The story so far

In the summer of 2009, I released a song called "Modern Art".

It was a goofy, experimental novelty song with a bizarre falsetto vocal and a lot of discordant synthesizer parts.  An unusual choice for a first song to share, for sure.  The reason I chose it was because, in contrast to the other pop/rock-style material I had on hand, the lyrics weren't my own, and I felt particularly insecure about lyric-writing.  (I should mention that the poet did give me his permission, way back in 2006.)

I was completely caught off-guard by the song's explosively derisive reception.  Desperate to save face, I composed a completely new song called "Days to Midnight".  This was a much more serious effort, with a much lower-pitched vocal, original lyrics about the end of the world, and an attempt at a more "normal" sound.

Exactly why I thought it was a good idea to sing half-heartedly over a bunch of MIDI instruments and call it a "rock" album is beyond the scope of this post.  Suffice it to say that, by the end of 2009, I'd done exactly that, with "Days to Midnight" and "Modern Art" as tracks 2 and 3 of Escapade.

I think I knew it didn't sound very good, really, but stubbornly insisted that that was just how I did things.  I even planned a second album using the same sonic template, but didn't get further than recording one song.  That song was "After the Party", an ambitious dirge about the transience of relationships.  In hindsight, I'm very glad this second album came to nothing.

Ultimately, what little material I'd come up with for an Escapade follow-up, got re-worked and absorbed into a return to my first musical love: classical composition.  I eventually started to worry, however, that Escapade as it stood could harm my credibility in that field, and so one day I informally re-recorded "Modern Art" in a lower key with just my regular voice and an honest piano.  I didn't really know how to mic an acoustic piano (actually, I still don't) so it was never going to be studio-quality, but it did get me thinking about other things that could be done to improve the Escapade material.

My solution was to re-record the whole album, as Escapade 2, released in 2012.  It was still just me and a bunch of electronics, but I did take care to ensure that I chose as appropriate a sound as possible for each part, and also tried to sing better.  I added two extra songs: one of them was the above-mentioned "After the Party", and the other was "One of My Goof Attacks", an attempt at a comedic hard rock song written in (I think) 2008.

Once again, this wasn't too well received.  I think the consensus was that it didn't sound as obviously bad as the first version, but failed to sound good.  I eventually came to more-or-less agree, and (history repeats?) a planned follow-up was shelved.  I went back to classical composition again, seemingly for good, although I continued to enjoy listening to and absorbing rock and pop.  I got more into R&B/soul around this time, too, and more generally I've become more open-minded about music genres as I've got older.

I ultimately started calling both Escapade 1 and 2 by a different name: Chronicles of a Dead End.  That's when I thought about it at all; most of the time I ignored it.

Then the COVID-19 pandemic happened.  Almost overnight, I found myself forced to make music completely on my own once again.  This quickly resulted in my creativity shifting away from classical, as I'm definitely not skilled enough on keys to be a solo concert pianist.  And although life has since opened up again to a large extent, it still seems that my so-called "dead end" was in fact nothing of the sort.

Which means that ignoring the Escapades is no longer possible.  It's time for another re-recording.

This will not be as slavish a remake as 2.  My aim, this time, is simply to present the songs in the best light that I can.  In the next two posts, I'll examine both Escapades in more detail, looking at what works and what doesn't.