Week #14 Update!

Feliz February!

Busy week this week. My wife had to travel to Portland, ME for work Sunday-Wednesday so I got to try out being a single dad for a couple days (with lots of help from MIL and preschool).

I finished another song on Thursday called RUN. I think it's a lot of fun and its gotten a nice response from the inner circle. It's mostly inspired by my feelings on the world of online content creation and my place within it. There is a cognitive dissonance between the need to express oneself and the need to perform at a level that justifies the work. It's also an inherently self aggrandizing endeavor, selling a product that is tied to your identity (or some perceived version of it). So there are a lot of complicated feelings that come with dedicating your life to something you love to do while recognizing that it isn't a particularly healthy or noble pursuit.

We had to cancel another rehearsal last minute due to sudden illness (we are a cursed band), but we were able to have a great 90-ish minute Zoom where we discussed all of the new music, plans to record, music videos, release strategy, etc.

We talked a lot about singles and everyone was in agreement that we 5 have or 6 strong contenders. One feeling I conveyed is how I'm not sure whether this album has a Sometimes. I'm sure I've talked about this before, but I had a similar thought toward the back half of writing SWORDS. I felt like that album didn't have an All Shook Up. I remember intentionally sitting down and attempting to do what I had done time and time again for Super Deluxe: Combine styles of different projects by writing in another artist's voice and placing it in a new context. Only now I was attempting to do it for myself: Write a song similar to All Shook Up with the dark circus energy of SWORDS. It proved to be successful as it's my most popular original song by a pretty significant margin. I spent all of Friday and Saturday attempting to replicate that success in the style of this new album but had no such luck. We'll see what next week holds!

Big announcements from the Ren & Stimpy camp should be imminent, and there is another exciting secret project that should be seeing light of day in the near future (I think it's secret? I may have spilled those beans already. It's something Brielle and I worked on last spring).

I hope everyone is doing well. I'm about to go grab dinner with my dear friend Mikey. Let me know if you would like me to ask him anything.

Goodbye!
(Big) Nick