Posted 02-Nov-2025 in Personal

Ever do something sorta as a joke and then the lines start to blur a bit?

That’s where I’m at right now.

After watching the DEVO documentary a while back, I was really fired up to make some new music. I have a handful of projects in varying degrees of intention and/or hiatus, but I’ve been feeling like I needed something new.

This has been kicking around in my head for a bit, but I’ve been holding myself back. Partly because I’d like to move forward with new music for venus on the rocks, partly because I don’t sing.

I’m definitely kind of tone deaf, and outside of background screams and the occasional sound collage, I try to stay in my lane.

That said, I write... a lot. Both music and words, I’m always jotting down notes and ideas. Guess you’d call the words “poetry”, but describing myself as a poet seems as big of a stretch as calling myself a singer.

That’s not to say I haven’t ventured into this realm once before. While in between some projects a few decades ago, I was jamming with a drummer. I was on bass and barking words into a microphone. It was fun, but never ended up going anywhere.

Fast forward to today, a rainy night in Austin, Texas. Everybody went to bed, and I was still kind of wired. I sat down and decided to throw together something. Shooting for that lo-fi bedroom pop type aesthetic. Drum machine with some light synths, and me whispering some lyrics I had written down so as to not wake the dogs or humans.

Taking the same “fuck it, ship it” approach to how I code, I laid out a track over a couple of hours, and literally whispered some words, tucked into the background, barely decipherable.

The next day, I played it for my daughter.

After questioning the authenticity of it being something her father made, she proceeded to die laughing as we reached each movement in the track.

I’m not laughing because it’s bad, it sounds just like the stuff I listen to while I’m studying.

The intentionally too low in the mix vocal whispers. The deliberate shortness of the track. The subtle percussive plink to differentiate the single chorus from the single verse.

For just over a minute, it had it all.

From there we came up with a “not too serious” name for the project, and I started the process of getting the music into the world.

I’ve knocked out a couple more tracks since then. As I’m not trying to fit into any specific genre, it’s all over the place right now.

The songwriting process is also quite different than my experiences working with vocalists.

Usually in those scenarios, me and/or me and other musicians would work on writing a song, giving it a bit of structure and such. Vocalist would write to that, perhaps there would be a little bit of adjustment to the song to structure it just right, and that’s that.

In this scenario, I’m starting with some words, writing most of the lyrics content before I even sit down to make music.

After I have enough words to get moving, I try to find a tempo, and start messing with vocal phrasing. Once a few scratch vocals are laid out, I start to write and sequence things around whatever mood I’m going for.

Not saying one way is better than the other, but I do like feeling like I’m collaborating to create something. Even when it’s just myself, it’s a more organic process and yields some interesting, sometimes unexpected results.

Not sure how much longevity I’ll have with this, but it’s been a fun foray. It’s easy to get too caught up in things, so it’s been a nice change of pace to just let the rubber meet the road and see where it takes me, even if it’s not perfect.

Without further ado, I present to you: sorority hamster.