Released September 21 2018

Background

Here it is, the album that started it all, in a sense. The Majestic Sailors – The Salty Sardine was the first self-produced album of original material that I’ve ever made, and there’s a lot to be said about this album. I’ve covered a bunch of details regarding the album’s origins in a few places, like this old vlog video of mine, and also in my interview on the Tapestry Music Podcast, so if you’d rather listen to me talk instead of reading, go check those out.

But I guess I should start at the beginning. This album began its life back in 2010. I was a senior in high school, and as seniors do, me and my buddies went to senior prom. For some reason, our school rented out this gigantic yacht to host the prom, and it ran up and down the St. Clair River over the course of the evening. At one point, me and some friends got our photo taken, looking like a bunch of goofs. The picture in question is at the top of this page. Anyways, we posted it on Facebook and everyone commenting on it said it looked like a phony album cover, of sorts. I took it upon myself to edit the photo, added a fake band name and shared it around again and we all had a laugh. Someone commented the name “The Majestic Sailors – The Salty Sardine” and I saw that and immediately thought of how funny it would be to actually make that fake band real and put together an actual album.

So here we are… I did that, as you can see. Joke’s on you, actually.

But really, me and my buddy, William Waldron aka Billy, started hashing out arrangements for the songs for this fake album we were suddenly making. I took an exercise that I had written when I was at Berklee (yes, that Berklee) and used it as the basis for the first song on the album, and with Billy’s arranging help, we effectively wrote the first five songs on the album within two weeks or so. From there, things came to a halt pretty quick. Billy isn’t really a musician, he’d be the first to tell you that, so he wasn’t able to contribute much as the project went on. Plus, I started going to college later in 2010, so the album fell by the wayside a bit.

The album originally was intended to be a comedy album, so the songwriting wasn’t meant to be that elaborate when we first started the project. But after we had finished writing the first few songs, I decided I wanted to take it a bit more seriously and write songs that pushed what I could do a little bit. We still maintained a lot of the humor in the album, but once I started writing songs like “Wallace the Walrus” and the title track “The Salty Sardine“, I felt like I could make something pretty fun and cool that allowed me to tap into my prog metal influences at the same time. So, if you can’t tell, I spent a lot of time writing the last few songs. I remember writing a majority of the 16 minute closing track “Transcend” while on vacation in Florida. I think this was in 2012, which goes to show just how long it even took to finish writing this album. I used to write all the music in Guitar Pro, which is like a sheet music program, so it uses a bunch of fake sounding instruments that will play back what you write into it. I no longer compose music this way, but this is what was working for me at the time.

Once the album was written, it was time to record it. Long story short is that I took it upon myself to record, mix and master the whole thing as a way of teaching myself how to do it all. It wasn’t until 2016 or so, after I graduated college, that I decided to really throw myself into finishing this album. I had recorded some crappy demos of some of the early tracks, but felt it was time to see this thing through to its completion. I basically started from scratch and worked steadily on it until it was done in 2018. For lead vocals, I had employed the help of Anna Armstrong, a college friend I met during the production of “Sway” from my Space-like EP. She was a good sport about all the silly lines and things I had her do in the studio, but I think the album came out great with her performances the way they are. I was so excited to release the album that I did basically no promo and released it maybe a week after I finished the final mix. It’s so funny looking back on it.

Anyways, there’s a ton more I could say about this album, like the concept, the backing gang vocals, the way dumber lyrics that were the first drafts, the programmed drums (EW!), but I feel like I’m already writing a novel here, so I’ll leave it at that for now. This album holds a special place for me since it was my first original production of (mostly) my own, and I can still listen to it today and feel like I did a pretty good job on it. Would still love to play these songs live one day, but we’ll see what the future holds in that respect. (I’m not hinting at anything. I promise. I’m just expressing a wish of mine. Use the Contact form if you want to start a Majestic Sailors live band, k thx bye)