Origin Story

I had no intention of writing another album at this time, especially having just released Embers in January of this year. Even now, Original Miles continues to be streamed on Spotify in numbers that none of my other songs have ever seen. I also know that if I wanted to maximize my [insert marketing lingo here], then it would make sense to ride this out for now, only to then promote another song from that same album. 

Mixtape, anyone?

Back in March, I was practicing guitar and came up with a power chord progression that was fun to play. As I was rocking out on acoustic guitar, I starting singing along as if the words were already in my head. Not all of them, mind you, but enough to get a pretty good sense of the song. After that, it was just a matter of writing it, which came together in about an hour. I later went back and revised it slightly. 

For the next few days, I had this new song bouncing around in my head, such that I was literally waking up with the chorus on repeat. It seemed that I had no choice but to record it, if only to exorcise this thing from my brain.

About a month later, I wrote two more songs in the same week, both of which happened to have seven-letter titles that started with H. At that point, I figured that I might as well write another album. If not now, then when? I wanted to capture these songs while I was still excited about them, and it seemed like maybe I had tapped into something. 

Over the next couple of months, I wrote eight more songs. In most cases, I recorded the entire "song skeleton" and then set out to figure out the lyrics. The only difference in this from my usual process is that ordinarily, this phase takes place almost entirely with acoustic guitar or piano accompaniment in real-time. 

This time, I listened to these simple instrumental versions of these songs until I came up with lyrics that fit the feel of the song, as well as the framework that I had already provided. There was one week in particular when I wrote four songs through the use of this process, one right after the other, like it was my job.  

The last two songs that I composed were tracks one and track eleven, respectively. In fact, if you look at my ReverbNation page, the order that they are listed in is the opposite order in which I wrote them. 

In total, this album took about three months to go from song stuck in my head to album with a bunch of tracks that I really like. If I wasn't proud of my work, I wouldn't release it. I hope you like it, too.

Petrichor will soon be available wherever you get your music. For now, you can hear low-resolution versions through the embedded the link below. Thanks for listening.