Hi everyone! This album post is HUGE NEWS. Here is my first album, which will release May 16th on Bandcamp. I have been working on it for 5 years (since 7th grade), and my goal was to create a project representing growing up on the Jersey Shore. In this post will be by track-by-track for the album, and if you want to support it, it will be available digitally on Bandcamp.
Ballad For a Mourning Dove
Most simply put this song is about making a first friend, when you are very little. In my mind most writing it was my friend (my day 1) Kaeleigh, but I tried to keep it more universal.
A mourning dove is a bird that would coo in mornings when I was little. I directly associate them with waiting for the school bus. You can hear one here:
You Don't Have to Worry, Babe
The single!! It was a song I wrote the first day of summer vacation in 2024. I wrote it for someone, but I more see it as something I wished someone would write for me. Now, I am in a relationship I feel taken care of in, so I don't directly feel that desire (thankfully)!
I wrote and recorded the whole song over the entire day. Everything you hear is from that day besides the vocals I re-recorded, the Moog-style synth, and the outro, which is my favorite part of the song.
The bee guitar does all the embellishments. I love it's clean, soft sound, and I barely had to mix it.
Manatee Tags
This song is just bee guitar, bass (all bass on this album is a McCartney one), drum machine, and harmonica. It's a breakup song, but not a sad one. Some things are inevitable and it's more about accepting that. "When I saw her the world stood still", but it has to start again at some point.
While the concept of a "rolling stone" has been used in modern media so much, the "moss" of the original Chinese proverb was something I had never seen explored and I wanted to, with the 2nd verse.
Cottage Bees!
The oldest song on the album, and second to last done. I started it in 2022, and worked on it until maybe 2024, and finally recorded vocals I was happy with (on a green bullet mic) in April 2026. While the songwriting might be a little less developed here than on the rest of the album, the instrumentation is my favorite part. Especially under the vocals on the verses, the "main" instrument changes constantly and flows, and I am super proud of my arrangements on this.
Do I Have To?
My current partner wrote me a super cute love letter, and I wrote one back. Except I hated it and threw it in a drawer. I decided to write this song instead. That's why it ends with me NOT writing a letter.
I also tried to continue the theme of growing up through keeping it naive. The narrator sings like he believes he knows everything, and has a closed mind. He has his mind made up, and thinks he is done growing her changing his mind.
While I really like the lyrics on this little love song, I probably wouldn't have cut it for the album because it was a fingerpicking song, and not my strongest compositions. So I decided to just mess with it and see what would happen. I thought about how I usually produced songs through a the mindset of building around the guitar, and so I tried to build it around a toy drum!
Lavender Tea (start of side B of the vinyl)
I used very little synth sounds on this album, and when I did (like on You Don't Have to Worry), they were clearly audible and separable. But here, I used a lot, and tried to combine all the sounds into a single texture. I have always been super interested in how producers were able to combine sounds into textures, like with the Ronettes album and Pet Sounds. If you listen between the lines, where the music isn't you can hear a wind. Not a sfx, a texture in the negative space of the texture the production created.
I can't even explain it well but if you hear it thinking of that I bet you will get it.
Alpine #9
Secret song! It's a part of Lavender Tea but I wanted to separate it. It is the only song written on piano and in 6/8. It continues in the synth-iness of Lavender Tea through it's use of bitcrushing, which I think made it a fun break from the more natural sounds of this side of the record.
The Bees Keep a-Bumblin'
KEEP. There was a song called The Bees ARE a-Bumblin', and this was supposed to be an instrumental reprise. I wrote maybe at least 8 whole versions of the song, all with the same chorus, but never liked any of them. So I just decided to keep the reprise and scrap the song, which is strange but I really like.
My cousin Dante (who just dropped FIRE with his 100 Americans project you should check out) wrote the basis for this song, with the melody and chords. I took that, wrote a new guitar part, and everything here.
Fairweather Woman
I wrote this song on guitar, and was going to record a more professional version with the Autoharp as an overdub, but I was messing with it I recorded a demo I liked so much I decided to keep as the final version. These are some of my favorite lyrics, as they feel extremely personal to the listener, but with people I've shown it to that's a universal experience. Everyone that has heard it pre-release think they connect to it on a special level.
Absent Air
This was the last recording for the project, over a year after I wrote it. Writing the song took a month, as it originally had 16 stanzas, but I cut it down to the first 4 to keep the album short.
The song, when it was complete, was my attempt to explore ego, both in other's, and me. The goal was each verse to represent a different way it is expressed, and to use imagery to represent the consequences of acting like this. Since the album version is just the 2 verses it sounds more like it's written to one person, but it still isn't.
With the Sun over Belmar
Belmar is the town on the Jersey Shore next to my town, which is pretty much just a highway to it. We even share the same zip code, and that has always made it feel like Belmar is both a part of my hometown, and something above it. Being there both feels like home and a vacation.
