A Simulated Avenue
I have decided to start a creative journal. Here, on the seventh anniversary of Simulation Avenue, on a stormy night in the darkness of my den, I have opted to tell stories and meander about my creative life. The purist in me wishes this process was something I might have started when I penned my first song 13 years ago, but, as we so often do in life, we move forward with what we have to work with.
What I had to work with in the early part of 2015 was a Blue Yeti USB microphone and a direct connection into my laptop running Adobe Audition 1.5 —a program that might predate the invention of instruments, but I can’t totally be sure. This was to be the first time I self-engineered any of my songs.
Simulation Avenue was the antithesis of everything its elder sibling, Lesser Tragedies, was. Lesser Tragedies was studio-produced, rehearsed, and carried the charming, but nonetheless outlandish, belief that those songs would propel me to some form of musical repute; Simulation Avenue was self-produced with the aforementioned Blue Yeti microphone, built with an as-I-go, budget-free mentality, and carried the belief that my songs were destined to do very little outside the walls of my bedroom.
Simulation Avenue also carried with it that I had no idea what I was doing. I had only the most rudimentary ideas of how to record things coherently, but Simulation Avenue made me a believer that I could, in some passably acceptable way, bring my songs into recorded existence without relying on any outside force.
I have this album playing in my headphones and am pleased by the sonic reminder that I, somehow, pulled it off. I don’t know what these songs are, but they are undoubtedly something. Despite all of my pie-in-the-sky dreams I’ve held at one time or another for my songs, the only thing I have ever wished to measure my creative success by was that something. For by most any other measurement, I would probably be a failure.
“Twilight Waltz,” the album’s closer and playing now as I continue typing, prods along in no hurry to go anywhere. I remember playing it live only once, on Valentine’s Day, 2015, a month before the album released, at a show in Delevan, Illinois, where the ambience of the room demanded as much slow, quiet material as I could muster. The appropriate thing is that “Twilight Waltz” might be the most blatant love song I have ever written. Though often obscured by wandering metaphors and imagery, the song's spirit is summed up in the closing line of the chorus: “But, love, they’re all waltzing for you.”
I’ve often thought that despite writing this song without any specific direction in mind, its final resting place is with that line: Every creative aspiration, every line of lyrics, every song that I have no idea what it’s about, is in homage to the girl I hope they all one day attract to me. Each song a romantic love letter of sorts, often veiled by language and grandeur of fantastical tales, often too shy, as I am, to deliver its intentions without evasion. But for a fleeting moment, as fleeting as twilight itself, I dropped the charade. This is all for her, even when I don’t think it is. Should she arrive one day, what an offering she will have waiting for her. Should she never arrive, what a magnificent monument to unrequited love I will have left behind.