Released May 25 2020

Background

Space-like is comprised of songs that I had written outside of a concept for any album, and coincidentally, each song on the album had a role in getting me my degree from Wayne State University in Detroit, MI. So I guess that’s the underlying theme of the album, in a sense. But also, I’m picky and like to have songs that I release be part of an album in some way, so I figured that was enough to put them all together on a shorter EP.

Lunar Shadows is actually the first full song I ever wrote, back in 2009 or so. It had gone through a few different iterations before becoming what it is on the album, but the backbone of the song was the same ever since I had a first draft of it. I feel like this song helped me get into the music program at WSU. Collegiate music programs generally only allow for study in two styles of music; jazz or classical. I’m not much of a classical guy, so I went with jazz. Turns out playing jazz is really hard if you’ve never done it before. I ended up having to audition three times before getting into the music program, and during that time, I had actually taken an entire semester off from classes just to study jazz under the instruction of Chuck Newsome, who is an amazing player and teacher who is now running the jazz guitar ensembles at WSU. I owe a lot to Chuck, but I also feel like Lunar Shadows helped push my third audition into the passing range, because I had gone into the audition stating I had a focus on music production and I had submitted a working demo of Lunar Shadows that I had made in Logic Pro at home. Though I’m sure my performance in the audition was passable at best, I like to think that the head of the music production department, Thomas Court, considered the demo I had made and convinced the music department head to let me pass. This is unconfirmed, of course, but that’s what I like to believe anyways. So thank you to Chuck and Tom for all the help and confidence. I graduated because of you two!

Sway was a song that was composed around 2015 with the intent of being recorded at the WSU Studio for one of my music production classes. I was to play the role of the producer and have a bunch of my fellow music students perform the parts while I ran the session from the control room. This worked out for most of the instruments, but not for ones like bass and guitar, so I still had to record those myself. I ended up retracking all the drums myself too for the final EP release, but otherwise, everything else was tracked by session musicians, which was super fun! In a bit of a twist, initially, I had asked a singer named Kari Hart to sing on the song. Recording day arrived, and I think Kari had fallen ill, but she managed to convince her friend, Anna Armstrong, to take her place at the last minute. That’s how I met Anna and had her subsequently record the vocals for the Salty Sardine album, as well as the other songs on Space-like.

Illusions was a song I was writing alongside Sway at the time, though I didn’t really have any plans for the song as I was writing it. Then my Bachelor’s project rolled around and I needed to figure out what I was going to do. So I thought it would be cool to make a sort of ‘making of’ documentary about producing the song Illusions from start to finish. This would touch upon my music production focus and also my media arts minor, so it was the perfect project. And honestly, it really was since I still basically do all of that stuff now all the time anyways, so my skills were well cultivated with this assignment. I asked Kari to come back for this project since she was unable to sing on Sway, and I was able to track her and Anna at the WSU Studio. I also tracked a drummer named Jake Halkey for the BA project, but again, I retracked the drums myself for the Space-like release. The mix and video for the BA project is pretty bad, looking back on both. But that’s what it was all about, learning how to do it so I can grow and develop my skills over time. I’m still not a great video editor, in my opinion, but I think I’ve gotten a lot better with production since my BA project. And despite what I consider now to be a bad video and mix, it still got me my degree, so it couldn’t have been that bad, right? Right?

For the final Space-like EP release, I ended up retracking most of the parts for all these songs, except all the stuff from the session musicians on Sway. Mixing and producing the album came at a weird time for me, as we were just heading into the pandemic and beyond that, my studio had flooded in early 2020 as well, so it was out of commission for a few months. As was for everyone, the pandemic was a tough time, though I had the extra hardship of not being able to see my future wife for what ended up being 454 days in total due to border closures between the US and Canada. I lived in Michigan, she lived in Canada. You can see the issue. So, mentally, I wasn’t as excited about the release of this EP since I clearly had other things on my mind. As such, I did basically zero promotion for this album when it came out, so it was very much a quiet release. Still, I think Space-like came out okay. I could have done a better job on the mix in hindsight, I don’t love the drum sound, but eh, it is what it is. It’s a decent capturing of those particular songs and time of my life, and I’m happy to still consider it an important milestone in my musical career.