I have surrounded the songs with even more irresistible synth sounds or patterns? Again, given more time, quite probably. But I was writing electronic music on headphones, sometimes by my daughter’s hospital bedside. The time just wasn’t there. The means to do a better mix just wasn’t there. I could either release that EP the way it was, or it could have been shelved for a bunch of years until I hopefully, someday, had more time.
And if there’s one lesson that has proven always true in my 13+ years as Cosmicity, it’s that if you wait for perfection, you will release nothing. So I always set a deadline, and I always keep it. I’m never 100% about any songs that I release, but I’ve decided it is always better to have something than nothing.
So where does that leave me? I’m this changed person. I live in a place so dark that almost no one can relate… or even if they can, they likely don’t want to. Going forward, how do I make music that anyone would want so I don’t become one of those self-involved assholes making music that no one can relate to? Don’t get me wrong - having lived through as much as I have now, I realize that a song won’t change the world. But I have to cling to some glimmer of hope that there was truth in that youthful thinking; that somewhere out there, I will help, change, or at least slightly affect someone with the song I’m working on. Lest hell just swallow me up, I’ve got to try to make this fucking lemonade somehow.
My answer thus far has been the recently completed “30 Beat Experiment”. As many of you know, I crafted 30 beats - tested on proper monitors in short, stolen bursts of time on Sunday nights - without focusing on what kind of songs they’d ultimately make. My thinking is that, by working this way, I might have a more accessible shell for these dark songs. The lyrics… they’re going to still be from hell… it’s where I live… but maybe if the production is better…
I think it’s going to work. I’ve got two beats posted on youtube (youtube.com/cosmicity) so far. You’ve probably already heard those. I like ‘em. And as a little first-blog-entry welcome (and as a reward for reading all of this!), here’s another one (Beat #29, at the very top of this blog entry) that I’m posting here exclusively. Sorry there’s no visual for this one. There will be a visual for a third beat (4th if you count this one) coming to youtube soon.
