Twenty-ish

I counted and I have a little more than twenty songs I’m working on right now. I’m trying to figure out at this point what I really want from the next record. Everything that anyone may have heard from us at this point was written before my twenty first birthday, before I passed into the snake pit of the music industry, before I saw the country spread itself before me, before I let my concept of love diminish from a bursting idealism to burnt out skepticism, before I wandered the streets of Manhattan in the stupor of four AM, before I made the error of believing the chirping record execs… My concept of the world has changed so much and my music taste hasn’t excluded many old favorites, but I have placed a lot of new and different songwriters in their company.

My voice is not significantly different though, and I think that I’m still stitched together by the same thread, but I’ve sewn myself into such a mishmash of varied elements that may or may not fit together or make sense to anyone but me. I don’t want to put out an album that strays too far from Charmingly Awkward, I want the progression of my songs to be gradual so that each album builds on the foundation of the last, hopefully leaving behind a cohesive catalogue that I can be proud of, that slowly but surely reached some sort of genuine destination. I also dont want to be fashionable, I may walk and drink coffee and pabst amongst the hipsters, but the moment I hear one of them humming my tune, i'll know I fucked up and will be tossed into the closet in a few months along with their clothes and haircut of the day. Charmingly Awkward is a compilation of the best songs I wrote in the last couple years of my teens, so naturally what I’m writing now should be the best songs from my early twenties, but what if the me in my early twenties has given up on a certain forced cleverness, has read too much Henry Miller and over-saturated himself in The Band and Leonard Cohen instead of Weezer and The Pumpkins?

I hope what I’m writing now will make complete sense to anyone who has given us more than a casual listen. It’s my life, but I’m bound to change, and I like to change my environment often as well. What I create is product of the time and place I’m in, I guess. There was a certain insecurity, a certain sense of humor, that I feel like late-teenage me had as a symptom of his age, that may have been altered slightly by the change in years and all the oddities of the last year of my life, though to anyone but me it may be too small of a change to notice.

All I know is I’m glad that we’re getting to a new record now and not any later, because I don’t want too much time to pass by before you see me again. I want to keep it familiar and consistent enough that you can’t sense the change, I don’t want to come around next time like a cousin you only see on Thanksgiving and have you say, “my how you’ve grown!”