HELD TO A BRIGHTER LIGHT
released MARCH 20, 2020
RELEASE 85
Ten outtakes from Atlantic Witchcraft. A lot of these songs were agonizing to cut from the album, leading to a belief I held for years that AW should have been 2 or even 3 different albums rather than 1 long album. "In His Shadow" was going to be the opening track on that album for quite a while. I cut it for two reasons: it was a lot longer than most of the other songs I'd done for it, so it would make more space, and also it's really just a ripoff of "Madman's Honey", my favorite Wire song (more on this next month). I still like it, but in hindsight AW is a better album without this taking up so much space. "The Last Cowboy" is, somehow more transparently than "Eagle Hook", my most obvious song about football. It's just me ragging on the Dallas Cowboys, which is always okay. "Something Else" was, like "Cowboy", a little song I wrote on bass. These aren't tremendously consequential songs, but if I had split up AW into even just 2 albums, both of these would have made it onto 1 of them. "Easily Entertained" was the hardest cut to make, but doing it made it easier to make the last few cuts needed to make AW fall under the 80-minute mark. It was about my disappointment with the music scene at TCNJ, and just not totally vibing with the bands who got shows, as opposed to my solo project that did not get shows. Because COVID shut everything down right as I was finishing the album, that resentment had time to build up, so the song still felt meaningful when I re-did it on No Victories a year later. I still sort of feel that way, but not nearly to the extent I did as a college student. Nowhere close, actually. "The Wrong Directions" and "Morning Will Come" came from the same philosophy as "For The Town" and "Supernova", which was to use video game soundfonts for most, if not all, of the instruments. I'm pretty sure "Wrong" uses the Pokemon RSE soundfont and "Morning" uses the Mother 3 soundfont (or maybe it was Earthbound). I like both a lot, but as I've suggested already, I didn't want to put out a 2-hour album. That's too long. I actually think "Lomo" probably could have made it onto AW if I hadn't mixed the bass like that. It's so noisy that the pauses in the playing don't stand out as much. Maybe that in place of "Breakout Story" would have worked.