Awesome! XD

hey everybody,

i’m very pleased to announce the release of my new album entitled (for obvious reasons) Awesome! XD. it is a collection of the work i have done over the last year. in the past i have put a lot of time into producing a lot of music that i often ended up leaving unfinished. often i would put so much time into producing something that the final result was never good enough to justify all the work i’d put into it, so i’d just lose interest and move on. also, music doesn’t tend to get better when it’s overproduced.

i recognized that what makes a song great it the song it self. the idea. the soul. not the packaging. packaging in this case refers to the production. you can have a great song recorded with the simplest means available and it will touch more people then a song recorded by the best studio musicians with the best recording equipment and produced by the best producers that just doesn’t have the heart in it. also, putting a lot of energy into producing is a complete waste if the music is never released.

i decidid to give priority to the soul of the music. i created a workflow that allows me to produce the music extremely fast and learned to finish songs to a level i can live with instead of getting caught up in details and abandoning them. most of the songs on Awesome! XD were done in a matter of days rather than weeks from initial idea to finished production.

i wrote the song sara for my cousin’s 15th birthday literally while i was making breakfast that same day. i wrote the song awesome on mothersday 2010 when i was hanging out with my mom by the riverside in salzburg, austria playing the ukulele. the last stand is a song i did together with my good dude derek who i met in the summer of 2010 as he was traveling through salzburg. we basically made the whole track in two evenings before he returned home to canada. little clown was also written and recorded in a day. the next day i went for a walk and made a music video for it too. the only song that falls out of this new technique is what’s real, but i put that on the album because it’s just too awesome not to. XD that’s a prime example of a song that i put a lot of time into. everything you hear, i did with my mouth. see it all is interesting in that it’s the first and only song i ever made without guitar. i did that after a pretty bad bike crash in san francisco on halloween 2009 where i broke my thumb and couldn’t play guitar. (yeah i know, breaking my thumb doesn’t sound like a ‘pretty bad’ bike crash, but i was really lucky. i flew like 30ft through the air and landed on my face) see it all is also the first song i did where i simply left the improvised gibberish i sang instead of actually writing any words. on my life is fun i did that again. i built the song structure and recorded the vocals of the chorus and then just improvised the verses and guitar solo ontop of that. i even filmed myself doing it. check it out! after having produced the last stand together with another person i only just realized how great that is, so i called up my good man josef and invited him over to do a song with me as well. we took turns playing producer, composer and singer and named the song change the weather. the final song on the album, inside of a soul only made it onto the album in the last minute. i wanted to give the people a demonstration of what it’s like when i perform live and compose and produce new music on the spot. everything that happens in that song is completely improvised; the beat, the chords, the bass line, the guitar picking, the hook and all the singing. you can watch it happen here.

so i hope you all enjoy listening to my tunes half as much as i enjoyed making them. you can buy a download of the album for 5 euro’s so, something like 7 dollars or you can just download the 2 songs awesome and little clown for free, but then i want your email address so i can spam the sh*t out of you with offers for viagra prescriptions. no… so i can tell you when