2016-2019: Pixie Period (Part 1)

I had my laptop with me during this period which I did have FL Studio on, and at night in the shelter I usually sequestered myself either in a separate space or within my bunk and worked on multiple new demos for songs that later became "I'm Looking", "Down In Evergreene", and "Figure Out Me". I played them to my bunkmates with positive reception. Back around this time all my lyric writing was done on paper, I'm currently still waiting for the books that contain those lyrics to get here with the rest of my stuff. I'll have more to share when those arrive.

My first actual house space that I got to move into was a basement apartment billed as a two bedroom but was really two smaller nonspecific rooms linked together with a makeshift living room and kitchen attached, and a bathroom with no hot water in the shower. It was also absolutely full of garbage, a sea of filth with every infestation known to man. I got lice for the first time during the 6 months between November 2015 and May 2016 that I lived in that apartment. I talked to the three raccoons that lived in our ceiling from time to time. It was a relative nightmare.

But I got to finish my first album with vocals there!

Luckily the two other people that lived there, two really sweet trans women named Wenda and Sara who were always super friendly and good to me, had a basic microphone attached to a portable recorder where I could record vocals onto an SD card and then transport to my laptop. I began going inside our very small, cluttered bathroom and nervously recording my first official vocals on our toilet. I rarely ever did second takes; what mattered to me was just trying to finally get my voice out onto something. It was excruciating. I hated my voice when I first heard it playing back to me in my songs. But it was a revelation just to get to this point, a point where I could finally put my vocals onto tape in some way. I conceded that I'd have to get ugly before I'd start getting beautiful. It's a step I'm glad to this day that I took. I no longer recoil in disgust at hearing my voice and I can record myself like its nothing. On my worst days I'll think I sound like Big Bird, but those are rare.

I had a DSLR camera at my disposal too. Naturally, i started to explore artistic expression via photography, and I designed a full set of artwork for one of my albums for the first time.

I finished the remaining songs for the album at that house. "Nervous Little Pixie", "Glimmers", "Getting Too Old" and "Can't Help But Like You Anyway" were all written and completed there. "Drawing On Yr Skin" I originally wrote in 2014, and I finally was able to give it music as well. It remains to me one of my better early lyrical songs.

I released the finished and retitled Notes of a Nervous Little Pixie in March 2016. I have friends who tell me that the work deeply touched them and got them through some rough times. I try to hold that close to my heart as best as I can.

Internal creative standards dictated to me that I should remake and remaster this album, and I did so in 2018. This remains the version of the album that is on sale on my bandcamp, but the 2016 original is included in full as a bonus download for those who want it. I remastered the album art for it also.

My first vocal release was finally complete, and thus began my "Pixie Period"; my first vocal songs and lyrical explorations. But where would I go from this point? I didn't know yet. I had a few outlines for future project ideas, but no real committed focus yet.

In April 2016 for my 21st birthday, a really good YTP friend who I knew as Nineroe mailed me a 90 dollar USB recording mic for my use. It was of good enough quality that I'm still using it today. I'm eternally grateful to him for that gift.

"Down In Evergreene" was the first song that I recorded using it, and it formed the kernel of what I wanted my next project to me. During this period I very much wanted to be a singing guitarist, and I made a few songs where I explored what that may look/sound like.

One of my first concepts was an album called The Many Lives of Maypole, taking inspiration from the XTC song "The Wheel and the Maypole", the last song on their last album. Maypole was a young girl who befriends a young boy from a conservative family who takes him on wild, imaginative adventures and eventually inspires him to come out as queer, which forces him to escape his family and seek out Maypole's whereabouts. Only one song was ever written for this project, "I Once". It would be years before it appeared on a finished album.

Next was The Giving of Violets, a concept album about capitalism self-destructing and society rebuilding itself around queer love, using an old lesbian custom of giving violets as gifts as one of its bases. While the concept didn't survive, many of the songs did, and it essentially became a prototype work for what would become my fifth album, and at the time, my most complex work. "From Young Unknowing Eyes"(at the time titled "I'm Just a Child"), Give You My Earth(at the time titled "Ma Ne Na"), "Cast Your Sleep Spell", "Silver Trees' Mixteress", the second half of "Masqueraders", "Twig Parade", "Lute-Bird Callings" and "I Hope It Doesn't Rain" were all written for this project. Leftover songs from the experimental period including "Rainbow Snow", "Candy Necklaces" and "All I" were also brought back briefly, but only "Candy Necklaces" survived.

In May of 2016, I got an opportunity to live in transitional housing, which I enthusiastically accepted. The selling point was I could finally shower in hot water and sleep in my own bed. I got a lot more than that out of it though; a full industrial kitchen where I got to play mad scientist and teach myself how to cook(I had to get my food handlers card just to use it), a lot of space to just exist and relax, and isolated spaces to record, such as an insulated "quiet room" and an echoey gym room. My next 2 and a half albums would be completed here, along with many songs that would find their way onto later projects.

I began another project called The Scarlet Sky With Anais, inspired by a long distance relationship that made me feel very stupidly blissful and buoyant with energy. It was in this framework that I wrote "I Feel Yr Heart Down There", "Periwinkle Death", "Darling Don't You Know" (originally titled "Heart II Heart", heavily inspired by a character in Undertale), "Burning Pearls", and "Monsters and Rainclouds" (originally titled "We Cried Together", and at another point titled "Sara, In June's Woods", inspired by the writer who at the time went by the same name.) "Down In Evergreene" and "Tell Me I'm Cute Again Cause I Forgot" returned again, and the unreleased songs "Anais",  "You Could Have Loved Her" and "Move Foreward Not Back" were also included.

The afore-mentioned Sara June Woods, now named Never Angel North, would play a very pivotal role in the evolution of my writing style. We first met in a yurt on a farm where queers would gather every Saturday to just be in nature for a night, and we later got to know each other through Facebook and meeting at poetry readings where she was a featured poet. She was working on the first installment of Sea-Witch, her raw and sprawling magical magnum opus, and I heard her read several selections of this at readings while also getting a chance to read her recent books Careful Mountain and Sara and the Existence of Fire. Reading these and spending time with Never throughout 2016-2017 was a transformative experience. I felt like I had just learned a new language that I was very eager to dissect and explore. Never and I also dated very briefly. It never went anywhere, but I, as should just about any queer on the planet, should feel utterly blessed to spend time with her and listen to her interpretations of the world and life. She is as brilliant and lovely as she is spiritually accomplished, and her work will one day be viewed with the same reverence and awe as that of the beats and the Virginia Wolfes and Kathy Ackers, but it will stand out in that it's several times better and more revolutionary.

Never also became very enamored with my in-progress music at the time also, and her imprint upon the album that became Petrichor is indelible. The story of Petrichor happened because of the inspiration she provided me with her world of language. I unashamedly lifted that language style in my own way, and let my imagination run until Petrichor's concept, about a celestial haven untouched by any evil in a universe full of planets being devoured by it, was created. The instrumental music I had at that time became lyrically adapted to this story and I let myself start to get much more imaginative with word choice. I began pulling many all-nighters and repeatedly watching the documentary The Persistence of Vision(2012) to keep myself inspired, determined to make this the greatest album I could possibly make up to that point, musically and conceptually. Thankfully, someone on transitional housing staff was always awake, so I was never alone at sharing my ideas, inspiration, and creative process, even into the early hours of the morning. I'd wake up at 6pm, work all night, then eat breakfast and go to bed at 9am. That is not a pattern I wish to replicate any time again soon.

I considered making an animated film to go with Petrichor to tell its story, but I never got very far into that concept. I still thinking about accompanying my music with a film eventually. It's going to happen. I instead summarized the story within Petrichor's album art.

The album art was also a breakthrough, as I discovered how magic things looked when you ran images through neural network processing and then composited them on top of each other. I still work like that with my album art to this day. It looks so good and I'm the only one who does it like that.

I released Petrichor on November 8, 2016, the day that Donald Trump was elected president. It remains the album that I've made the most money on, and it seems to still be slowly developing a cult following all its own. I have a friend who is a diehard fan of that album, considering it a major contemporary work of Prog, and it seems like talking about it a whole lot has sown some cool seeds.

At the same time I was working on Petrichor, I had an itch for more harder edged electronic synthy music that I was wanting to scratch. From this came another project I never completed called Dark-Light Position, for which I wrote the song of the same name, "I Get a Rise(The Trans Holy One)"(originally titled "Piano Girls I" and then "Under The Scent of a Gun") "Pretty Perfect Hands"(originally titled "Jellyfish Girls"), and "Goddexx Bless"(originally titled "Piano Girls II"). "Tell Me I'm Cute Again Cause I Forgot", "Burning Pearls" and "I Feel Yr Heart Down There" returned again, along with another old track from the experimental period, "Never Having Or Always", containing a melody that I first conjured in 2009. It also contained one song I never released called "Slash Sounds".

Desperate to have a new album ready that could effectively follow up Petrichor, I very hastily cobbled together most of these songs and many of the other songs I didn't use from The Scarlet Sky of Anais and The Giving of Violets and sculpted together my 6th album, Dandilionheart. "Galaxy Owl" and "All The Rain" both dated from the experimental period and were brought back for this project, and all this material was augmented with new songs "Damsel Lilith Pansy", "Moth Girl", "Another Rain Song" "Uranus in Aquarius" and "Let Me Remind You".

The project represented a break from my softer, folk-based proggier beginnings into a more upbeat and poppier sound, and this would be a sound that would continue more or less for the next two years.

I released Dandilionheart technically twice, the first time was very hastily in February 2017 as the result of a massive mental breakdown that ended in a suicide attempt, and the second and official time was July 22, 2017, after cleaning up the mixing. 

This is the earliest album I can comfortably listen to; it contains some of the first work I felt truly proud of. By this point, I had updated my version of FL Studio from 10 to 12, and had my process down to a science. This experience would carry over well in my future work, more of which I will write about in my next entry.....