cry babies

My newsletter has an album?

Dear Friends,

tl;dr I made a record. I’m gonna charge for it and put the money towards a good cause. Skip to the end for more, or read on for notes on process.

<3

Bumps

When I started making the this newsletter’s podcast, I also started playing around with bump music. Obviously, my inspiration here was the run that Flying Lotus did for Adult Swim. But I was also motivated by the form, and it turns out that I really needed that motivation to get going.

As a kid, around the same time I was learning rudimentary HTML so I could have my own website, I was also programming dumb beats on a disappeared piece of freeware called Tuareg. But as with my website building, I never had the time or patience for anything beyond what I could teach myself by tinkering. I didn’t become proficient with either.

Years later, the prospect of actually trying to use Ableton well felt utterly overwhelming because I knew enough about the program to recognize the size of the distance between me and someone who’s good at it. Those folks have put the same amount of time into learning it as I did the drums, whereas I took one class on the software 16 years ago and basically never used it again. Plus I didn’t want to pay for the full version. How could I let myself actually try to goof around without judging myself the whole way, knowing my limitations?

Again, it’s the form that got me through my mental block: bumps can last 30 seconds or fewer. If the purpose is to help transition a podcast segment from one topic to another, I felt that the task was discrete enough that I could step out of my own way, stakes being after all quite low.

Having given myself this permission, I had a lot of fun playing around. The music I came up with is out now, and sits right in the middle of things—good/weird enough that I want to share, bad enough that I can’t imagine charging for it. I consider it a fun exercise more than anything, with some moments of nice music mixed in with a lot of just ok stuff.

cry babies

I used almost all the music I made in that first project in the course of the podcasts’s fist season, chopping it up into short chunks that I interspersed throughout each episode with the ambition to never repeat anything. I had enough music to hit that goal. Then the question became: would I start the cycle over for season two? Or should I make something new? And if the latter, would I take a different approach?

A little while ago, I started considering what it would be like to make something overall more coherent. Less like bumps and more like a record. After I made the first track, I committed to the idea because I felt capable of it. There’s lots of music that I still can’t make with Ableton 12 Lite and the skills I’ve managed to learn in my spare time; but the kind I was inspired to make—both pretty and weird—felt within my reach. After I started, I found I wanted to keep going.

Along the way, it became necessary to learn more about what I was doing. I’d reach for a tool and find I didn’t have it. So I watched tutorials on sidechain compression and finally learned the first goddamned thing about mastering. I endeavored twice to reproduce music that I loved—one a FlyLo bassline and the other basically an entire track in miniature. Trying to figure out how to do this forced me to learn things about what I was doing a little bit more concretely.

All of which is to say that yes, the second season of the podcast will have new music. And because I like it, I’m going to release it as a kind of “cry baby album,” a representative of this newsletter, this podcast, and the whole project of studying/crying over music together. You’ll be able to stream it on bandcamp, but if you like it (and/or want to support this work), I hope you’ll buy a copy because I’m going to donate the proceeds to something cool.

I’m not exactly sure where yet, in part because I think a lot will depend on how much money comes in. I’m happy to throw $50 any number of places, and gods know that need is everywhere. My initial thought was to try to do something around school—trying to support folks fighting against the erosion of academic freedoms, for example, or contributing to a debt relief fund. That said, I’m really open to ideas. Please drop em if you’ve got any.

Details

You can preorder cry babies on bandcamp, where you can also hear two of the tracks. To help get the word out, I’m doing a fun lil campaign: anyone who preorders the record will be entered into a drawing for a book—Big Feelings if you don’t have it, something else if you do.

Please share with anyone you think would like it. 💜

c r y h a r d