A handful of songs from a 50 track album of demos that I have been working on in "secret" the past few months. I picked the songs that I thought were the very, very best and worthy of showing off to compile this little album.

Funny thing is, I didn't think I'd make /this/ album. Everything on here was for the next EPAB! album with my band (and it still is, some of these songs could probably end up on the next album), but I figured that I would give one last hurrah for the solo recording style that I've persistently held on to for all these years to make way for a new path: a path where I work with my band. So I picked 12 of the best songs off my spreadsheet and assemble into a 12 track album to release.

All profits for this album will be donated to Black Lives Matter. (blacklivesmatter.com)

ELISIA SONG - VOCALS/LYRICS/GUITARS/DRUMS/KEYS/BASS/MIXING

GANNON EARHART - WRITING CREDS FOR GUITAR ON TRACK 7.

Album art by my dear friend: Shay. [@camkatsu]

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
TRACKS! OH, SUCH FUN TRACKS! AND I GUESS RAMBLINGS???
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I DROPPED MY CHICKEN:

This song was written waaaaaaay back in 2016 when my (now deleted) second album, "Band-aids & Skateboards Made My Summer Suck", came out. I thought it was fairly decent at the time, despite the drums sounding like complete shit. After I took down that album, I decided to keep a couple of songs from it, this being one of them. By the time the 50 track project rolled around, I started to look for old demos and ideas that I had and came across this. I touched it up to bring it up to date and BAM, here it is. Not much has changed, except the tuning. Also, my friends have never knocked my plate of chicken from my hands (ON PURPOSE!).

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

OH, FRANCESCA:

This song was written… I want to say a couple of days after "Songs for the Summer" had been released. That album had been the product of every pain, every heartbreak, and every bit of self-doubt I had experienced for the 2 years that it took for me to write that album. After getting all that negativity out onto a platform of some kind, I really wanted to write a happy lovey dovey album called "girl pop!" to balance out the feelings I was feeling at that time. I had never written a love song before (or anything I considered to be a love song) so I wrote this. Gannon had also shown me a band called "Day Wave" and I really dug the sound so, the first iteration of this song sounded a lot closer to the more reverby lofi sound. But after we played a SLUDGEFEAST show, I decided to go home and recorded a more “power pop” version with more distorted and less reverb guitars and beefed up drums that emulated the drum lines that Gannon had made for the show. And then whenever the idea for the next EPAB! album came around, I threw this song in for consideration, since the whole band seemed to like playing it. I eventually made a rule that the album had to be in half-step down tuning and re-recorded the song to be in half-step down, and that’s this version on THIS album instead of the next EPAB! one. Oops!

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

1999:

As time went on, "girl pop!" turned into a split EP I was going to do with a friend of mine and I had written this track for my side of the EP. It’s pretty much stayed the same since its inception and I like to think that’s a testament to how good the song is. I had gotten into a J-Rock band called "Mushroom Empire" and really liked their guitar tones for the album "eureka", so I tried to emulate it to the best of my abilities and this song came out. The breakdown came from my song, "I’m Not Creative" and it’s almost a carbon copy of that. Is it ripping something off if it's my own song?

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

YOU WOULD WANT ME TO:

On the day before my birthday, I was still a bit sick from when I probably had a weaker strain of COVID-19, but still wanted to write a song. My vocals had been getting better from the previous week and the instrumental of this song was pretty much written out and demoed on my phone. So, when I felt good enough to sing ROUGHLY, I wrote out the lyrics and tried my hardest to not strain my voice. The idea of this song came from Weezer’s "Keep Fishin’" off of their album "Maladroit" and it’s really clear where all the inspiration came from once you hear that song. I do really like the guitar harmony I wrote for this song and would really like to hear it live one day. There’s also a little Bomb the Music Industry! reference in the second verse, if you can catch it.

Also, I had to rerecord the vocals. Of course they were ass the first time. Just goes to show you, kids, don't sing when you're sick! You'll end up hating it later.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

OXYGEN SICKNESS:

I forget what exactly inspired this song. I think I consider it the weakest in the album, purely because I don't really feel a connection to it. I think I just wanted to write a simple little power pop song with really punchy guitars to change the pace of things a little bit. Not much to say about this one other then that I recorded the vocals first at almost 1 in the morning, which my family DID NOT like at all. I imagine that they especially did not enjoy the sounds of my pick hitting my strings until 3 AM. I have a one track mind when it comes to completing tasks.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

IT'S ALWAYS SOMETHING:

I had gotten into a really big fight with someone I know, which wasn't the first time. We had a constant cycle of arguing and then being cool for a couple of months and then arguing again. It was over something stupid, obviously, but we seemed be hung up on whatever was upsetting us more than we did the other times so, when everything snapped, it SNAPPED. I had written this song a bit before everything snapped when I really needed to get it off my chest somehow. It came out pretty great, though! It's probably one of my more catchy songs.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

22:

A huge chunk of this songs guitarline was actually written by my drummer, Gannon Earhart. He had posted a little video of himself playing the progressions you here from the verse to the first bridge and I thought that it sounded absolutely fucking fantastic. I had forgotten about it until I checked out his Instagram page for whatever reason and found the post again. I then asked Gannon if I learned the progression, can I use it in a song? He said yeah, but that he didn't know how it went anymore. I sat myself down for a full hour with my guitar in hand, in a VERY weird tuning since his was out of tune in the post, and learned it all by ear. I had written the actual lyrics a couple of days after my 22nd birthday, which was a very sad birthday. But, goddamn, I fucking love that guitarline.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

SOCIAL DISTANCING:

This song was written for a quarantine compilation album that was being put together by someone in a Jeff Rosenstock fan page on Facebook that I'm in. I was probably listening to Weezer before writing this, since I mention "Pinkerton" and that guitar solo.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

YOU HAD IT IN YOU (ELISE VERSION):

This track was pretty much inspired by Little Big League's "Tokyo Drift" and all of American Football's "LP1". I wanted to write an "emo" song and use my distortion pedal in one my songs (which I spent $80 dollars on, just to have it sit in my drawer). The intro riff had been sitting in my phone for a month or two labeled as "Remember The Good Times? idea" and I was rattling it around in my head, trying to come up with something to follow it up. I had the bright idea to just strum the intro riff but in CHORD form because I'm a SMART and ORIGINAL musician.

It was originally meant for a quarantine compilation that I'm putting together with a bunch of other people, but decided to put it here. I just really fucking vibe with it. I consider it my best song yet!

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

MORNING ALARMS:

Yet another song from :Band Aids & Skateboards Made My Summer Suck". Some of my friends may remember this song, especially Said (it's about him!). It was one of the only good songs off that album so I thought that I should salvage it and use it somewhere else. It jumped around from album to album until I threw it in for consideration of the next EPAB! album and now it's on this. It was heavily influenced by one AJJ song that I can’t remember. I think it was "Distance"? But you can hear the melody line of that song in the chorus. The guitar line was actually influenced by Alex G’s "Gnaw", or at least the strumming pattern was. I was pretty much obsessed with it when Justin showed it to me.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

SEASON FOR EVERYTHING:

This was also another song intended for that compilation album that I'm working on and it was written for that project, until I decided that I didn't want to make my songs sound so dark for that project. So, I scrapped it and added it to my 50 track project. Obviously, I added it to this album, too.

Fun fact: this is the first song that I mixed in FL Studio with. It sounds pretty fucking great! Obvs, I had to go back to mix it again as I learned new stuff, but it was still a nice experience to finally be free from the clutches of Audacity. And, come on, do I need to even tell you that it's a Weezer rip off at this point?

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

SOUTH COAST:

On the set of a student film that I was acting in, I had brought my bass for a couple of scenes. I started playing random things on it on the times I wasn’t needed on set and came up with the beginning bass riff. It sounded really cool so I cataloged it and forgot about it for some time. I went through my phone a couple of weeks later when I was looking for ideas for songs and ran across this bassline I had titled “Coast idea”. I got to work writing guitar and drum parts for it all and it all came nicely! I was stumped on the lyrics for it all so I spent an hour or so humming along to the verse guitar lines and I don’t think that my parents liked it at 12 AM. The outro lyrics were lyrics that were sitting in my phone for almost 6 months and I found that they fit nicely with the song, so I used those, too! So RECORD and SAVE every idea you have. You'll thank me later.