Howdy!

So, I’ve been busy. Life, work, family, and also… making a 24-track triple album, No Gods Above the Sand. I’ve managed to keep up with a release every Friday. A few weeks ago, I spent a weekend writing, recording, and producing: This Kingdom I Have Built, Empathy Thermalized, Three Breaches Filled, and Metaphysical Harmonic Failure. Four awesome singles with very different inspirations.

This Kingdom I Have Built (out now) was inspired by a book I’m currently reading, King’s Dark Tidings, which is super damn cool. This is actually my third re-read. A boy raised as an assassin tries to apply the strict rules he was taught to normal social situations. He’s insanely capable at almost everything, except understanding how regular people actually behave. There’s a lot more to it, but I connected with the idea of a king struggling morally with those who helped him win a throne.

Empathy Thermalized (out now) is simple. It was inspired by personal experience: being frozen by having too much empathy for others and allowing that empathy to keep me in situations that probably would have been resolved through confrontation. That feeling of being frozen while still trying to push forward creates a kind of vibration, energy, and eventually heat. The music features one of my guitar warm-ups with these big bluesy bends, which just sort of happened, haha. The creative process is interesting!

Three Breaches Filled (out now) is a single snapshot from a story in progress. The story is straightforward: a revenge plot. Left for dead, our character seeks revenge and chooses a 3 a.m. wake-up call as the method. I love the chorus in this one: “You’re not so tough with sleep in your eye.” Hah! The driving riff is an addicting set of palm mutes. I’m a rhythm player at heart, and this one really gets my head moving.

Metaphysical Harmonic Failure (coming 8/21) is a callback to my roots: cold industrial metal. During the production of Apocalypse System: Season One, I wrote about 40 different tracks in the genre, of which eight made the cut. It was my first AI-hybrid album, and I was learning throughout the process. I sorta burned myself out on my favorite genre, so I used the rest of my catalog to explore different sounds and held back on the purely industrial stuff for a while.

Well, I went in hard with this one. I pulled an older version of LYRA out of the dustbin, grabbed my Metal Zone guitar pedal, and we got to work. It’s a fun listen about emotional erosion… and eventually losing your shit.

Whew. And now, on to my latest project: No Gods Above the Sand.

I’ve officially written all the lyrics. It’s basically a full novella condensed into 24 songs. I’m breaking the story into three episode albums.

And….. EPISODE 1 is fully produced and will be available to listen to Friday, Aug. 28th!

I’ll have pre-save links up as soon as Spotify gives them to me. That’s all the info I’m going to share for now. I’ll start dropping previews as we get closer.

Until next time,

Thanks again for listening and reading.

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