Just A Meat Blob
In my free time I enjoy composing original songs and playing guitar! Just A Meat Blob is the outlet for my musical ideas.
Full Moon Tonight - 5/26/21
This was a hybrid project between my music and animation work. I had recently completed a year-long project of creating animations for every full moon and wanted to put them all together in a supercut. Naturally, this was a great opportunity to compose some original music to accompany it!
I took a completely different approach to this track, which features no guitar. The guitar is my primary instrument where most of my ideas flow from, but I wanted to challenge myself to keep the song 100% digital. I have access to a pretty big library of sounds and music production software, so I just kept the composition as simple as possible and experimented with different sounds. The song has the same chord progression played 3 times, with different instruments and melodies fading in and out to provide enough variation to keep it interesting.
The album artwork features stills from all the full moon animations over a synthwave-inspired neon purple background.
When Clouds Come Down - 4/9/21
This song took almost a whole year to complete, from jamming out riffs in May 2020, to the last steps of mixing and mastering in April 2021. I wrote this song in a total of 4 different houses, and spent a lot of time outdoors during this time due to the pandemic closing down indoor activities.
The song is inspired by changes in weather, specifically the storms and rain of Spring and Summer, but also the gradual changes throughout the seasons.
This is my most ambitious song so far, clocking in at 6:31 and combining a lot of layered guitars with digital drums. My favorite part of the process is the composition and figuring out instrumentation, which does take the most time. After that I need to practice all the parts and get ready to record several takes of each one. I recorded the guitars, bass and saxophone alone, and then sent all the tracks to my friend Eric Robertson for mixing.
I am capable of mixing myself, but I’ve found that bringing someone else into the process can add a lot of value to the song and get me out of my own head to see it in a new light. I had also been working on this song for so long that the musical ideas for new songs were piling up and it was time to start moving on.
I decided to release the song as soon as I got Eric’s mix back and added a few final touches in Mastering. I don’t have a following right now so I figured it is just best to get it out there instead of trying to hype up a release date.
The album artwork is a photo from Effigy Mounds National Monument, overlooking the Mississippi River.
Changes - 6/20/20
This was the first song I ever made completely independently, and it taught me a lot about how to take on musical idea and keep adding layers to turn it into an interesting song. It went through at least 10 different name changes, and by the time it was ready to release it had been a full year since starting it. I thought back to who I was when I began and ended the project, and realized I had gone through many personal changes, hence the song name.
Just A Meat Blob was a name that came to me shortly before the release in the Spring of 2020. I think the Pandemic awakened a primal sense in all of us where we had to stop our superficial lives and think about mere survival for awhile when we were unsure how deadly the Covid-19 virus would be. I realized that underneath all of my societal values, career ambitions, relationships, and hobbies I am simply just a vulnerable blob of meat like any other animal on Earth.
The album cover is taken from a looping animation I made back in 2019 of an endless corridor of chameleons. I thought the variation in skin colors over time fit the ‘Changes’ title very well. The looping animation can be found on my YouTube channel.