Happy New Year
No lyrics today. I thought about it, but decided not to. I do hope you liked the lyrics I posted on Christmas Day, though — Spinning on a Rock is very important to me. It was one of the first songs I wrote after coming out of my most recent psychosis, and it still sits at the centre of this whole project.
Have you made a New Year’s resolution? Mine is to lose weight. I’m hopeful, partly because I actually succeeded with my 2025 resolution, and partly because I’m just fucking sick of being fat. I’m 40 now — it’s the kind of weight you don’t lose unless you deliberately do something about it.
The music itself continues to go well. The beat I mentioned the other morning turned out well, it now has the music around it. I like the track a lot — it’s something of an interest piece on the EP, a bit left of centre, but it earns its place.
That brings me to the EP itself. I wanted to say a few things about it.
Firstly: it gets a hint dark. The first song I released a couple of years ago leaned into that darkness, and people responded well to it. Then Play With Me, just under a year ago, went in the opposite direction — intentionally bubblegum pop — and people didn’t respond well at all. That told me something important. I decided to keep my dark streak, and more importantly, to keep that crushing kind of honesty that feels most like me. The EP does get bouncy at times, but never in the way Play With Me did. What it really contains are genuinely dark sections, alongside a few tracks that lean outright into hip-hop territory.
Which raises the second question: where did the hip hop come from? For me, it feels almost inevitable. Hip hop has bled into my psyche simply by being such a dominant cultural force for most of my life. Then, when I started making music on my computer all those years ago, I became fascinated with electronic production, and from there with beat-making itself. At some point, those threads stopped feeling separate.
And finally: why now? The short answer is that there’s no better time than the present — and that becomes especially true when you’re a 40 year old musician, you’ve only technically released two songs, and you’ve taken both of them down. It’s well past time for an EP. I’m not going to speculate about how popular it might be, but I will say this: it’s better than anything I’ve put out before, by a long shot. It won’t be taken down. It represents about 90% of the work I’ve done over the past three years, since recovering from the psychosis that lasted from 2018 to 2021 — a period I’m preparing to write about properly in a separate essay for this blog.