Last week I posted a download link for a new EP of demos I created called “Getting By on False Hope.” The EP is now up for stream on Soundcloud. I thought I’d take a moment and share a little bit about how this EP came to be and what the inspiration behind it was. I've been wanting to put out new music for a long, long time now. The last time I shared any original music with the world was on September 9th, 2011. A few days after that I left home to do some missionary work in Peru for the next two years of my life. When I got back in August, 2013, I was excited to get back into music as soon as I could. Sadly, my old laptop was pretty much dead, and my new laptop was too new to use my old recording equipment with. On top of that, my family’s desktop computer died. It wasn't until April, 2014 that I finally started recording this EP. It seems absolutely ridiculous, but it took me ten months to finish recording these songs. Why? Because I was trying to use my dead laptop, my new incompatible-with-my-recording-equipment-laptop, and other dead computers to record this. On top of that, being away at college I rarely had a moment where I was somewhere quiet enough to record music. The apartments I have stayed in are far from soundproof. To record I basically had to be the only person in not only my own apartment, but also in the neighboring apartments. Nothing was working in my favor, and what could have taken less than a week to finish ended up taking ten months in between broken computers, malfunctioning hardware, having nowhere to record, dealing with some pretty serious depression, doing school full-time, and not having the right programs to get this stuff done. It was a nightmare to get these songs recorded. The mixing is poor, and the mastering is non-existent. I decided it would be impossible for me to really get these songs the way I truly wanted them to sound doing it the way I was doing it, so I settled with the idea of simply releasing demos instead of full-fledged final products of songs (which I still hope to do eventually). Plus, it’s nearing four years since I last put any of my music out for the world to hear, and I was just anxious to let people hear it.
This EP only has three songs on it. I was planning on recording a fourth, but for all the same reasons I listed above, I decided the fourth song would have been too much of a hassle. I am sad about it, because the other song I was planning to include would have been a fun treat for anyone who’s been listening to my music since high school. That song will have to wait though. The three songs I included on this EP were all written at completely different times of my life. They were written over roughly a two-year span of time (and I wrote many more songs that I didn't choose to record for this EP) with the earliest being written in mid-2012, and the latest being written last April (when I started recording).
I chose the title “Getting By On False Hope” because after I chose the three songs that I wanted to include in this EP, I noticed a reoccurring theme. In each song I was writing about something I was hoping for that in retrospect never came true. “Seven Years” and “This Rediscovery” are essentially about the exact same thing. I wrote both songs while I was away in Peru (“This Rediscovery” was written mid-2012, and “Seven Weeks” was written in the Summer of 2013, exactly seven weeks before I came home), and both songs were me imagining how amazing my life was going to be after all I had learned while I was gone and after living in third-world conditions for so long. In fact (and I didn't notice this until long after I wrote both of them), both songs include a variation of the line “nothing will go wrong” because I imagined that any problems I would have wouldn't matter, because I would just be so happy to be back home, and I would be such a stronger person than I ever was before. I’d be home, and life would be great, and even when things went wrong, life would still be great, and “nothing can get me down.” They were very optimistic and excited songs.
Sadly, when I got home, everything in my life actually did go wrong, and I found myself more miserable than I had ever been before. My family was falling apart, and I plunged into a deep depression that I am still struggling with to this day. Life was kicking me while I was down repeatedly, and it was awful. 2014 was the worst year of my entire life, by far. These happy and energetic songs took on an ironically sad meaning for me when I realized that what I had hoped for in those lyrics not only didn't come true, but things actually became much, much worse for me. When I wrote “This Rediscovery” I meant for it to be a loud, electric, full-band song that was filled with energy. I stripped it down enormously when I started recording. This version of the song sounds nothing like what I originally planned for it to sound like. It’s a little sadder. A little more boring, perhaps. Despite the hopeful lyrics, the new stripped-down music gave the song a melancholic touch that reflects how the lyrics feel to me now as I sing them. I was hoping for something that never happened.
“Trying to Be Happy” is among my favorite songs I've ever written. I don’t know why exactly, but I really love it. It is probably one of the prettiest songs I've written. I wrote this song last year, right before I started recording this EP. The chorus popped into my head one day, and I thought it was catchy, so over the next two days I wrote an entire song around it. The name "Trying To Be Happy" was pulled from the chorus, but I chose it because I wrote this song at a time in my life when I was trying really hard to be happy despite battling some serious depression. Though looking back at my life this song isn't as sad to me as the other two, it is still a song about I girl I had hoped so badly I could be with, but ultimately knew it could never happen. It was another song about hopes that went unfulfilled. And that is where the name of the EP comes from. “Getting By On False Hope.” The lyrics in these songs are among the most personal and true lyrics of any music I've put out yet. Although most of the songs I write are at least partially based on my life and true events that happened, these three songs are 100% true feelings and true snapshots of the three different times in my life when I wrote them. I even toyed with the idea of naming the EP “This Journal” because these songs are essentially journal entries of three moments of my life.
Ten months is far too long of a time to spend on recordings that are this poorly done, but at the moment it’s the best I can do. I hope to get better recordings of new music out as soon as I can. But until then, I hope you enjoy these three songs. A big thank you to everyone who’s downloaded them already. I didn't expect it to be downloaded so many times. It means a lot to me.
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD “GETTING BY ON FALSE HOPE”
