Until I Reach the Sun March 30, 2022 (Patreon)

My body gave up on me yesterday.

I think I’ve forgotten how to write down my thoughts.

Growing older makes me realize how limited I am as an individual. It’s the kind of discontent that makes me want to be better.

I don’t know what I’m writing anymore. It seems that two years in quarantine has taken awy my ability to write cohesively.

Or did I ever have that skill in the first place?

My mind is a collection of jumbled up thoughts. I can’t even put them in order to make them presentable.

I feel exhausted. I’m grateful, but I’m exhausted. I’m too exhausted to think; too exhausted to make sense of things. But I can tell you how I feel. I feel dissatisfied. I’m not 100% content with last Sunday’s recording session. I suspect that it’s mainly because I wasn’t able to record my guitar and vocal parts.

Can we just fast forward to… Wait. I just realized that recording was on Monday, not Sunday. And today is a Wednesday/. I’m losing track of the days.

Can we fast forward to next Monday? I want to get in the studio and sing over the tracks Jan, Bry, and Joric recorded. I recordied the guide tracks, but my guitar was out of tune and I was singing under a mask. It’s not the same.

Until I Reach the Sun part 1 has been quite a journey. Lots of lessons learned in the process of making it. It’s not at the level I expected (nothing ever is) but it’s definitely better than the previous album. I am again stuck in the limbo between horrible and perfect. Not so much mediocre as it is good but imperfect. It’s what the band Half Alive might describe as the Now, Not Yet.

It’s Not Yet at the level I expected it to be, but it’s good for Now. Sigh. Should I have practiced like crazy in quarantine? Should I have spent more time practicing how to stay aligned to a metronome? That’s one of my main worries about the album. It sounds so “metronomed.” But maybe that’s just me.

I’m hoping that the imperfections could pass off as wabi-sabi, the beauty in transience and imperfection. I’m hoping that the recordings aren’t too off the mark that it distracts people from the passion that we put into the tracks. I don’t want the record to sound too clean, either. Alex understands that, so I’m excited to hear her mixes.

Another thing I’m worried about is that the tracks won’t be as well-received as the previous ones only because they aren’t love songs. No Aphrodite here. No Dywtbm. That will come later, but that’s not what the album wants to convey. I expect a “flop” of sorts with this release.

And yet I still want to push through because I believe it’s a story that deserves to be told. I believe it can speak to a few people out there who need to hear this: people suffering in silence who are looking for a place to rest. This next album is about my personal journey painful isolation towards rest, conveying it first through allegory in part 1, then getting a bit more personal in part 2.

It’s really not AOTY material. It’s not recommend-worthy. No, you can’t send this to your crush unless you misunderstand the lyrics. It’s an album that’s meant to be listened to in private. But even then not, everyone might relate.

In fact, I hope no one relates to this kind of sorrow at all. If anyone listens to Until I Reach the Sun and says, “Hmm, this doesn’t resonate with my personal experience. Album one was better,” that would make me happy for the person. Please, friend, live the rest of your life without knowing the pain of loneliness, the shame of getting what you deserve, and the frustration that comes with life not going the way you want it to. I remember telling TJ De Ocampo that if a world without pain means losing the ability to write “great” art that stems from suffering, then I would gladly give up my songs.

In a sense, this album is transitory. This album is not the end. My hope is that no one dwells on these songs as long as I have — 4 full years and counting. I firmly believe that we’ll live in a world without suffering and completely full of love, cheesy as that sounds. In that world, these songs have no place.

But until then, I hope these songs make the heavy journey a little bit lighter.

Thoughts for today. Brb, my mind is on April 4 when I get to record my guitar and vocal parts.