New Music

First, take a listen on your preferred platform!

Then, see below for the backstory.

Backstory

Back in November, 2016, I was on orders for 4 months with the Delaware Air National Guard, doing formal training for Broadcast Journalism at the Defense Information School (DINFOS). I was staying in a hotel at Ft. Meade, MD.

The family was still in Germany at this point, and to help with missing them too much, I was staying extra busy with music production, and some online classes with Berklee College of Music.

One evening, as I often did, I brought the mobile recording studio downstairs to the lobby to lay down new ideas and just jam for a while. I ended up laying down a really fun, mid-tempo groove, with a haunting, harmonic minor tonal center.

It was so much fun, that within a few minutes, I had the loose structure of a full track. A strong melody was still not falling into place, but I knew I’d get there at some point.

Over the next few days, I listened to it, noodled a bit on guitar, but just couldn’t quite get something that felt right.

Around that same time, I was deep in with Materia Collective, and had made some wonderful musician friends that I still keep in touch with to this day. One such friend is Xander Cruise.

I sent him a demo of the song, and he really enjoyed it. After talking through some ideas, he decided to lay down some rap vocals over the track…which is not at all what I had originally envisioned. After I heard his take on it, I couldn’t imagine it without it. I loved it.

And…that’s where the story turns into real life.

The school that I was attending got more intense and involved, and I didn’t have the right setup to do a proper mix/master. After I finished the school, I went back to Germany and got back into the routine with the family, and had some other freelance projects come up that took precedence.

Then, I had a pretty catastrophic hard drive crash+backup failure that took up months of time trying to piece together my data to recover everything. Lots of painful lessons learned on that. One of the painful lessons was that I had a newer version of Vaporjazz where I had laid down a pretty cool bridge section that I really liked. I have the audio bounce of that version, but the project file itself got deleted. My backup project file was from the original session, and didn’t have the newer material.

Before I knew it, we were getting ready to move back to the U.S., my career was taking some interesting, unexpected turns…and life just…happened.

Xander and I talk fairly regularly, and we had a few different sessions through the years of making progress, dusting off the track, and trying to get it to the finish line. But each time, I had some things to work through, either professionally or personally.

As my family and I have gotten settled in St. Louis, and just generally gotten settled from all the craziness of the past few years, I finally got the studio to a place where it’s really put together and ergonomic again.

And it was finally time to get Vaporjazz to the finish line. Long overdue, but better late than never.

It’s a good reminder that creative work is a discipline. Inspiration, and the spark of the idea is the fun part…sure. But it’s execution and discipline of finishing, and putting the art out into the world that really requires the focus and effort.

I’m really proud of how this track turned out.