October Project #4: Fall Time (continued)

Hey there!

I’m sitting on a plane en route to Los Angeles. We’re currently somewhere over Kansas City (where I lived for a few years in the 90s). We completed the 4 am drive to Nashville, and passed the security check with flying colors. I just edited this short, behind-the-scenes featurette for 'Fall Time in Tennessee' while flying in the damn sky (see above). 

The response to this song has been wonderful. The truth is, I wrote it over a month ago. September 27th to be exact. It’s actually what set the whole October project in motion. It was one of the first days where the weather felt perfect. I took my guitar and wrote the song walking up and down my very long driveway (where the majority of the video was shot). I was excited to move forward with the production but I had two big problems. Eric was still putting finishing touches on the basement and the leaves had not yet changed color. So I devised a scheme where I would begin work on another song and revisit this one later in the month when the leaves changed.

Here’s a voice memo demo from 9/27 

Notice that there’s an excluded verse:

The swine got loose

And now there is hell to pay

The people ate our tires

So there’s no chance for an escape

We pledge fealty to the forest

And spend the fall enslaved

This is life in the Tennessee hills

It’s just another October day

More on that later.

I began work on another shelved song that I hope to release by the end of the year. I had logistical reasons for delaying that song as well. The October Project was born out of this backlog.

Eric was using stilts to finish the ceiling in the basement and that was the primary inspiration for the forest people. Knowing I had time to plan, I reached out to Justin Cipriani (director of Spineless, Sideshow and G3 trailer) to see if he was willing to bring out the big guns for this one.

But as the month progressed, I began losing interest in the song and I felt the video shoot would be too ambitious with everything else going on. I was also worried that the celebration of fall time would feel belated at the end of October. I called the shoot off and decided that I would write a new song for week #4.

Things got complicated when child care for the week fell through last minute. I didn’t have the energy to start a fourth song, so I was very relieved to have this one in my back pocket.

I decided to shoot a simplified version of the song which primarily consisted of me dancing around with a selfie stick. I omitted the verse about the people eating our tires as that would be the most difficult to shoot.

Eric stayed after rehearsal Tuesday to help figure out the forest people’s costume design. The initial plan was to use heavy prosthetics on the face and we needed to figure out a simplified solution. We spent an hour or so playing around with some furry fabric and long black mesh but nothing was coming together super well. We decided to sleep on it and figure it out in the morning.

I studied the photos the next morning and decided the furry fabric wasn’t translating as actual fur.  I thought it would work better as clothing - like the people had skinned a deer either for warmth or camouflage- and I wanted the hands poking through to help convey this was a skeletal / scarecrow-esque creature. I ended up pulling the hands off of the Krampus animatronic and they worked perfectly. The creature felt like a mix of Nosferatu, swamp thing and Sasquatch.

It was tricky for Eric to operate the stilts on unlevel ground and almost all of our property is on a hill. He knocked it out of the park once again and Karen was a huge help as well.

Thanks everyone for following along on this 4-week journey. I've submitted the songs to streaming services as an EP called "Incantations" (shout out to Nym on title + album art) and I'm hoping it will go live on Halloween. But it says it can take up to 5 business days sometimes. Fingers crossed.

The plane is now flying over Las Vegas. The band is trying to decide whether or not we're going to go see Danny Elfman tonight. Excited for a fun weekend in the land of the Fat Cat but will, of course, miss my family dearly. Hope to see some of you Monday night at The Roxy!

-Nick