Well, here we go again!

This is now my fourth active blog, because I feel I need a place to keep public updates and rants involving my own music and associated projects without cluttering up either my other blogs or my Facebook profile. Basically, I’ll use this to dump all sorts of information, updates, and randomness for anyone who cares to check it out. If you’re reading this chances are you either know me personally or are a fan of my music already, so I need no introduction. On the off chance that you made it here without going directly through me, and have no clue who I am, here’s the rundown:

I’m an amateur rapper on Scrub Club Records. I wrote that over on the side too, see? You can look to the right of this post and see exactly where I would have continued with that sentence. In any case though, you can check out my debut on Scrub Club Records for free right here!

I’m pretty proud of how this album turned out, and can’t extend enough thanks and gratitude to Lefthand for mixing it, and S-Rock for making the killer beats. Thanks guys! In the past couple of months this has been available it has been downloaded hundreds of times. That may not seem like a lot compared to conventional music sales, but for me, just some guy making songs, that’s incredible. Hundreds of people have heard my album, so why not keep going into the thousands?

I didn’t make this blog to talk about my past endeavors though (Okay, maybe a little bit…), I know you are interested in the future. The project I’m currently working on is the Idiot Zoo mixtape. “Idiot Zoo” is a title I’ve wanted to use for an album for years now, and then I kept getting side-tracked. First it got side-tracked by Tunnel Vision, then by Human Barcode, and then again by Empty Handed. Now I’m finally actually putting in work on “Idiot Zoo.” It’s not really a concept album, the general theme, if any, is going to be focusing on the faults of human nature. The Idiot Zoo as it were is society. And no, I’m not trying to be deep, I just think it’s a funny title. If you needed meaning though, there it is. I’ve decided after doing a ton of solo stuff to open up this release to a wide array of collaborations, and since there’s no strong central theme, or any consistent beatsmiths working on it, I’m labeling it as a mixtape. So far I have a good handful of demos done, but I’m not sure how many of them will even make it. I also have a lot of collabs set up, but I’ve been slacking. Even now I should be working on music instead of blogging, maybe I’m just creating this as a form of procrastination.

I’m also currently in the midst of shooting a music video for what is probably still my most popular and widely known song: Stalker. The music video concept has been a long time coming, as I knew almost instantly that this would make for a killer video. I just never really had the motivation or the means to make it. Last summer I was really pushing for it, but it just never happened, and once winter rolled in it sort of killed any plans to film the video that I want to make. Because really, who wants to stalk someone in the winter? I imagine stalkers just hate the winter. They can’t hide in bushes effectively, and sitting in trees would just get cold. Lesson learned, if you’re going to be a stalker, don’t live in Minnesota. Unless you only want to be a seasonal stalker.

Back to the point though, this is the summer/fall that the video is happening, in fact I’ve already begun shooting! I wrote a script and everything, I’m on top of it this time. I also managed to borrow a pretty nice camera from a friend (Thanks Mandie!), as well as a tripod (Thanks Staples!), so I feel all official about it and shit. I wrestled with the idea of recording it on my Flip HD camera last year, but ultimately knew that if I was going to shoot a video for this song I had to do it right.

Speaking of, I also have re-recorded the actual song, and should really send that off to get mixed so that it’ll be ready for when the video is shot. What’s interesting about Stalker is that it’s probably the oldest song that I still perform and really keep around at all.

Side note: I just ended up on my old Myspace page because I was looking for the blog that I wrote after I released Stalker for the first time so I would know what year it came out (Yeah, I’m meticulous like that), and the last blog I had made on Myspace was from 2009 about how I was about to start working on “Idiot Zoo.” That’s actually pretty damn funny.

Anyway as I was saying… Stalker came out originally in 2008, it was a collaboration between myself and my friend ThreeJP, who I used to make some songs with, but he sort of just stopped doing music stuff altogether after a handful of songs with me and a couple of solo attempts. It’s a shame too, because he had a lot of potential. In any case though, we sat down in my room one night in ‘08 and wrote then recorded Stalker. The entire thing was born out of one line I thought of at school: “I’m a stalker, I’m gonna follow you home. Wherever you’re going, that’s where I’m gonna roam!” I started singing this in the cafeteria and people thought it was funny, so I said to ThreeJP, “let’s make a song about it.” When I found the beat it all fit together perfectly, little did I know that it would go on to be so well-received even to this day. It really is a fun song though that we wrote out of a joke around Halloween time, and when it first came out ThreeJP was actually incredibly embarrassed because of the subject material. At my very first official show I dragged him along and made him perform it with me, he felt ridiculous. Since then I went on to re-record the song quite a few times actually. The first recording was awful quality, and we were both pretty bad at flowing back then too. All we had going was some clever writing and the correct tone of voice. Also seeing as how ThreeJP doesn’t do music stuff at all anymore, there were a lot of cases where I would have to perform the song solo, and seeing as how he’s moved semi-far away, the new version of the song is also re-recorded solo. This will make the video actually possible to make in time.

The fun thing about Stalker though and that second verse is that I can sort of outsource it to different people. If you’ve ever seen me perform alongside my good friend Mattari 2600 you know exactly what I’m talking about. He wrote his own guest verse for Stalker to perform with me at shows that takes the creepiness factor past 11. It’s fantastic.

But I feel I’m rambling on about the song now, I really do have a lot to say about it apparently, and I could keep going! But I don’t want to get long-winded. Instead I’ll just leave you with this: I am finally at long-last working on Idiot Zoo, and I am also working on the Stalker music video. More updates and random rants to come!