2024.12.20

Track 10 - The Upside Down

The Upside Down is an early song that I had been thinking of taking into a different direction but glad I didn’t. The bass line was inspired by the sample used in the Massive Attack song Safe From Harm. I was working on the song at a time that I went mountain biking on a trail that had a section called The Upside Down. I’m assuming this is a reference to Stranger Things. I just felt this song had a groove that would be so fun to listen to while riding that trail, and the menacing sounding bass line seemed appropriate for the Stranger Things connection.

2024.12.13

Track 9 - Summoning the Nerve

Summoning the Nerve came about by stumbling on a guitar tone and keyboard patch that sounded very similar to one another. I got the idea to have them do a call and response, representing different internal voices of the same person, like a devil and an angel hovering over one's shoulders. In the context of running or racing, they are the voices present in the struggle of whether to stop when feeling discomfort or to keep going and pushing though it. The Charlie’s Angel’s-like 70’s string sample in the chorus turns it into a true Greek chorus, where there is another group of angles and demons piping in, commenting on the struggle.

2024.12.06

Track 8 - Summer in April

I wrote Summer in April with a particular person in mind and with the musical parts having specific meanings. When I started laying down the beat and samples, it reminded me of the lo-fi tunes that would play over a simulated car stereo in the game Grand Theft Auto. I was working on this song when I heard that the twin sister of a close friend of mine who is my age had passed away from Covid. My friend drove a Jeep, and my mind went to imagining her listening to music like this, driving down a deserted urban highway with the top or windows down, wind blowing through her hair, recalling a lifetime of memories with her sister and wishing for her to still be around. There’s a repetitive laugh-like sound in one of the samples in the background that I felt represented a persistent memory of her sister during a better time. Sometimes it’s audible, sometimes it’s masked by other things in the music, but it’s almost always there. The main guitar part is my friend half talking to herself, half having a “conversation” with her sister, recalling all of the good and bad times they’ve had together. The opening arpeggio came from me wanting to do something different that my usual go-to of playing in a pentatonic box. There is a melancholiness and longing-ness to the tone. At one point at the end of the first phrase of the second verse, the guitar trails off into a growl. At the end of the first phrase of the third verse, the guitar goes a little out of tune. Initially I wanted to correct that, but then I decided it was fitting because it felt like her voice was cracking and she was struggling to keep her composure. At another point the guitar repeats a note in a staccato fashion as if my friend is laughing a little to herself. The only time her sister’s laugh goes away is when the beat drops out in the bridge. This represents her taking a deep breath, getting ahold of her emotions, and clearing her head. Inevitably the memory of her sister’s laugh and the emotions return and continue on till the end of the song.

2024.11.29

Track 7 - Pins and Needles

Pins and Needles started as an experiment with delay pedals. Ever since hearing Pink Floyd’s Run Like Hell and One of These Days, I’ve had a thing for delays. The way those songs are constructed, the plucking is timed so that playing quarter notes effectively injects eighth notes between them. I’ve always wanted to do something like David Gilmour or Roger Waters do in those songs, but it’s one of those things where it has to be done right and in special cases otherwise it’s a bit too much. There’s something about the Hip Hop beat that made me feel it would be appropriate in this case. In retrospect, I feel there’s also a bit of the feeling of The Who’s Eminence Front from the menacing sparse bass attack in the background. There are a few staccato riffs in the intro that I even took some inspiration from those in John Mayer’s Body is a Wonderland. I liked how all the various guitar parts sounded so I also experimented in pulling them all together in the end. It results in a steadily building energy and I like that you can still hear all the parts even though there are so many all at once. The main guitar part was fun to come up with and even more fun to play. I’m not a virtuoso by any stretch, but this song had me moving my fingers up and down the fretboard more than any of the other songs on this album.

2024.11.22

Track 6 - Not Paid To Run

Not Paid To Run is another running-inspired title, obviously. Most runners like myself are not elite, winning prize money or getting sponsors. In spite of this, we endure the pain and struggle and keep going out for those midweek and long weekend runs because we still find value or purpose out of it. The beat reminded me of a galloping wild horse running across a plain or through the woods, running because they want to, not because they are going to be rewarded for it. The guitars remind me of something from 80’s rock, though I can’t put my finger on a particular song. Maybe something from U2, Mr. Mister, or Flock of Seagulls?

2024.11.15

Track 5 - Just Can’t Stop

Continuing the running theme, Just Can’t Stop got its name from the steady beat that I felt just didn’t have a clear feeling for when it should end or change. The drum fills remind me of someone stumbling but then recovers and keeps running or walking. Nothing will stop them from making forward progress. The lead guitar makes me think of someone talking to themself, repeating a mantra but changing it a little each time. I am not much of a virtuoso when it comes to playing guitar, nor do I even prefer listening to wildly fast playing. I love music where the composer or musician leaves space between the notes. The verses in this song exemplify this preference of mine. In the choruses, I experimented with creating harmonies with two strings in a manner similar to the famous riff in Dire Straits’ Money For Nothing, as Mark Knopfler is one of my biggest inspirations.

2024.11.08

Track 4 - Midnight Somewhere

Midnight Somewhere starts with plucking the strings on my electric guitar with my fingers on the frets in a particular way produce overtones called harmonics. It was inspired by the intros of a number of some of my favorite songs: Horizons by Genesis, Midsummer’s Daydream by Triumph, and The Fish by Yes.

The overall beat reminded me of the tick-tock of a clock. I wanted to do something from a typical song structure so I decided to do repetitions of a verse, chorus and bridge. The repetitive nature of the beat and song structure made me think of the passage of time and how it is universal no matter where we are. It is a play on the phrase “It’s 5 o’clock somewhere”, with midnight seeming to fit the mood of the song a bit better. As an ultra runner, I have done a number of runs at nighttime, so the idea of running at midnight was in line with the theme of the album.

I struggled with this song for a while because I wasn’t completely happy with how the guitars sounded throughout the song but the tone was critical for the harmonic parts. After a bit of experimentation I got it to a point that it was “good enough”, but this is one song that I’m not sure I will ever feel is complete.

2024.11.01

It’s time for another Atoll Escape Behind the Music installment!

Track 3 - Metallic Tiptoes

Truth be told, Metallic Tiptoes didn’t have any clear influences. I liked the groove that developed as I started laying down loops over the virtual drums. I liked the guitar riff loop at the beginning; it sounded like something that Edge from U2 would do. But I was in the mood to have a song that was more keyboard-based than guitars, so I played around with various patches and decided I wanted to do something with the Saturn synth lead. The overall sound I felt was very robotic and in my mind I envisioned an animated music video that could accompany the music with robots marching in a similar manner to the Disney Pink Elephants on Parade animation from Dumbo, hence the name Metallic Tiptoes or from Pete Miser’s Scent of a Robot video. As the music on this album is intended to be run to, ambulating robots seemed like a fitting idea.

2024.10.25

It’s another installment of Behind the Music!

Track 2 - A Massive Beckoning

A Massive Beckoning was the second song I started working on and is again representative of where I was at this point in my journey. I wanted to start branching out from just using the loops. I wanted to start adding actual instrumentation and possibly vocals. I bought a Scarlet 4i4 audio interface on eBay so I could connect the Yamaha keyboard I’ve had for over 20 years and my Ibanez electric guitar that I’ve had for nearly as long. I started experimenting with various keyboard patches and the virtual guitar pedals in GarageBand.

I had been listening to Massive Attack’s Blue Lines album during a recent run. The song Daydreaming had been running through my mind and as I constructed this song, I imagined a vocal line similar to the one in that song and I laid down a “mumble track” with the cadence and style that I envisioned. My voice doesn’t sound remotely like the guys in Massive Attack, so I applied some guitar pedal effects to alter it. I wrote actual lyrics and have tried many times to record them over the years, but I haven’t been able to match feeling I’m going for, so I decided to leave the mumbles as is. I’ve decided this is a feature, not a bug. The songs on this album are all instrumental, allowing the listener to project their own meaning. Maybe someday I could release a version of the song with the guys from Massive Attack reciting the lyrics. One can dream, right?

I don’t have any guitar pedals and the only amps I have are a small little practice amp and a large basic keyboard amp. So I hunted through the guitar patches until I found one I like. I kept coming back to the one I used for this song as one I liked. It wasn’t too over the top thrash metal, but still soaring and in your face. However, it was also fairly clean without any hum but also not plain. After recording the guitar part using, I felt it sounded a lot like the soaring Jeff Beck solos in the Moodwings song Skinthieves. The track’s title comes from these two influences.

As far as the drums go, I started with one of the virtual drummers, but didn’t want to risk the song sounding like any other song that someone made with that same virtual drummer, so I started experimenting with various percussion and drum based loops to layer on top of it. This became a template for the rest of the songs on this album; play around experimenting with a virtual drummer, then layer additional loops or virtual drummers on top of it to make something more unique.

As far as instrumentation goes, this is a fairly simple one with 9 tracks total: 3 tracks for drums and percussion loops, 3 keyboard tracks for atmosphere, a simple bass track, the vocal track, and the lead guitar track. There is no rhythm guitar part on this song. I wasn’t there yet in my song craft.

2024.10.18

I'll be sharing a little background about the songs on Alight over the next few weeks to get a feel for the inspiration or thought process behind each one.

Track 1 - Cirrus Protocol

Cirrus Protocol was the first song I started working on as part of the Alight effort, and as such, I felt this song would be an appropriate first track on the album because it shows where I was at as I began this journey. The file creation date is October 1, 2020. At this point I didn’t have an audio interface to connect my guitars or keyboard to the computer yet. I was just exploring the loops library in GarageBand, experimenting with piecing together something interesting and trying understand how to structure a song. An enterprising individual could likely reconstruct most of this song themselves in GarageBand.

I was somewhat reluctant to release this song since I don’t play any instruments on it. However, I’m a fan of many artists music that make music that is heavily sample-based: DJ Shadow, Fatboy Slim, the Beastie Boys… in fact, a lot of 90’s pop and trip-hop use samples or interpolations as the backbone of the songs. Of course, many artists add their own performances on top of those samples… I just wasn’t at that point yet. I wasn’t “crate digging” for samples (this was in the middle of the pandemic), but instead “loop library digging”. As a side benefit, I didn’t need to worry about clearing the rights to use any of the loops. Relatedly, Paul Simon received a bit of criticism for “appropriating” African music for one of my favorite albums, Graceland. If you’ve ever heard the Zulu Jive Umbaqanga compilation, you can hear a lot of the source material he borrowed heavily for Graceland. So what was it that Paul Simon brought to the table that made his songs so memorable over the original material? I would argue that he was largely acting as an “art director”, he recognized interesting sonic textures and could piece them all together like a collage and add his own special sauce to it all. And that’s what I was bringing to the table with this song… there was artistry in the act of piecing together the samples and virtual drums into a song that I felt worked well for listening to while running.

The song starts with a number of sounds starting in mono and then later developing into stereo, most noticeably the strings stabs. The macaw sample also pans left to right. These subtleties begin the narrative of the macaw leaving its comfortable environment and heading off to get a wider view of the world.

The name was inspired by the Bonobo song Cirrus, as I felt it had a similar vibe. I tacked on protocol because I thought it sounded mysterious and as a reference to trying to uncover a culturally accepted song structure.

2024.10.11

“My heroes had the heart to lose their lives out on the limb
And all I remember is thinking I want to be like them
Ever since I was little
Ever since I was little it looked like fun
And it's no coincidence I've come
And I can die when I'm done”
Crazy - Gnarls Barkley

It’s pretty wild to wake up and see something I’ve made in Spotify. Music has always been a huge part of my life. In high school I had considered making it a career but it seemed so challenging and risky to make a living so I took the safer path. As I’ve gotten older and seen lives cut short, I’ve realized that if I want to make something happen, the time is now, because the opportunity may not be there later.

I’m feeling a mix of pride, anxiousness, and vulnerability. I’ve made something that I like and now I’m releasing it out into the world where it will take on a life of its own and be scrutinized and subjected to public opinion. Some people will love it. Some people will hate it. Some people will think some of it’s good but other parts could be better.

I’m just happy to have made something I feel is worth sharing and have enjoyed making. If nothing else, I’ve learned so much along the way and am better off for having done so.

I’d love it if you took a listen. It may not be your thing. Or maybe it is. Maybe it’s your friend’s thing. If so, share it with them! In any case, it’s my thing and I’m happy to be sharing it with all of you!

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Over the next few weeks I plan to share some details about each song… maybe the instrumentation, maybe what led to a particular musical bit, maybe the inspiration. In the meantime, I’ll start with talking about the album as a whole.

After becoming tired of my normal workout playlists, losing patience in discovering new music that I liked, and wanting something more upbeat than podcasts to listen to, the songs on this album emerged from a project to write music that I would want to run to. All of the songs are within a BPM range typical for running. Many of the songs have a running theme, some focused on ultra marathons.

While the songs can obviously be listened to individually, I decided I wanted to structure the album so it could be listened to during a typical mid-week run.

The first song is part of the warm-up; muscles are still stiff and the music starts a bit sparse and builds from there. The second song intensifies. The next few are pretty steady paced. The second half of the album, starting with Pins and Needles, I feel are some of the stronger songs, so they represent being warmed up and working on negative splits. The last two songs start to slow down. Viscous Consciousness evokes the muddy thinking in the pain cave that comes at the end of a hard run. Reaching Dawn is back to being sparse and less energetic, part of the cool down.

So strap on your running shoes or Luna sandals, pop in your ear buds, hit the pavement or trails, and give the album a listen by downloading it from Bandcamp or your favorite streaming service.