For the Dreamers

With this album fast nearing completion, I've been reflecting on the creative process and my journey as a composer/songwriter over the past several years.

I've been working on this album in some form for about 7 or 8 months now, and it's a pretty surreal experience to listen to these mixes and realize that it's nearly finished. The creative process is weird and wonderful, and in a very real sense, I almost feel more like a bystander than I do a creator, just watching it all materialize. 

These pieces have changed a lot since their first iterations, and it will never cease to amaze me how months of work, ideas, melodies, chord progressions, arrangements, production decisions, and no small amount of serendipity cascade into a tidy, unassuming, 3-minute audio file. This is one of my favorite things ever, and I feel so incredibly blessed for the opportunity to be creative.

Tom Waits once said, "Songs are really just very interesting things to be doing with the air." 

I really like that.

Speaking of things I really like, Sufjan Stevens's "The BQE" provided a lot of inspiration for this album. This piece strikes such a fascinating balance between ominous and hopeful. And there's just something charming about 7/8 time.

It might come off as a bit odd that I'm releasing an instrumental orchestral album under my own name, just because I've always released singer/songwriter stuff as Nicholas Webber. But honestly, in a lot of ways, I think this album is more like me than anything I've released.

In many ways, this record is a dream project for me. 

I've been wanting to make orchestral, movie soundtrack-esque music for years. When I was thinking about this blog post tonight, I remembered this mildly embarrassing recording I made in high school, circa 2012. This was one of my earliest composition endeavors (clearly before I learned that note quantization is a thing). A high school boy frantically attempting to play timpani rolls with individual hits on a keyboard in his bedroom must have been a comical sight.

I've always found instrumental music to be very moving and evocative. I often find that the absence of lyrics ignites my imagination. It allows me to make my own story. 

My hope for this album is that you can find a story in it.

Dreamers, keep doing what you do. I didn't ever think I'd have an opportunity to write/record an orchestral album.

Sometimes it's really wonderful to be wrong.