About the album
The making of this album came as a complete surprise to me. I had not done much of anything musically in about 6 years. Within a year after releasing my EP Moths and Butterflies in 2009, I pretty much put the whole thing down. I thought I had lost the ability to use music as a form of self expression as my life took other turns. Although I want this body of work to speak for itself, I did want to give some context and background of how A Ghost With a Fish Eye Lens came about. For me, a little of the story behind it is worth sharing.
The entirety of this work and the recording of it was made when I was going through a very difficult struggle with Major Depression. This episode was severe enough to where my life was completely hijacked by it, and for a time, found it near impossible to do much of anything. I stopped working, exercising, socializing and pretty much lost the ability to take care of myself. I went from being an endurance athlete to hardly being able to will myself to move around the block. During this time, surprisingly, I found one of the few things I could do, and actually felt a need to do, was make music again. In fact, my revisit to writing songs became such a critical outlet for me and one of the only forms of relief for me when things were really dark. Rather organically, everything that was coming out musically became something of a journal, or a way to document my own dance with depression. Many of the songs are actually not meant to be "downers" but more about dissecting the nature of the beast and actually trying to understand what was happening to me. The music originally started as instrumental electronica musings just to take myself out of my own head. At some point this morphed into more of a songwriting venture as I found I had a lot to say and a direction for the songs.
The creation of this record was also made rather humbly as well, with VERY barebones equipment. I basically created a little makeshift recording studio in my parent's shed, surrounded by gardening tools. I had a little space heater for warmth, a borrowed guitar, an iPad, and an assortment of studio equipment bought on a shoe string budget. Using very minimal equipment did allow me to explore a lot of unconventional techniques to get the sound and feel I wanted. I also had no idea what I was doing on the sound engineering side of things. Although I have been composing with guitars, drum machines and synths for years, I had never been the sound engineer for my own projects, so I was shooting in the dark with the recording and mixing techniques.
So I share a bit of the backstory behind this recent work and battle with mental illness because I feel there is a pervasive lack of understanding and also a good deal of stigma about illness in the head. In particular, depression. I had to get over my own stigma about what was going on with me...and yes, Major Depression is an illness, not a state people choose to dwell in. If someone told me to "get over it", "move on" or "snap out of it" they might just as well have been asking me to get over diabetes, the flu, or a broken leg.
Although I am normally a rather private person, I did feel compelled to open up about my depression for a few reasons. One, because it was a driving force behind this latest musical endeavor. The second is because one of the things that helped me along during my dark days was hearing of other people's stories and battles with mental illness. It certainly made me realize I wasn't alone in my struggles and that a hell of a lot of people deal with throughout their lives. Needless to say, this is the most deeply personal musical project I have ever done and feel very grateful for this album being such a silver lining through a difficult time. So yeah, enjoy the tunes, and spread the word if it resonates with you! Thanks so much! And for those with their own personal battles with depression or mental illness, my heart goes out to you. Keep fighting the good fight. Things do get eventually get better!
