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March was the third album in the A Year of Music series. It was written and recorded quicker than any of the other albums in the series, but it also has some of my favorite music from the series.
Many of the tracks were written in one sitting, but others like “Don’t Like Me”, took much longer.
Also, this album cover is not empty. Keep looking.
Don’t Like Me took a while to write, primarily because of the second first. After writing the Piper Blush line, followed by “Too Much? No, not enough!” I decided to continue the rhyme scheme. This meant keeping the same syllable count, rhyme pattern, and similar rhyming words.
I started by writing out every word that would work with the rush/Blush/guts/butt/nuts words from the lines that started this. It was a pretty long list.
However, what ended up happening was the “punk chumps / pump junk / dump clumps” rhyme pattern. These words already have a close enough rhyme to each other, so it caused me to exhaust my word list much faster.
It took a while to write, then ended up being reconstructed and moved around multiple times before the final version was recorded. After the third verse, I had become very in tune with the beat so I fired out a fourth verse.
Anyone who has ever thought about trading stocks has likely been hit with an ad on Youtube for penny stock traders. They show us jets, flashy cars, and claim to have turned a few dollars into billions. Now they want you to sign up for their stock alerts service to become a bazillionaire also.
Yeah, those guys are usually full of shit, and Pump Bigly is the worst of them all. After living in a Wendy’s chili cup on the side of the road, he managed to turn his life around through penny stocks and now drives a Ferrari inside a private jet on his yacht.
These are the kinds of guys who caught my attention when I first started trading stocks. Fortunately, I didn’t actually sign up with any of them. Instead, I found Joe.
I tried trading stocks on my own for a while and learned really fast why I shouldn’t. I lost a lot of money just buying things because people on StockTwits said it was a good idea. As a general rule of thumb, it’s a good idea to not do that. Ever.
Eventually, I found a guy going by the name Joe Stocks. He was running a Discord group where he provided stock alerts for a small fee (about $15/month if I remember correctly). After a few months of everyone doing really badly, Joe realized that we were all dumb and needed to be taught the basics.
He started up a training service that was also extremely cheap, especially compared to the big names in this game. He taught us how to read charts and perform technical analysis. Instead of trying to read everything, he made us focus on one stock of our choice. We learned that stock and used a handful of indicators and movements to identify the trading direction and possible moves.
Thanks to Joe, I was able to turn things around. I’m not the world’s greatest stock trader, but it helped me pay my bills. It’s unfortunate that Joe is no longer with us, but the skills he taught will live with me forever.
And that’s why “Thanks Joe” had to be written.
Hello started out this series of albums. It was an in your face, blasting out of the gates set of tracks that hammered the mic the way that I like. But while many of the tracks on Hello were speaker bangers, something still lived under the surface.
My music has always been an emotional outlet for my depression, anxiety, and anger. It’s why I started this. The loser who would always be nothing, often attacking myself in my own music.
The title track March is a storytelling song that offers a glimpse into my current way of being. The need to be unstoppable despite what lies ahead is a major turn from the way I used to be. It also mentions “The Voice,” a darkness that tries to keep me from pursing a better life and becoming anything. This voice is further explained in the song Tun, a song title that references the character in the original Shutter. As explained in Tun, the voice is a back and forth abusive asshole that both encourages and discourages. The rubber band nature is that of my own conscience telling me that I can do something, while also telling me that I’m not good enough. In my case, I liken this entity to being some type of warped angel that has been dispatched to fuck with my head.
Yet, despite the fear and the punching back from life, I keep going.
This became a running theme throughout this album. The Talk I Walk and Thanks Joe are all related to my need to fight against the universe of shit in my life.
This is the hook from March:
The darkness is consuming, with full intent on dooming
me as I walk through it, I don’t know what I’m doing
I know I must keep going, I feel this in my heart
so forward on I travel, continuing to march
I suspect this is a common feeling among others who find themselves failing to get over hurdles, even when the hurdle is of our own making. What is important is that we do not stop. Keep fighting, keep moving, keep trying. The demons you fight may not go away easily, but they won’t always win either.
Both Automatic Writer and Currently were both written under the pressure of a deadline I was trying to keep. In Automatic Writer, I mention that the album is supposed to be done soon, but I’m just now getting started on it. I should have realized just how much foreshadowing this would be. After this album was Colossus Kills, released in April. After that, nothing came out until December, when I dropped the other 8 albums in a single day.
The song Currently was a very different kind of track. I had writers block while trying to complete the album, which is not a wonderful condition when you have a deadline you’re working toward. So what was the solution? Write whatever was in my head at the moment.
Currently, I am sitting at my desk writing
It’s 4am and I am fighting sleep to keep igniting
The spark inside of me to compose this and expose
The thoughts that dwell inside of me at this moment, let’s go
From then on I go on a tangent of random thoughts as they jump into my head. I go from talking about COVID to complaints about my 401k turning to shit to talking about how I need to stop cussing to insisting that I need to buy a lamp.
Yes, I was all over the place and weirdly, it worked.
As with most of the albums, Hannah has again made an appearance and this time she’s stranger than usual.
On the album Music For My Kids, it is revealed that Hannah’s last name is O’Connor, which she mispronounces. In passing, I mention that O’Connor is an Irish last name which I clearly should not have done.
After learning of her Irish heritage, Hannah develops an accent that matches none on the planet. I have to explain to her that accents don’t work like that, which just results in a new completely demented accent for a moment.
From there, things get dumb.
I finally end up convincing Hannah that COVID is a disease that makes beer come out of your dick, and that I’m under quarantine for the rest of my life. She’s forbidden from having any contact with me until she receives word from the President of the United States. This almost worked.
In the end, my wife shows up, feels up Hannah and the two begin making out heavily. Then I wake up and realize the whole thing was a dream.
Hannah, however, is there, asleep in my bathtub. Because of course she is.