caesura 004/001

The caesura 004/001 recording was a return to solo composition and my first experimentations with attempting to format my ideas into modern rock. Previous compositions were explorations in breaking rules and defying genre boundaries, so it seemed like the time to challenge myself by trying to understand the commercial radio format.

The songs 'clean' and 'fixed/real' loosely followed the rock guidelines of big drums and big guitars, but true to form I strayed outside the box with 'aphrodisiac'.

I just had nothing to do on the fourth of July, so I headed into the studio to see what would happen. I was originally thinking of something pretty laid back, but ended up with an up tempo beat and ran with it. The vocals were a stream of consciousness one-take-wonder, inspired by a flame that had moved across the country. They had a very rap feel to them and later on I realized that they sounded a lot like my teen years music influence Prince. Funny thing was I had to write the lyrics down and memorize them after they had been recorded; felt kind of backwards.

All the songs on this were about personal relationships, but from various perspectives. It was the beginning of a dark time of writing that took a long time to work through.

Doing most of the engineering and production by myself, I learned a great deal, particularly how much further I had to go with these skills.