2018-12-06

The Marketplace

Album

I wrote this album as a love letter to the OPM rock and punk classics I grew up on. At the same time, though, production and music in general has come a long way since the days of Parokya's Gitara or Taking Back Sunday's Cute Without the E. So I wanted to capture the image we have of these in our heads, rather than just create an album that's basically "those songs except it's 2018". It's a polite and worshipful nod to the music of the past, but with fairly modern musical sensibilities. I called it "The Marketplace" because of how it contains ideas from many different sources — sort of like the open marketplace of ideas — and additionally parts of it weren't played solely by me.

Don't get me wrong, I love the way that music is evolving, and I try my best to keep up to date with the latest songs. Also, I know that pop music tends to be somewhat cyclical, with people moving away and towards certain genres decade-by-decade. However, sometimes you just can't help but think, "where's the rock, man?" So that's what this album is, or what I intended it to be. It's an answer for anybody's who's wondering where that stuff has gone. I'm delighted that it's starting to make a comeback in today's sphere, but really, it never left.

Tell Me

This song recounts the story of a woman I met while out drinking with some friends. As I recall, it was in Taft which wasn't (and isn't) my usual spot. I had gone there to visit some friends from La Salle. She was from France, was a bit taller than me, and was plenty cute. We played darts and talked the night away until it was time for me to go. In the song, I go through the motions of trying to psyche myself up to talk to her, and recite the often ridiculous thoughts you have when meeting somebody new. Little did I know I'd never see her again after that night, but boy was it fun.

Never Alone

This song was actually a challenge from my then-girlfriend, (now either fiancee or wife, depending on when you're reading this!) Faye. I had written maybe 4 songs already for The Marketplace, but she astutely observed that it's all so heartbreak-y. The truth about love songs is they're very easy to write. From almost any perspective, you have such a wealth of other songs to take ideas and copy from that if you can't write a love song, you either have never loved or never written a song. So, as much as possible I try to not write the same love song as everybody's ever written, to try and find unique perspectives to write about.

She wanted to me to write about a perspective that not many songs are really about — outside of the "party club banger" type of song. This is ultimately a song about friendship and camaraderie, and it's one of my favorite songs I've written because that's not the kind of love you hear about very often and it came out really cute.

Across the Sea

I remember how I wrote that opening riff – it was on the toilet! On my Telegram I use the "Saved Messages" feature extensively to quickly record voice messages of my musical ideas. For this riff, I sang it. It was actually originally going to be a vocal melody and I had some lyrics written up that went okay with it. One day, I was just messing around on my bass and had the idea to play this riff on it just to see how it would sound. I threw some heavy distortion on and boom – there's an intro for you. Then the rest of the song just kind of came to me. Sometimes that's how it goes, you really hit the ground running and can write basically the whole song in a day or two. That just leaves the instrumentation and production. The drums, guitars, and bass are all me but the lead guitar is actually played by Eric. He plays the leads in quite a few of the songs in The Marketplace.

Story-wise it's about how often times it's not clear-cut how or why relationships end. As much as we'd like to believe it's always somebody's fault, choosing to blame and hold aggression towards our former partners or even ourselves just leads to a domino effect of ill will when, really, sometimes relationships just run their course. It's hard to accept when it hits you, and often you do hold on for longer than you should, but that just takes a toll on you and your partner.

How Long

I don't often like to write songs specifically about a person, or people in my life. Generally, if I write a song about somebody, I don't target it at them specifically but more at a character of them that exists outside of reality. I just don't like the idea of a song being their song, because I don't write music for them, I write it for me. Additionally, it helps in keeping Acropolis Blues the artist from JC Gurango the person.

But this one was different. I wrote it specifically for my fiancee, and I meant every word to be in speaking about her. She continues to be the light of my life, and in a sense not all of my songs are about her, but they're all for her. Particularly this song talks about our interesting meet-cute and how we kind of rushed into things — but it ended up being exactly the right decision.