Kyle VanDusen-EP4

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Little old farmer sit by the tree. Foundation led by and hello everyone.

SPEAKER_03 0:11

Welcome to the Sound of Podcast. I'm your host, Steven of the Scott of the Andes. You know me by now. On the show, we have Kyle Van Duzen. He just played a showcase that we did called Cruel April. He is a singer-songwriter. He's from all the way in upstate New York, but he lives in Maryland now. We chatted about his musical journey, writing his songs, his motivations for writing his songs. All of this and more on Sound of Podcast. Kyle, I just want to start off by saying how incredibly jealous I am that your artist name is essentially your real name, and I I can't get away with that, and which is why I had to hide my name behind a stage name. But Kyle Van Dusen. It's a and and I think about all the great Vans in Towns Van Zant, Steven Van Zant. You've already got it. It's in your name.

SPEAKER_01 1:16

Yeah, it's uh I'm flattered. Thank you. Um it's interesting because actually I'm kind of jealous of the folks that have stage names in other monikers they go by. Well, that's because we don't have a cool enough regular name, so we had to make it up. Ah, that's interesting. Because uh, yeah, as I've tried to get in uh a little more exposure and just get out into the music scene, I've thought like I'd you know it'd be great to have a stage name, but what would that be? And I just never come up with anything, and so I've sort of just stuck with my name so far.

SPEAKER_03 1:48

Hey, if it's if it's working, it's working. I I think it looks good. I think on the show, uh, or or at least when I first heard you know, I was like, yeah, that sounds like a honest name. I'm not I'm usually not a fan. I know that popular country does this where they do like the first the the two first names, uh two first names, but it's a last name as well. So like Jake, I don't know, Steven Steve or something like that. And it's just I don't know, all that stuff throws me off. But I I wanted to go back to actually this is also a uh historic episode because usually I try to um split it up in somebody who does like a video interview for the sound of Instagram. I don't uh have them do the show just because I think it's redundant. So you are the first one to do both a video and an audio component. I'm honored. Big deal. But in that, I wanted to because when we did those little uh snippets, I asked you about uh the the anirondix, and uh you were kind of like, yeah, it was fine like growing up. I mean, verbatim that wasn't what you said, but like I I asked you about kind of the the uniqueness of it, and then after we wrapped it, you were like, Oh, wait, I did think about something of the uniqueness. So now we have that opportunity for you to talk about the uniqueness of I mean, I think it was what was it, the music just being in uh upstate and and growing up in that area and what that experience was like and how it it informed you.

SPEAKER_01 3:20

Yeah, I suppose at the time I got hung up on the idea of Adirondack music traditions, which admittedly I I I'm not all that familiar with. Certainly, we have those flavors of music up there, uh lots of bluegrass, lots of folk, um, and like bluegrass-inspired folk. Uh my dad, for example, is in a couple bands that play just a lot of the folk classics. And um, and you'll find a lot of that in the original artists as well as just the more prominent bands, whether original music or cover artists up there.

SPEAKER_03 3:52

But I suppose Is that not your vibe though? Like, is that why you kind of went to the rock centric more is you were like, I can't.

SPEAKER_01 4:00

Yeah, I mean, as a surly teenager, like I can't be caught dead doing whatever my dad's doing. So now, uh, but for myself, I suppose growing up in the Adirondacks, um, in a very rural, remote town, um, and just to give a little background, I forget if I gave this on the interview, but the town I grew up in, Stony Creek, New York, um, has a population of about 700 people year-round. But the geographic area is almost identical to that of Annapolis. And Annapolis has a population of what is it, like 40,000? But I haven't counted everybody, but yeah, maybe something like that. Yeah. Well, once you do count everybody, let me know. But um, so anyway, to where I'm going with this is uh I was very isolated growing up. Had a handful of friends, but you know, they live 10, 15, 20 minute drives away. Um, I spend most of my time on the farm around animals more than people. And so instruments and music were a good distraction for me and just something I immersed myself in kind of as a pastime, because at my age, this was also pre-internet days. So it the world did exist. I remember it. Yeah, so um, you know, before the internet came along and before I was spending all my time on AOL Instant Messenger, I was listening to music or playing music or trying to play music at least. How were you getting exposed to music? Radio friends, uh radio. We had fortunately a great independent radio station over the Vermont border, WEQX 1027. I don't know if they're still around, but they were the last independent radio station we had in the area, and they would play all sorts of alternative music, which I loved. And because you know, they'd be playing all the hard rock and not censoring a lot of it. Um like all the other radio stations. Um was it like a pirate radio one? Or just pirate.

SPEAKER_03 6:05

They were how can they do you can't do that with radio?

SPEAKER_01 6:08

I thought I don't know. I mean, this was the early 90s, man. Anything was possible, yeah. And so, yeah, radio predominantly, because it's um, you know, growing up in the country, the nearest place to see shows that wasn't the local bar that my parents wouldn't take me to. Um, you know, we had to drive 40 minutes to an hour away to any kind of significant music venue. Do you remember the first show that you ever went to?

SPEAKER_03 6:35

Or that you were actively like, I want to go to that show.

SPEAKER_01 6:38

Oh, let me think. Um, it was either Benfolds or Weezer. Oh. And I forget which one came first. And where were they playing? So Weezer we saw in Albany. Okay. Um, so that was like an hour and a half drive for us to get there. But me and my friends, we all got tickets. Oh, it was a great show. I forget who even opened for them, but what year is this? Uh, this was in either 2001 or 2002, I think. Holy shit. So we're talking like post-green album? Post-green album. Okay. Yep. Yeah. And so me and my friends, you know, being uh teenagers of that age, we were just the blue album was our jam.

SPEAKER_04 7:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:18

Um, and in fact, uh, the folks that I went with were mostly my bandmates at the time. We had a little garage band, and Say It Ain't So was like our bread and butter song. Um, I probably played that song more than any other song in my life. And so, of course, when you know we lost each other at the show, it's a big open admission uh mosh pit style. Um, I had happened to get up and managed to be crowdsurfing at the time Say It Ain't So came on. Um, and it was just the greatest moment of my life. And I'm crowdsurfing, I'm looking up at the ceiling, and then somebody grabs my hand, and it's my bandmate also crowd surfing, and it was just like serendipity, like it was just an incredible, yeah, incredible moment, and uh really cemented in my mind like this is what music can be, and just the feelings that it can evoke from people and you know just bring a crowd together to have this experience. It was so cool.

SPEAKER_03 8:16

Yeah. And you were how how did you start? I I know um you had talked about learning guitar from uh what was it? It was Radiohead. It at what initial point were you like, all right, this guitar thing, let me give a good let me give it a go.

SPEAKER_01 8:35

Um, let me see. So I yeah, I was I must have been 13, 12, 13. I forget maybe I was even younger than that. But had an old guitar laying around the house. It was actually my grandfather's electric guitar. It was an old silver tone that um I think those silver tones back in the day, you ordered them from the Sears catalog. Yeah, and then he also we also had my grandfather's old tube amplifier. And so once my dad noticed, like, okay, he's picking around on guitar, let's let's dust this off and let's uh see if we can't get this old tube amp working. And so he did. And of course, the first thing I tried to do was crank it to get distortion out of it. And um, I forgot what the original question was.

SPEAKER_03 9:23

Oh, it was just about like so so you were already kind of messing around with guitar.

SPEAKER_01 9:27

Oh, that's right, yeah. Um and at that point I wasn't playing chords or anything, I was just kind of dinking around on individual strings. Um, and in particular, I attached to what I now know is the pentatonic minor scale. Um, because you know, that's kind of your general rock scale. It just sounds good no matter what note you play on it.

SPEAKER_03 9:49

That's probably all I know, to be fair, scales-wise.

SPEAKER_01 9:54

And um that particular riff from uh Paranoid Android, um, I figured it out on guitar and I thought it was the coolest thing ever. And I thought I was the coolest person ever. If only everybody could see me, I'm a rock star already.

SPEAKER_03 10:13

Like pre-internet, you figured it out on your own. Yep. No tabs for you. Right. It at what point did you get the confidence, or maybe not it or well, what was the next step where you're like, I should start playing with people? When did that come along?

SPEAKER_01 10:28

Um, let's see. That's a good question. Because uh as I mentioned, we had a band in high school, a garage band with me and a few of my classmates. So obviously at some point we must have come up with the idea to play together. Um, but that would have been a few years later at least. I'm not sure if I did play with anybody really. Again, we were in the middle of nowhere, and of course I was too cool to play guitar with my dad, much as he wanted me to. Sorry, dad. Um, but eventually, yeah, we got the idea and we got together and we made it work, and it was uh really cool. Um as I'm sure anybody who's played music with anybody else knows, the experience of playing music with other people is a bit transcendent compared to just you know playing by yourself. Can't be beat. No, no, you can't.

SPEAKER_03 11:22

You're yeah, you're you're connecting in a way that I I don't know. It's yeah, it it surpasses I think many things in terms of well, you're having a conversation, you're having a dialogue musically.

SPEAKER_01 11:35

Yeah, that dialogue, but then at the same time being in sync with each other and just finding that groove that you and that path that you can just both follow.

SPEAKER_03 11:45

Now you mentioned that when you you also had a like a jam band in college as well. How was that different? Or I guess as you kind of grew up and and grew into your own, how was that how were kind of these different stages with the the high school band and then playing with people in college? How how did that differ age-wise? Uh obviously.

SPEAKER_01 12:05

But yeah, so the high school band was very just a garage band in the classical sense. Um all of us came together, didn't really have any formal music education in our instruments, and just made it work. We picked some songs to cover, we wrote some songs together, and it was just fun, just making noise in the garage, and I say making noise in the most joyful way possible. Um, I don't think the neighbors viewed it that way, but and then in college, the group of musicians that I um ended up falling in with were uh of a much higher level of talent. Um our one guitarist, Tom, he was a brilliant guitarist, fantastic, uh huge Pearl Jam fan as well, which you may appreciate. He uh he and the bassist would often do uh Yellow Lead Better on their own. But um anyway, so uh just a great experience falling into that. So with a jam band, as you can imagine, it's a whole lot of just free soloing sections and improvisation, which uh I'd actually kind of learned how to do on my own as a teenager before I went to college, just you know, playing it myself um in the bedroom, trying to figure out scales or at least notes that would go together. And so I happened to slot into that relatively well with the jam band. And a lot of the music that they were playing was generally Grateful Dead or Fish. And much of the Grateful Dead I was very familiar with since my dad was a huge Grateful Dead fan, and we were always listening to that in the house and in the car growing up. So it was kind of a natural fit. It's like, okay, I know these songs, and okay, I have at least a rudimentary sense of how to improvise over it, so let's make it happen.

SPEAKER_03 14:02

What you guys were did you play around campus and stuff, or where did you where did you rock out at?

SPEAKER_01 14:07

Uh mostly in the dorms, or one of our band members, his family, happened to have a vacation home nearby. And so for for at least a year or two, that became our practice space, which was quite fortunate. But you played out and stuff, or you just hung out in the dorms? Uh, we mostly just enjoyed ourselves. Um we we played like a couple frat shows here and there, nothing serious. Uh it's a frat show. Yes. Well, I mean, but did they have a good time? Did you have a good time? Uh we had a good time. Yeah. Um, I'm sure the few people that were paying attention had a good time too.

SPEAKER_03 14:42

I uh well, I I think there's I don't know, college is always interesting to me. And ironically, I wasn't playing a lot of music in college in the school that I went to, but I went down to my friend's college. We were all in a band together, a heavy metal band, and we played down in Asheville, and it was really kind of our last official show as a band together, and it was I I think the weekend was called uh Circus or something like that. Um I'm it's over at Warren Wilson College. Apologies to any Warren Wilson alumni if I messed up the name of this event. It happens in May, I believe, or April. But, anyways, um, you know, just like a celebration weekend or whatever, and we were playing in front of a bunch of college kids, and I think it it it has a lot to do with the age range that you're going in, but like just people don't any any modesty is like thrown to the wind. People are there to have a good time, and it it really, you know. It reminded me a lot of playing in bands in high school too, of that you don't have you know, there's no guardrails, people are really just there to to live and uh love the music and whatever iteration you're doing, and and if people want to go crazy, they'll they'll grow crazy. Um, which I don't know. There's just something to me that speaks of the the inhibitions of um just well, I I guess in this case it's the youth, but even still, like I was at a I was at a punk show um a few days ago and there were older people young in a life and and I think it's an energy thing too, which is also curious to me if like being in the songwriter scene now and you can have you can have a toe tapper and and I think as long as you and even if it is just you acoustically and if you have people's attention from that, I think that also just speaks something. And I you know, and it doesn't have to be a full band experience as long as you can engage with people in that way.

SPEAKER_01 16:43

Oh yeah, no doubt. Um I think rhythm is one of those underutilized or overlooked aspects of music. A lot of people key in on melody and uh virtuosic performance, but but at the end of the day it's the beat, at least for me. And when I when I write music, um a lot of it is very rhythm driven. Um if for no other reason than I'm not as great at writing melodies, in my opinion, or you know, virtuosic or bombastic performances.

SPEAKER_03 17:17

I I think it uh well I think it just taps into the we're talking about a nature thing here if humans um have inherent rhythm in them, whether they want to admit it or not, but this comes from a bazillion years of evolution of walking and your heartbeat. And that's always a a consistent thing. And to me, when it comes to like songwriting, and this is where I feel like there's a misconception with um some people of when you say you're a singer-songwriter, people assume that it is like it's acoustic coffeehouse chill, and that's not that's not what it is to me. It means you write songs, and if it's a fast song or a slow song, is up to you. But a singer-songwriter me doesn't mean that the song is is at low mellow volume and and whatever. Um, it's it's whatever you want it to be. Um, and I feel like there's just a misunderstanding from the general public about that, which is fine, they can have it. I just know what it means to me.

SPEAKER_01 18:22

Yeah, I tend to agree. Um, it's almost become a pigeonholed genre in and of itself, at least the way it's been presented to the general public.

SPEAKER_03 18:32

Now, when you were in what were you guys called, by the way? The college band.

SPEAKER_01 18:35

Uh the college band? I don't know if we had a name. No, if I'm honest.

SPEAKER_03 18:40

How many, how many people were in it?

SPEAKER_01 18:41

So let's see. We had a drummer, three guitarists, and a bassist. So five of us.

SPEAKER_03 18:47

Oh my god, you had three guitarists?

SPEAKER_01 18:49

Yep. Rhythm, solo, and a bass. Wait. So Tom was definitely our lead guitarist because he was head and shoulders the best guitarist in the band. Uh Sean was on acoustic, uh, great acoustic player. Um, wish I knew where he was today. Then myself also, I would lead sometimes, but for the most part, I would get there on rhythm. But I was doing more ambient things with guitar effects.

SPEAKER_03 19:15

Oh, interesting. Wait, let's let's go down this rabbit hole. Okay, because this is a never-ending right with the the guitar people with their with their pedals. Where did that start for you?

SPEAKER_01 19:27

That started when was the first pedal I got? That's right, for Christmas in high school. My parents got me one of those Zoom multi-fX pedals.

SPEAKER_03 19:39

I remember those.

SPEAKER_01 19:40

I think it had a built-in expression pedal, but otherwise the whole thing was entirely plastic and very I don't want to say cheaply made, but it certainly wasn't going to go on tour with me. And I d delved into the thing. There were so many effects on board. I didn't know whether it was good enough quality or not, and I didn't care at the time, but I had the ability to combine multiple effects, and I spent hours and hours, weeks, however long, just playing with this thing and getting all sorts of crazy sounds out of it and loving it the whole time. And I got a lot of use out of that in our garage band before I eventually graduated to well, it was actually another Digitech multi-fX pedal, which came in a metal enclosure and was much higher quality. But same thing for me, it's okay, a whole new um uh set of sounds that I can play with and experiment with. And then eventually in college, I think that um gave up the ghost, and I started diving into uh more your more traditional um single effect pedals. I think my first one was from the guitar store just outside just in town outside of campus. I think it was it was either a boss C S1 compressor, which was kind of an interesting choice. Yeah, not everybody's usual first pedal, no. Yeah, no. Uh, but I was kind of playing with it and it was just an interesting, you know, I had no concept of compression at that time. So playing with that and hearing how it evened out the sound and affect the the attack of um the picked notes was really cool to play with. The guy saw I was playing with it in the store, and he said, Hey, if you want to borrow this for the weekend, and if you don't like it, bring it back free of charge. Um, but if you do like it, you know, then uh we'll charge you for it. And I free trial. It was like a library. Free trial, exactly. Pedal library. And I've still got it to this day. Oh and then shortly after I went back to the same store, they had a used boss SD1, their super overdrive. I still have that pedal as well. Actually, every boss pedal I bought, I still have. have.

SPEAKER_03 22:00

That makes me happy that you that you have those. Uh part of me still regrets that I was a dingist and just didn't take care of my first guitars. And pedals. There was one pedal I'll I'll never I rule the day. It was a Scotty and pedal from Anthrax. He had his own pedal for a while. And it was great. And we used it on a couple of the albums that we recorded when I was in the heavy metal band and I I was a dipshit and I either gave it away or I don't know. It's but we don't have it anymore. Yeah great we greatly miss it. I'm sure it's out there making somebody happy. Yeah well you can't find them. You can't even find them in the used market. But um on the you still having those pedals reminds me of there there's a Iron Maiden has a YouTube video of Steve Harris's base rig. He's been using the same base rig for the past 30 years. Whoa still like since they started it's the same one. And I'm like I don't know if that's just like an OCD thing or he's like if it ain't broke don't fix it. Yeah. But like I I'd like to think it's more the the latter than the four maybe a combination of both but I don't know there's something to be said for that which is why like I don't go too crazy in my in my pedal world because I know I'll get lost. I know I'll get lost and there'll just be too many and it'll become an obsession and I have plenty of friends that like it's that's that's their thing and I'm like you're never going to find the sound that you're you're looking for. You know that right oh it's an endless I mean maybe you'll get closer but it's and what is it you're you're chasing the dragon thing is yeah tone chasing oh it's real I actually my songwriting didn't take off until I stopped tone chasing.

SPEAKER_01 23:48

When I got back into music during COVID I of course took the opportunity to buy some new gear um including a boss katana which is the boss amp has all their effects built in digitally into the amp and I dove right into it. It was like having that zoom pedal all over again except amplified and with so many more options. You can get a phone app you could hook it up to the amp and like play with all the settings on the fly the amount of settings that you could change was even more in depth than the pedals that were being emulated and I played with that for about a year before I realized I was spending more time turning knobs than I was actually playing guitar.

SPEAKER_03 24:38

And uh sorry oh uh I was gonna say what um that you got into it during the the start of the pandemic what kind of brought that on was it just a lack of things to do or it was just something that you had shelved for a bit that you had missed or what what brought that back around?

SPEAKER_01 24:57

I think as a lot of us experienced during the pandemic uh we had a lot of free time on our hands and I needed to feel like I was doing something with my time that was productive. I had actually given up not given up but taken a hiatus from music about 10 years prior and since then I was feeling more like a consumer rather than a creator and that itch was kind of starting to come back inside of me. So I it it felt like it was the right time to come back to music and pick up the guitar again. And of course with all the free time in the world it turned out to be the right time.

SPEAKER_03 25:37

Now when you were in the the college band we'll call them the college uh the the fearless college uh dorm dormsman the dormsman there you go there's there's your band name post 15 years or whatever. Um were you guys writing songs or were you doing other people's stuff or when did that come about for you?

SPEAKER_01 25:59

Oh we uh so in the college band we were covering mostly fish and grateful dead oh right as you said yeah so when did that come about for you then where you were like hey let me try this let me try this songwriting business see what that's about that was a couple years ago so to go back to the previous point so I I put the amp down I put my electric guitar down and I bought an acoustic guitar and I found myself playing so much more and actually playing because there were no knobs to turn I just picked it up and it sounded good and it inspired me to play and it inspired me to get more creative with what I was playing and to explore the fretboard and just music in general. And at that point things started coming to me mostly just on the guitar not so much the lyrics or anything but and I would start putting musical pieces together phrases licks chord progressions etc and naturally when you put those things together it felt like okay we need to put some words to this let's let's say something or let's try to describe what feelings or sensations this is this music is evoking within me. Let's try and complete it.

SPEAKER_03 27:21

And in all of that time when you were playing other people's stuff that had never kind of I mean I'm sure it crossed your mind but it you just maybe never enacted on it or or acted on it?

SPEAKER_01 27:33

Not so much we I I've I dabbled in songwriting in high school and in college but I never considered myself a songwriter. They were just songs to throw together just to have songs. But now I that I've come back to it and approached it there's more intent and I feel I feel just like I'm in a better place to write music. Because that was that was the reason I took the hiatus from music to begin with. That was in 2010 I had lived in Maryland for a few years. I was on my own and I was still kind of playing music in my apartment and occasionally with people and I just didn't like it. I didn't get enjoyment out of it and I kind of realized I was doing it for very selfish reasons. And it it was kind of a wake up call to me and I thought back about my experience ever since I first picked up guitar. It was all about me it was a way to glorify and bring attention to myself and granted I had a lot of good times in high school and college made great friends their experiences I wouldn't turn uh you know give back for the world but eventually the path that led me down was one that I just where I didn't like myself at the end of the day. I was still trying to write music well I say write music or play music in my apartment with the idea that this would give bring me attention that this would bring me glory and it's like this this isn't realistic and it's just not a good motivation to play music. And at that point I just put it down and I kind of didn't look back until COVID came about.

SPEAKER_03 29:20

And it's and again when I say it felt right it's felt right because I was ready to approach it again with better intentions and honesty to create something to give back to the world or just to put out there for whoever might enjoy it whether that's one person, a million people it doesn't matter but it's just something to have pure expression to put out there yeah I mean and I'm not I I think I've told you this but I think the one that that turned me on to your stuff was is Stony Creek is that's the song that's the name of the song right yeah named after my hometown yeah and I had had I had experiences as well up in the the Anirondex um and and I remember talking to you about that and but purely from like a songwriting perspective I'm like that guy's singing about what he knows about and I mean the the stuff that I'm attracted to um when it comes to songwriting is is really talking about things from personal experience. And yes I I don't get me wrong I love the love the Forlorn songs and you know being angry and and things like that. But when it comes from a place that is wholly unique to that person that's when my ear is perked up of like they're singing about this experience that they have had or where they've come from that is that is wholly unique to them. And I think that's why I like and appreciate that song and because I spending some time up there as well I feel like you encapsulated it in that way. And to my knowledge I'm sure there are people from from in and around the area but I I can't say how many people are you know actively singing about that in a way that I I could immediately attach on to and I think that's the beauty of you know um good songwriting is that uh you're transported into that place and you're painting a picture hopefully with words. I can say that none of the songs that I do necessarily are that but like that's why I appreciate other songwriter stuff so much is because it's writing you are writing it in that way.

SPEAKER_01 31:44

Yeah and well first off thank you for the kind comments oh I really appreciate that and yeah you kind of keyed in on something I've tried to take to heart especially recently with writing music is just coming from a place of honesty um I've actually been reading uh a book by Stephen Jeff Tweety's book oh okay uh by Stephen King actually he has a book called On Writing in which he it's partly autobiographical but then also he goes into his writing process and his creative process and although you know he's not a musician actually he is a bit of a musician and he does music oh he loves his heavy metal loves yeah yep but one of the things in that book that really resonates with me is the exact same point is you have to be honest you can be dishonest in your art but the audience will sniff that out immediately and even if they don't realize it they're still probably going to sense it and he gives examples of how he does that in his writing of how other writers do that in their writing and it's just something I've tried to hone in on like what what can come from my experience that I can then return in my expression um to give to other people do you get stuck in terms of that um then all the time yeah how do you get around that or I mean do you do you get around it do you just put something away that you've been working on and then move on to something else oh very much the way I get around it is brute force mo much of my songwriting is not so much I don't set out to intentionally write a song about a particular topic or theme. That's just not how my brain works. For me it starts with the guitar and much how I started with music um or at least with guitar and rock music back in the day when I first picked it up is it was the guitar that inspired me. And that's where most of the creativity comes from through my fingers and creating chords, melodies, progressions, etc that for me is where I find inspiration in the things that I create on the guitar. And that evokes sensations and emotions that I want to put words to that's when I start thinking about the words in the lyrics.

SPEAKER_03 34:30

Okay. That's that's a more I don't know maybe tactile approach because for me and I've heard other people talk about it too it's it starts with a feeling for me it starts with a feeling and I'm like what does that feeling sound like and then I I work it from that way. So it's that's interesting that you're um putting it through those kinds of channels.

SPEAKER_01 34:54

Yeah and ultimately my my only real method is to give myself the space to be creative. And currently that takes the form of an hour or so most nights after my wife goes to bed I'll go downstairs and I will so you have the allotted time that you do it. Yep. Wow um and I found that routine and habit just encourages creativity in my case. And so within that time I will either pick a song I'm working on or just give myself the space to come up with new things on guitar that I can explore. And if it comes to me that night if I have lightning bolts of inspiration or creativity, great. If not, that's all right I've still kept the habit going and practice is practice. And so at the end of the day it's uh it's a win-win.

SPEAKER_03 35:45

Do you find that I I'm I'm sure you do so I but I just want to hear you say it um but of uh inspiration striking at maybe uh less than inopportune times when it's not within your schedule and you're like oh shit here we go all right I better have a piece of paper or something to write this down.

SPEAKER_01 36:05

Yeah. And for me that time is typically about 15 minutes after I go to bed. Oh so it's torturous. Uh yeah and so I've learned you have to seize that opportunity. I might be in bed it might be so warm and comfortable but if that's when that particular chord progression and sometimes a lyric on top of it arrives in my head it's okay we're gonna go up we're gonna go back downstairs let me turn my phone on so I can record this, play it out. Cool. Now let's go to bed. Hope that another idea doesn't strike and keep me up all night.

SPEAKER_03 36:45

Yeah I I think I I don't have that I never have those aha moments I feel like before sleep. I think my main thing is like I'm already just excited about going to sleep in the first place but I think what happens sometimes is I'll have recorded something and what might keep me up is like did I record that part? Like was that did I got the best take the the take that I liked right like that's more my thing and or like maybe I could do that one again or something like that which is just as torturous in that way.

SPEAKER_01 37:21

But it's good that you're buffering it out in that way too yep yeah I try and it's weird because I record a whole lot of things on my phone but rarely do I actually go back and revisit them. I think just the act of recording cements it in my brain so I can remember it later. Because if I don't record it then the next morning I definitely will not remember it. And I've probably forgotten more things that way than I have actually recorded and saved in the moment.

SPEAKER_03 37:51

It's taking those extra steps for sure um I mean I'll I'll have like a I guess like a a lightning bolt of inspiration and I'll write some lyrics down to write some chords down and then I'll start playing it and I won't record it. Well as I've learned I have to record that too in that moment because if not I'm gonna wake up the next night and be like I don't know what the fuck this is. I don't know like like that just happened if I went to a songwriter's share thing and I was like this is a song I wrote I think it was like two months ago and it was just like a blurb of an idea and I was just you know reading through it and playing along to it and and just laughing at myself because I'm like I don't remember I don't remember what this I mean I kind of do but I just yeah and and even then it's not a hundred percent that that you know feeling that you had in that moment or that performance is a hundred percent what's going to get translated um to the final thing. Do you find yourself rewriting a lot?

SPEAKER_01 38:53

Uh very much so as I described starts with the guitar part the guitar part kind of builds the vibe and the emotions that I want to express then we start to put words to it. The words typically start with yet another lightning bolt uh so within that creative space I'll just play the guitar part over and over maybe build on it and then at some point a lyric will come to me and it's usually something pretty catchy just something like an aha moment and that becomes kind of a foundation to build on and we start building out more lyrics kind of and if you know themes will start to come and emerge from that and they might evolve as well a lot of my songs I will get maybe 25 to 50% of the lyrics out there before I realize that the song actually needs to be about something else. It's going in a very different direction and let's and let's just go with it. I hate that because you have to rewrite a bunch of stuff oh yeah and uh oftentimes that anchor lyric ends up getting rewritten and never used so yeah very many times I've had to rewrite songs. I think we were talking about this after the cruel April show is I'll come up with a song and I've gotten in the habit of just not titling them. Yeah I remember because didn't you have a few didn't you have two songs that night that didn't have titles I did yeah and then well Dan graciously recorded and videoed that and when he reached out he was like what are the titles of these songs and so in the the five minutes I had to think about it I I assigned some titles to those songs.

SPEAKER_03 40:41

How do you how do you assign your titles is it a word that's in the song or not? Typically or us it summarizes the song I honestly don't think about it that hard okay I I'm I I'll admit it on here I'm kind of a pretentious person when it comes to my song titles and sometimes I feel like it just needs to be maybe more elaborate than than what it actually is. But it's also just interesting to me and I'm just coming at it from like a a frame point of like there's a million songs that have been called broken or unbroken or something. Yeah please don't put me in there I will not put any of the songs that I've written in that they might be about similar themes they probably are but I'm not gonna do that to other people there's already a bazillion.

SPEAKER_01 41:30

That's the beauty of it though it's it's your song you can it is approach the title however you like and by the way I love your song titles oh thank you well see and that's the thing is that I I'm trying to get Big Hill and all the small bumps yeah like that's such a descriptive and for me like I it just create paints a picture right off the bat.

SPEAKER_03 41:51

It does I thank you um I listen to a lot of radio and there's a lot of authors that talk about things and there's words and phrases that stick out to me and um I'll I'll write them down and if if it happens to fit what I think the vibe of the song is like then that's then that's probably where it's gonna go. And I have a whole list of just potential song titles and I try not to you know reverse engineer it of here's a title what would that sound like hopefully it's the song presents itself and then is there a title that matches this this particular you know vibe or or sense of of what's going on within that and and I don't know but yeah I mean back to the song to you just just stick with working titles if you don't have anything. Yeah because there's nothing more that pisses me off as an audience member if you don't have a title just anything just pick any word it could be whatever you wanted um what uh what would you say is kind of something that you you you're always trying to improve on when it comes to songwriting or that you're um I mean besides the whole art of but um are are you I mean you're reading a book about writing are you listening to other artists talk about their process or how do you are you sponging stuff so if there's anything I want to improve on right now it's lyrics.

SPEAKER_01 43:22

I and maybe this is just your typical artist dilemma where you just don't think your work is good enough but I I I'll be satisfied with my lyrics by the time I play a song in public but I just feel like there's always something missing. Whether it's the right language, the right phrasing the right vocabulary I don't know. And so and it is one of those weird things where I can listen to for example I I grew up listening to a lot of smashing pumpkins in my mind um Billy Gorgon writes some incredible lyrics, just so descriptive with such a flow to them. Um, grandiose yet intimate at the same time. That guy reads very visually.

SPEAKER_03 44:12

I can tell he's a reader.

SPEAKER_01 44:14

Yeah. And so in my mind, uh for me personally, that is like the goal, the lyrical goal. But I just don't know how to get there. Um, ironically, my mom was an English teacher, she hammered uh the English language into me growing up, and I benefited greatly from that. But when it comes to actually writing lyrics and um is it prose or poetry? I that type of writing, I don't know. I I feel like I had it when I was younger, but I just lost it somewhere along the way. And so that's where I would like to improve the most. And I'm trying to just give myself the space to just let it happen. I know I feel like I've got it in me. It just hasn't become habit, or I've just haven't quite hit that vein yet.

SPEAKER_03 45:04

I feel like with that, what's helpful for me is just ingesting as much different pieces of art as possible, whether it's books, whether it's music, whether it's movies, just so that you are getting like different perspectives and different vocabulary. And I'm not talking about like listening to an Elliot Smith song and being like, let me write my Elliot Smith song. I'm just talking about taking taking knowledge from all different sources and points so that we are this kind of walking encyclopedia of our influences and things that have stuck with us. And no, I do know what you mean in the lyrical sense of there's definitely times where I'm like, I fucking wrote this before, like, or or I have phrased this as in such a way. Um, and then there's other times where I think what's helpful to me is kind of doing the role-playing thing of like, this is a character, I'm a character in this song, and how do I um communicate um that message through that particular character? Um, or or again, just the I don't know, the the vibe of it within it. Um there's a song that I have kind of been sussing out. I I think the penning title was like It Will Do As It Always Does or something. And I wrote it. Um I wrote it, I don't know if you were there when I played it or not at the at an open mic, but my voice was really fucked up um because you know, allergies, whatever. Like I was I sounded like RFK Jr. Um, and uh but the thing was is I wrote it when my voice was fucked up like that, and I was like, wait a minute, let me use this. Like, if my voice is like this way for the song, how is that emotionally going to um influence how I'm writing and what I'm writing? And it it turned into this kind of very like you know, kind of toe-tappy-y type of song with kind of a darker underbelly to it, as most of the songs that I write are, but the uniqueness was where my voice was at with that, and I felt like I had tapped into something within that of like, this isn't yes, this is my voice, my audible voice, but it's super like scratchy and gnarly right now, and it helped influence that song.

SPEAKER_01 47:34

So yeah, I don't know. Like it's coming at it from a different angle with a different perspective, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 47:40

Yeah, so maybe songwriters should just uh just put a a clothespin on their nose or something, and then the song would be the I don't know. Yeah, I mean again, I but that kind of stuff kind of is always interesting to me because there's definitely times where I get stuck and I'm like, I've written about this before, or this is like the same similar feeling, and like how much of this is just a repackaged thing. And I understand that that's you know, songwriters do that too, as well as like movie directors have similar themes that they always will run over that they believe.

SPEAKER_01 48:18

Yeah, people tend to do what they know, and that's kind of natural. That's the human experience is to take in what's around you and then turn it back out to the world in whatever form of expression you take.

SPEAKER_03 48:30

What would you say has kind of been a a benchmark for you in being part of this songwriter um or music community in Maryland? When you say a benchmark, I mean just in like uh well you're out of the dorm now, you know. You you play at the open mics, you know, you've been writing your own songs now. So I guess um if you were to measure that in in like a way uh it it it makes sense that you've reached this this point from humble beginnings of jamming along to radio head to to where you're at now of doing your own stuff.

SPEAKER_01 49:14

That's I'm sorry if I'm trooping on the question, if only because in my like day-to-day job, everything is very quantified, and music is my way to not quantify anything. I see. So to apply a benchmark to it, but I regardless. I think just being out there and being able to express myself is success in itself. Um I have no I'll say I no longer have illusions that I'm going to be a rock star or make it big or anything. Um just being able to be a part of a community that allows me to get on stage and play my own songs is amazing. Um honestly, when I started doing open mics a few years ago, just playing covers, I didn't even think I'd be playing original songs at any point. And then a month ago, I was asked uh to be a part of the Cruel April show, and it was an incredible experience, and it was more than I ever thought I'd achieve in such a short amount of time. Um, so one, thank you for that. That was thank you for asking me to be a part of that. That was an incredible experience.

SPEAKER_03 50:31

That's why we're here for the for the original voices.

SPEAKER_01 50:34

Yeah. Um, so I suppose at this point, whatever goals I had, I kind of met them in an in an unexpected way way sooner than I thought. So I suppose at this point the sky's the limit.

SPEAKER_03 50:50

Yeah, well, I mean, what do you see yourself doing now?

SPEAKER_01 50:52

I mean, writing more, obviously. But writing, my original thought was that I would just gig around being a cover artist.

SPEAKER_03 51:01

Which you can do, you can totally do that here.

SPEAKER_01 51:03

Yeah, and uh I'm still trying to build up to that just in terms of a repertoire and and all the things that go into gigging. Um and so I'd like to do that here in the next year or so, start putting myself out there, and we'll just see where it goes from there. And certainly I'm gonna keep writing. I I have found a deep sense of satisfaction in that, using it to, of course, create uh, but also as a tool for uh introspection and just working through things, whether they're emotional or things that are just happening in life that I need to process. And so, in that sense, it's become a very complete practice for me um in all aspects, and I don't see myself putting it down anytime soon. And I suppose as long as I can continue to do it, I'll be satisfied.

SPEAKER_03 52:00

Wow. Uh, you pretty much answered the question that I give everybody of like what what has music done for you? And it sounds like it's it's done a lot and and is still continuing to do so. So, wow, yeah. That's the power of music, man. Awesome. Thank you so much, Kyle.

SPEAKER_01 52:18

My pleasure, thank you.

SPEAKER_03 52:24

Thanks so much for listening. You can follow us on Instagram for show announcements and other episodes. And if you dig the artist stuff, give them a follow, give them a like. And if you want to go the extra mile, check them out at one of their shows, buy their merch. Keep the scene alive. And I'll see you out there. Take care.