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.
What I had in the early part of 2015 was a Blue Yeti USB microphone and 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 engineered any of my songs.
Simulation Avenue was the antithesis of everything its elder sibling, Lesser Tragedies, was. Lesser Tragedies was studio-produced, well-rehearsed, and carried the charming, but outlandish, belief that those songs would propel me to some form of musical repute. Simulation Avenue, meanwhile, was self-produced with the aforementioned Blue Yeti microphone, built in 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, 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 party.
I don’t know what these eight songs are, but they are undoubtedly something. Despite all of my dreams I’ve held for my songs at different times, the only thing worthy of measuring my creative success by was that something. For by most any other measurement, I would probably be a failure.
“Twilight Waltz,” the album’s closing track, prods along in no hurry to go anywhere. I played it live only once, --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” is pretty undeniably a love song of sorts. 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.”
The song's 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.