Weird Little Hill People
Happy Solstice
I like to read John Donne’s “A Nocturnal Upon St. Lucy’s Day” on the Solstice. It’s so dark and the rhymes are gorgeous.
Dead and interr'd; yet all these seem to laugh,
Compar'd with me, who am their epitaph.
Yummy bummer.
Yesterday I took my first steps toward launching my album, After the Pulse, which is still planned for a February 7 release unless something happens to change that. The first step was to finally decide on the first single (I picked “Weird Little Hill”), and how to position it within my discography so as not to confuse people too much. I elected to use the overall album cover, by Spike Milliken, for the singles so that when the full album comes out it will be very obvious that they are all part of the same project. So I uploaded everything into DistroKid, the track and the art, and set January 2nd for the release date.
When I woke up this morning, I found that Spike had delivered a really crisp high-res image of some concept art he had done when we were discussing the cover art. The piece is so beautiful and haunting, and so evocative of “Weird Little Hill,” that I couldn’t bear to not use it.
So this morning I made a special Solstice early release, on Bandcamp only, ahead of the general streaming release. And I used the concept art at the risk of confusing people. The good thing about Bandcamp is that I can just send a message to everyone who follows me or buys a track of mine, so if there is any confusion I can clear it right up. Can’t do that on Spotify!
If you want to hear the song, or even buy it, click that image or this link and it should take you to the track on Bandcamp.
I didn’t expect to do this when I woke up this morning, but the Solstice timing was irresistible. Last night I was feeling pretty good about having initiated the new album’s launch in the middle of the longest night, since it’s the first big event of the new year for me and marks the end of last year’s singlemost concentrated project. I don’t know what I will get up to in 2025, I don’t have any plans as clear and focused as this one was at the beginning of 2024.
Now that I’ve committed, it seems inevitable that “Weird Little Hill” should be the first single. I got the germ of the idea for this song while returning from Palm Desert and Joshua Tree on December 26th, 2020. The images and snatches of verse stayed with me but I had no idea how to make a song out of them, so I enrolled in a Berklee School of Music songwriting class in hopes of learning some strategies. Although the class was quite a bit over my head in terms of theory, and I initially panicked, the teacher talked me into staying with it. And by the time we got to the third exercise, I found the form I had been looking for, finished writing this song, and then recorded it on an evening I’ll never forget even though there was nothing otherwise memorable about it. I heard the song I had been wanting to write, an incredible moment, even though it was pretty crudely put together entirely in Ableton. I started to imagine what it would be like with real instruments, real people playing and singing instead of just me and my DAW, and those thoughts eventually led to a handful of similar songs and to my contacting Ryan Pollie late in 2023 and asking if he might want to help me make an album. This album.
But it all started with “Weird Little Hill.”
Here’s the first demo version, by the way. It still holds a lot of magic for me because I could hear my voice in it, maybe for the first time. But instrumentally it’s a bit sterile.
To really do it justice I needed help—so much help. From Ryan and the musicians he brought in, Will Fox and Bailey Mae Gardener, and the expert mixing of Brian Rosemeyer and the masterful mastering of Rob Dobson.
“Weird Little Hill” will still be out on all the streaming platforms on January 2nd, but for those who prefer Bandcamp, or just want to hear it sooner, why wait?
Happy Solstice!