Super Secret

Hello! Well it's snowing outside and the time has come to release a new song. This one is pretty personal. It's the prelude to my family's journey out of Dallas. Nothing felt quite right since my dad passed, and it was hardest on my mom. So this song is for her. Trying to see the world through her eyes a bit. All against the backdrop of trying to remember we're only here for a short time. Things get built up and seem so huge and permanent while so much really is temporary.

Hello friends. It's been a minute! I'm really happy to release "I Can't Find You" into the world. This is my first real musical collaboration, featuring Grace Bergere on vocals. Grace did stacks and stacks of harmony, I'm so grateful for where a new voice allowed the song to go. Grace is a fantastic songwriter herself, and I encourage you to check out her music. I'm definitely a fan.

Hey everyone!! It hasn’t been tooooo long since Bear Factory. I saw a comment after Bear Factory that said “time to wait 6 more months for a new Grand Commander song.” And I was like no way, I’m going to crank out another one.

Alright, it’s here. The song I’ve talked about since the beginning. I looked up the first demo of this song, and I was shocked… 2017. I’ve been sitting on it for 7 years. The main reason is being completely intimidated by the thought of making a nearly 13 minute video. At one point 5ish years ago I bought an Oculus Rift with the intent of building a virtual 3D world for the video. The weight of that idea collapsed, however, the sign on the Bear Factory cover art, created by Tarah, was originally made in this 3D virtual world.

It hasn’t been 4 months, but there’s a new song?!

“I Want To Work Less”… it feels like something I’m not supposed to say. It’s wrong that one must work more and more and more just to scrape by. The overall vibe of people these days… it feels like everyone is exhausted. It’s weird how the accepted numbers for how much things typically cost are just so much higher. Everything feels expensive. But it’s not the thing itself that’s happening that is hard to handle. It’s the collective mood of society. The mood is feeling like things are bad and getting worse. I see it in so many faces, and I hear the undertones in casual conversation. I feel like I need to go read something upbeat and humorous.

New song below I’m so happy to be typing this, I love “new song” stuff. It’s been a minute, and I want to thank you for being here and reading this. Also many thanks to my sister Tarah for painting the cover, and also El Hicks for capturing it in a photo.

Hi friends, the time for a new song is here.

The weirdest day led to this song. I was working on a couple songs pondering ideas like looking for love, and very non fence kicking things. I possible love interest took a serious nosedive, I got a spider bite possibly from a brown recluse that needed antibiotics, so I had a weird feeling of spider venom and antibiotics mixing and fighting in my body. I guess a bunch of other stuff. A dude at a funeral said some racist shit about a friend of mine that passed away that pissed me off a week earlier… suffice to say a bunch of shit was brewing.

I want to to start by saying thank you for being here along this journey. I do not take you for granted, and appreciate you being here soooo much.

“Fantasy, reality, they’re both a part of me.”

So… the title is pretty intense. I got an email from a record label and they said they wanted to talk to me and make me an offer… long story short they wanted 80%, and when I hung up the phone I wrote this song.

I’m always shocked when I look at the last time I wrote a post for a new song. Last one was the end of October, just over 5 months ago! I feel like I say this every time, but I can’t believe it has been this long. I had a big life change since Journey came out. Sadly, near the end of November, my father passed away. This song is about the experience of losing a loved one.

Hear it the new song right here first! Since the pandemic began, I’ve moved three times, started one career, and ended two 🙂 How’s 2020 been treating you? Hope you’re hanging in there 🙂

As promised, here is early access to the new single GRAND COMMANDER.

So last time I wrote one of these, the pandemic hadn’t really hit. Feels like a lifetime ago. I want to send love and good vibes to everyone, this thing has hit all of us in so many ways.

Here it is, the next single. This won’t be out on Spotify/streaming services for a few weeks, so this is the time where you get exclusive early access. The video is unlisted on youtube, which means anyone with the link can see it. So if you want to share, go for it. It just won’t be public until the song hits streaming services.

So, I bought a vocoder. This is my vocoder song. If you are unfamiliar, a vocoder is something that mixes speech with an instrument. So I plug in a mic and my guitar to the vocoder, and it takes the notes from my guitar and mixes with what I’m saying. There was a specific vocoder, the Roland SVC-350 that I’ve been obsessed with for a really long time, and I finally pulled the trigger on it. So of course I had to make a song with this new toy.

This song is about the feeling of wanting to escape from any situation that feels unbearable. Anxiety, depression, money troubles, whatever… anything that causes you to go to that place where you imagine building a rocket, flying to the moon, and leaving the world behind forever.

This is what it sounded like the day I wrote it. It was the first song I over wrote that sounded anything like this, and I'm glad I did. I think I kept the original acoustic rhythm tracks. That's the deal with demos. Always make sure everything is in tune because that first take is often the one.

My friend told me a story about a guy who convinced his girlfriend to take a gun, and shoot a book he was holding in front of his chest because he believed the book would stop the bullet. It didn't, and this guy was shot and killed on camera in front of a crowd of people. The lengths that people go to for social media attention is shocking, and this story hit me really hard.