Merry Christmas!!!

Another Christmas is here therefore, another Melodramatic EP is here.

This Melodramatic Christmas EP is pretty interesting because it consists of 3 old tracks that I resurrected specifically for this EP. Additionally, I really liked how I included some covers of songs that really moved me as a musician on the last EP, so I did something similar this year. I've been getting really into Joyce Manor lately and I felt like "Constant Headache" was an appropriate song to cover as 2020 comes to a close.





A little backstory on the tracks if you're interested:

1. Roses,
I wrote this song back in 2016/2017(?) when I was in community college. We watched the Hitchcock classic Rear Window and it instantly became one of my favorite movies of all time. I liked it so much that I decided to write this song based on the story. Each line moves through events from the film so if you read the lyrics close enough, you're basically getting a synopsis of film from the perspective of the main character. Additionally, the tempo/energy of the song very gradually increases corresponding to the gradually increasing tension you feel as you watch the movie. I was trying to mimic the feelings you feel while watching the film.
I recorded this back in 2018 and I feel like my production quality has DRASTICALLY increased over these past couple years, but I really like the rawness of this recording. I literally took my microphone into my garage to get some natural reverb and set up the mic on one end of the garage while I played guitar/sang on the other end.


2. Now You're John Hammond
Also wrote this one back in the 2017 era of Melodramatic. I was going through a very intense Mountain Goats infatuation era at the time so this song is HEAVILY inspired by them. Originally it was recorded in a similar way to Roses, in a big room, like my garage, for some natural reverb. But when revisiting this song I felt like it needed some more attention, so I rerecorded the entire song in November/December 2020 and layered some Mellotron instrumentation over it to give an orchestra-like quality. I never really knew what a Mellotron was until I watched this video of Paul McCartney describing how the Beatles used it back in the day and how it was essentially the precursor to the synthesizer. I really liked that, so I wanted to try and channel a little bit of Paul and came up with something I'm really proud of.


3. Interlude I
When I first got the MacBook that I record all of my music on back in early 2018, I FINALLY had access to GarageBand, and this changed everything for me. I instantly had access to SO many instruments that I never dreamed of getting the opportunity to mess around with. The first thing I did was pull up a Tonewheel Organ and laid down some chords. Threw some improvisation over that on another piano track and added some light drums. It was a fun little improv thing that I didn't expect to even save, but I did. I've listened to it every now and then over the years and often think to myself, that actually sounds pretty shweet. So I finally decided to polish it up a bit and officially release it this year.
Also!! There's a sample in this track of my friend Dexter & I talking over facetime. At the time, Dexter was at a study abroad program in Australia and I just thought it would be cool to turn on my mic and record the conversation. After digging through about an hour of us joking around I got to what you hear in the song and felt like it matched the mood of the track.