Album Review: HIT ME HARD AND SOFT by Billie Eilish

Every once in a while, I come across an album that I love deeply from the very first listen. HIT ME HARD AND SOFT by Billie Eilish is one of those albums. Unless the greatest album ever recorded comes out in the next two and a half months, I think this is going to be my album of the year for 2024. I may be five months late to the party, but I really just want to talk about how great this album is.

HIT ME HARD AND SOFT came across my radar for the first time when it was the topic of discussion for an episode of Ghost Notes, which is one of my favorite podcasts. I listened to the episode, in which the hosts heaped praise on HIT ME HARD AND SOFT, and I made a mental note to check the album out at some point, but I didn't really think about it much after that. I did, however, remember that The Diner was singled out by the Ghost Notes crew as a particularly good song.

A few months later, I bought the album on a whim while on my lunch break. I had felt like doing a little bit of shopping, so I went somewhere I knew I was likely to find a couple of CDs, and I found HIT ME HARD AND SOFT. It was either that or Taylor Swift, so I picked up the Billie Eilish album and thought about that episode of Ghost Notes. I was working late that night, so I set the CD aside to listen to the next day. When I did, I was absolutely blown away.

The opening track, Skinny, immediately caught my attention. As a guitar player, I love to hear electric guitar start off an album. And then Billie's singing came in, and I knew right away that I was listening to something good. The chamber strings outro (which I didn't know yet was a call forward to The Greatest) rounds out an amazing opening track, and then I listened to Lunch for the first time.

Okay, not exactly the first time. I heard Lunch for the first time in my friend's car on the way to a soccer game, but it wasn't all that loud and we were talking over it anyways. But I did notice that it was cool, and I'm pretty sure I mentioned something about needing to check the album out, which Soleil agreed with and then we moved on to other matters (like the fact that she'd driven us to completely the wrong place!). But let me just say, Lunch is a completely different experience when you listen to it with headphones on, completely focused on the song. I knew Billie Eilish had come out as bisexual recently, and I knew that she was into girls, but I was not exactly ready for the second song on the album to be such a direct tribute to sapphic sexuality. Needless to say, I love the song and can't get enough of it.

I could go on like this, praising every song on the album, but I'll limit myself to just two more. First, The Greatest has been an earworm for me since my second or third listen. I love when songs start small and intimate before exploding into a loud and intense experience. Knowing that, if you're familiar with the album it shouldn't surprise you that my favorite song is L'Amour De Ma Vie for that same reason. Neither The Greatest nor L'Amour De Ma Vie would benefit from me trying to explain them here, so just go listen to them if you haven't yet. They're dynamic, expressive, and break out of the typical pop mold brilliantly.

And that's what I really love about this album as a whole. It's deeply expressive emotionally, and part of what makes that expressiveness compelling is the way songs follow an emotional arc rather than a typical song form consisting of a verse and chorus that each repeat, a bridge, and a final chorus. That basic structure exists here, but Billie Eilish stretches and distorts those forms so that the songs don't feel disorienting, but they do feel unpredictable when you're listening for the first time. Once you're familiar with the music and know what's coming next, it's very satisfying to see the twists coming ahead of time. Eilish has always been masterful at crafting outros, and HIT ME HARD AND SOFT takes that to an entirely new level. It can sometimes be hard to tell when one song ends and another begins, and it's not always obvious whether you're listening to the outro of one song or the intro of the next. The flow of the album is so well thought out that  I'm going to repeat my frequent refrain on this blog: the best albums are the ones that are experienced best as one cohesive work rather than just a collection of songs, and HIT ME HARD AND SOFT is one of those albums.

Before I wrap things up, I do want to comment on the sonic palette of the album. It's a pretty guitar heavy album by 2024 standards, which I appreciate. HIT ME HARD AND SOFT is a very human feeling album with plenty of personality. Even the synth parts, which are frequently the target of accusations of music sounding "impersonal" are imbued with a human touch. Maybe that has something to do with the fact that most of the sound design sounds like it could have come out of the late 1990s. When the synths are in the foreground, they're usually brash sawtooths with beautifully obnoxious filters that sounded dated on my first listen, but on further reflection I think they sound like a tribute to the over-the-top production styles of the past. It may stand out like a sore thumb today, but it's an aesthetic choice that, while jarring to me, still works to support the overall work. You wouldn't expect those synths on such a chill album, but it works.

Obviously, I'm giving HIT ME HARD AND SOFT ten stars out of ten, there's no other way to rate this album. It's been in constant rotation in the car, at home, and anywhere else I happen to be listening to music. I'm so thankful that I found this CD on that lunch break, and I'm also very happy I got to share the experience of discovering this album with Soleil, who has also become an enthusiastic fan after I shared my experiences listening to the album for the first time over text. My favorite song now, as it was on my first listen, is L'Amour De Ma Vie. The video recording below omits the extended outro, but it's still such a great recording that I've got to share it.

Why I Still Buy CDs in 2024

Six years ago, I wrote a blog post titled "Why I Still Buy CDs in 2018". At that time, it was beginning to feel like the Compact Disc was dying in popular culture, and that internet streaming was beginning to take over the music industry. And of course, that's exactly what happened. For most people, music is no longer something you buy, it's something you pay for a subscription to access over the internet. As this shift has happened, though, my belief in the superiority of the CD has strengthened. So today, I'd like to explain why I think the compact disc shouldn't be allowed to die, and why I think it is actually the best way to listen to albums in 2024.

Let's get a few things straight first. I'm not trying to say that CDs are perfect for every music listening need you might have, or that it's better than streaming for everyone. What I am saying is that the CD is a format that is much more convenient, useful, and practical for modern life than it gets credit for, and that you should consider listening to music on CDs if your listening habits align with the strengths of the format in today's music landscape. As evidenced by the growing size of my CD collection, I believe CDs make sense for me. They might make sense for you, too.

In my original blog post, I asserted that CDs were not as convenient as streaming, but I liked them anyways so I kept buying them. Six years later, I've changed my opinion. Buying CDs is more convenient than streaming for the kind of listener I am. I like listening to albums, in order, all the way through. I think that an album can be more than the sum of its parts, as I've already written numerous times on this blog. So let's compare what it takes to listen to an album in 2024 on streaming versus compact disc. Streaming is the most popular method, which requires a subscription or putting up with ads. Then, you have to find the album you want to listen to- that shouldn't be so hard, but often requires navigating through menus and swiping past distractions. Then, you need to hook your phone up to something to play the music out of, or else resign yourself to crappy phone speakers. Bluetooth is frequently unreliable for me and annoying to deal with, but to avoid it you'll need a dongle, which costs more money and in my experience reduces the audio quality considerably by adding hum that wasn't there before. Oh, and if you lose your internet connection, your music is interrupted. That's method one. Alternatively, you could take a CD, place it in a CD player, and just hit play.

Let's quickly run through some of the advantages of CDs as compared to streaming. CDs have no ads. You can buy a CD once and it's yours forever. You can buy them used for next to nothing- that's how I built my collection. You can rip those CDs to your computer and then put them on your phone or any other device you want- they'll be available whether you have an internet connection or not. If your computer doesn't have a CD drive, they can be bought pretty cheap as well, not to mention how cheap CD players are at thrift shops. I got my 5 CD changer for $15 and it is amazing. CDs have better audio quality than streaming, with no internet connection required. CDs typically also come with a booklet, which is totally worth a flip through if you're a big fan of the artist. And finally, when Spotify or Apple Music or whatever finally shuts down, you won't lose all your music if you have it on CD.

I want to dwell on that last point a little while. Right now, we're in a bit of an enshittification crisis. Online services in particular are rapidly getting worse as big companies compete to cut costs, to the detriment of their product. Online music streaming services are no different. User interfaces are getting clunkier and more cluttered. Features that used to be free are going behind paywalls, and features that used to be available with a subscription are being removed entirely. And after all that, you don't even own your music library on one of these services. Every online service eventually ends, and when Spotify ends, I'm going to lose all 200+ of my playlists unless I save them elsewhere beforehand. This will happen to every user of every streaming service eventually, and if you don't like it, you need to change your listening habits.

I still have CDs that I've had since I was a child. I have CDs that I've bought used that are twice as old as me, and they work just the same as they always have. And of course, I have new releases from this year. CDs predate Spotify, and while Spotify's quality is diminishing at the moment, CDs work just as well as they always have. When I bring up that I listen to CDs to friends, they'll often mention that they don't have a CD player anymore. To that I just want to say that it's a solvable problem. You can just go buy one, they aren't expensive. In the long run, streaming is much more expensive.

Of course, there are things streaming does that CDs can't really compete with. The modern understanding of playlists is a totally internet-reliant phenomenon, for example. You can make CD mixtapes, but nothing is quite the same as a 10+ hour playlist. CDs also don't allow you to discover new music as easily as you can on streaming services. In years past, when I wanted to find new music I'd put on Spotify's For You and Release Radar playlists and add anything that I enjoyed to my liked songs. Discovering new music through CDs requires an element of risk typically. However, I've never really discovered new music through CDs. I've almost always listened to albums on the internet before buying a CD, and that's still true. But when I find an album on streaming services that I like, I will almost always try to buy it if I really like it, assuming CDs for that album are even being made.

Over the last six years, I've come to the conclusion that CDs are valuable and are worth building listening habits around. Today, I listen to CDs in the car when I'm driving, at my desk using my CD player, and I rip every CD I buy so that I have it on my phone in case I ever want to deal with the hassle of plugging in or connecting bluetooth in exchange for the ability to listen to a CD I left at home but wanted to listen to anyways. I use Spotify when I want to listen to music in playlists, or albums I don't own but might want to someday, or listen to music recommendations from friends, or when I'm listening to music on a device that doesn't have access to my own music library. Both can coexist, but I find myself gravitating towards good old, physical CDs. As the internet gets worse, CDs stay the same. In 2018, I said CDs were less convenient but I liked them anyways. Today, I think that CDs are back to being more convenient. There just isn't anything easier than placing a disc in a CD player and hitting play.

Album Review: Where the Light Is: John Mayer Live in Los Angeles

 

I'm a big fan of live albums. As a performer myself, I love listening to a great performance that has been immortalized on tape. Of course, I know intellectually that a live album is not the same as going to a concert. There's a lot of mistakes that can be corrected after the fact in a recording, and Where the Light Is is no different. But there's still a special kind of magic that you get on a live album that you don't get from a studio album. And for an artist like John Mayer, that extra magic is where some of his best musicianship is. Where the Light Is is an incredibly well polished live album that is missing none of the live feel that I want from a good live recording.

Every genre of music has different expectations for what a live album should be. In jazz, for instance, it's almost taken for granted that a jazz album is recorded live, even if it's live from a studio. The ethos of jazz includes the expectation that jazz should be recorded with all the musicians in the same room, playing all at once, and that room should ideally be a jazz club with an audience. Even if it's not recorded in that setting, jazz albums are still expected to sound like they could have been recorded like that. Even in jazz studio albums, there is an expectation that there will be a live feel. On the other side of the spectrum, pop live albums have no such genre-wide mandates. A live album by a pop artist might include extensive post production editing including overdubs, autotune, and the concert the album was recorded at could have been entirely pre-recorded anyways. It's entirely possible to imagine a live album from a modern pop artist where no musicians were playing live, and the vocalist's performance was so heavily edited it couldn't qualify as live anymore either. And that's not to say that doesn't happen in other genres, but pop music doesn't try to hide it like jazz does.

John Mayer's live albums, and this one in particular, tend much closer to the jazz side of this spectrum than the pop side, at least when it comes to the live feel. Listening to Where the Light Is, you can't deny that it feels live. The album was recorded in a theater, and it sounds like it. I wasn't at the venue when it was recorded, but I find it hard to imagine much was lost in translation. Well, except for the two cut songs. There is that to be aware of. Because despite the audible crowd interaction and the perfectly imperfect live vocals, this album is still heavily polished- but not too heavily polished. The vocals sound like they were recorded on a typical live vocal mic, not a studio microphone, and you can hear that Mayer's distance to the microphone isn't consistent. The mixing engineers probably worked hard to get it to sound as good as it does, but it still sounds like a guy singing into an SM58 at a concert- a sound I'm well acquainted with, and a sound that sells the live feel to me in a subtle but powerful way.

Okay I'm three paragraphs in, I should probably start talking about the music. Where the Light Is comes in the form of a 2-CD double album, where the first disc is split between an acoustic set and the John Mayer Trio. The second disc is full rock band. Each of these sets has a mix of memorable John Mayer hits, deeper cuts, and a cover or two. The acoustic set tends towards older material, the trio set obviously draws heavily on the John Mayer Trio's album Try!, and the band set focuses on mostly material from John Mayer's latest album at the time, Continuum. I love the track listing here. There's a little bit of everything, and every John Mayer song is developed just a little bit more than it was when it was first released. There are extended solos, altered lyrics, brand new intros and outros, and all the other little things that make me love listening to live recordings. As a John Mayer fan, these are songs that I know, played in a new way. 

John Mayer's blues and rock roots are even more evident on his live albums than they are on his more pop-friendly studio releases. At the same time, I'm impressed at how well his songs translate over to a live context. The arrangements are largely the same as the original songs (with the exception of the acoustic set), but the band feels looser, like they're playing together and playing off each other more. It's not as sanitized as the studio albums are. It's not even like the studio albums are that sanitized or sterile, but there's just that extra 10% edge on the sound when it's done live. You can hear the chemistry between band members and if that doesn't make a live album worth listening to, I don't know what does.

As with Unreal Unearth, the last album I reviewed, Where the Light Is is an album that benefits from a full listen through rather than just picking out individual songs. Unreal Unearth is greater than the sum of its parts because it is a concept album, but Where the Light Is is stronger than any individual song because live albums are all about mentally putting yourself in the room where it happened. It's about imagining that it's December 2007 and you're in Los Angeles and you don't know what's going to happen next. Even if you do know, you have to pretend you don't.

I found this album at a record store in a trendy side of town that I didn't know existed until I walked past it one day. I stopped in, and found this album. I listened to it on the drive home, and it quickly became one of my favorite live albums. I listened to the band set while driving, with the stereo turned up as loud as I could stand, and listened to disc one at home through my my nice headphones to get all of the nuance of the more intimate sets. Since then, I've listened to the whole thing straight through, I've listened to just disc two with the band set, and I've had it in my shuffle rotation when I want to listen to John Mayer and I don't really care what songs come on. In all those contexts, this album makes me instantly happy as soon as it starts, because I know that it will suck me in quickly.

As I'm writing this, the last song of the album, "I'm Gonna Find Another You", just came on, and I know my time listening is almost up. Normally when I write these reviews, I listen to the album on repeat while I write, proofread, and re-write. While this album is plenty long (two hours and four minutes!), I know I can't let it repeat back to the beginning. My listening ends here, because the show is over. Maybe I'll edit this review while listening to a different John Mayer live album I have. But that's just the power of the live album- it draws you in, and asks you to play by its rules. Who am I to say no?

My favorite song from Where the Light Is is "I Don't Need No Doctor", a Ray Charles cover that caught my ear because it's one of the few songs I didn't already know when I first listened to this album. I love a good blues, and I love that it's the only song with presumably improvised solos for both the trumpet player and the saxophone player. As a jazz saxophonist myself, I really enjoyed that. I have no choice but to rate this album five stars.

Album Review: Unreal Unearth by Hozier

If I have an Album of the Year for 2023, it's Unreal Unearth by Hozier. Unreal Unearth is one of those albums that I wasn't really sure about the first time I listened to it, but I did know right from the beginning of the first track that there was some really good music in there. Over subsequent listens, I found myself connecting with the album on a level that I don't feel very often. 

The album opens with De Selby pt. 1 and De Selby pt. 2, which work together to set the tone for the album. The soundscape feels intensely intimate, especially in part one. It's hard to get any more intimate than a singer and a single acoustic guitar, but that intimacy is maintained throughout the album even as the arrangement grows in scope. De Selby pt. 2, while much louder and bolder, maintains that very personal feeling even with a completely different context for it. This continues throughout the album- Hozier's lead vocals are always soloistic, virtuosic, and incredibly emotionally potent whether he's singing softly over one or two instruments or singing over a full rock band mix. De Selby parts 1 and 2 show off both styles, and the rest of the album builds on those initial tracks.

Personally, I have some history with Hozier. In high school, I was unwillingly subjected to his 2013 single "Take Me to Church" with distressing frequency, as is the custom of top 40 radio. I didn't have the context of the album it came from (now a favorite of mine as well). I also probably wasn't really ready to appreciate the song's lyrical content. I just knew that it was another overplayed pop song that didn't have a place in my rotation of Taylor Swift, Owl City, and Slash ft. Myles Kennedy and the Conspirators albums. My friends at the time, in particular my longtime collaborator and dear friend Denaie, tried to get me to see the light, but I wasn't ready, so I let Hozier pass me by in high school, confident that I wasn't missing much.

But of course, times have changed. Owl City's music since The Midsummer Station has been hit or miss for me. I can't even listen to Taylor Swift anymore because I'm too annoyed by her as a person. And Hozier has wound up at the top of my rotation as one of my favorite artists and in the year 2024 I own all of his albums on CD. How did that happen?

Well, another one of my friends finished the work Denaie started. I'd like to thank Soleil (who made a Hozier cover with me!) for convincing me to listen to Unreal Unearth, which I did with initially low expectations. I've listened to other albums on their suggestion, with mixed results. I'm pretty picky when it comes to music so that's no insult to Sol's taste. But at any rate, I put Unreal Unearth on one night before bed, and gave it a listen. I didn't really get it, but I could tell that it was good stuff, the kind of good stuff that I wouldn't be able to fully identify on the first listen. There's this incredibly pretentious academic term called "high information music", which is basically the idea that some music is just better because it has more music happening in it than other music. I don't like that as a concept because it seems more likely to be used to belittle music that academics don't like rather than elevate music that your average music listener does, but I'm going to commandeer the term for that purpose here. Unreal Unearth is high information music that has a lot going on and it wasn't easy for me to tease out all that nuance and value the first time around, but I could identify that it was there. That's why I gave it a second listen, and a third, and a fourth... and the next thing you know I'm going to a Hozier concert and buying his CDs and putting them on every time I get in the car.

Unreal Unearth has some incredible individual songs, such as De Selby pt. 2, First Time, Francesca, Eat Your Young, Damage Gets Done, and First Light. But my favorite part of the album isn't any individual song or group of songs. It's the overall experience of listening to the album, from start to finish, where you can feel yourself being taken on a journey beginning with the descent into hell and ending with the emergence back into the light at the end. Unreal Unearth is a masterpiece in album sequencing, pacing, and storytelling without explicitly saying anything about the story. I'm a big fan of listening to albums from start to finish, and this is an amazing album for that purpose. There are songs on this album that are not satisfying at all when listened to out of context, but feel like important moments of arrival when encountered in the course of a full album listen- one example being Son of Nyx.

The climax of the album, and one of the best songs, is the song First Light. It represents the conclusion of the journey; the return to where it started. The entire album comes to a head here, and to describe it in too much detail would only do it a disservice, so I'll keep it short and just say that this song, when heard at the end of the album after an hour of music, is incredible. It's one of the best album closers I've ever heard, a fitting compliment to the De Selbys, which together are one of the best album openers I've ever heard. It's a satisfying conclusion to an amazing arc that you would never experience if you only ever listened to #1 hits. Maybe high school me was right all along: one Hozier song out of context isn't all that great. But now that I've heard the album and understood the context, all of the individual songs are elevated. That's true of the singles from Unreal Unearth, and it's doubly true for Hozier's debut album that I panned all those years ago- perhaps that will be the subject for a future album review.

Before concluding, I need to take a moment to talk about the textures and instrumentation of Unreal Unearth. The sustained intimacy of this album despite its dynamic highs and lows is only possible because of the instrumentation. Unreal Unearth employs a dark sound comprised of very human instruments- acoustic pianos and guitars, a string section, and choirs all give the album a distinctly human touch. When things get more intense, we hear a rhythm section consisting of a bass guitar dripping with personality, tight drumming on a funk-sounding kit that I can't get enough of, electric piano and simple synth patches that mostly stay out of the way of the arrangement, and electric guitar sounds that could have come out of the 70s- and I love it. Hozier's use of fuzz and overdrives in a way that don't overpower the sound aren't exactly revolutionary, but they are refreshing. As a guitarist myself, I love the rich layers of acoustic and electric guitars that create the spacier sounds on this album, and I love the tight rhythm playing that locks in with the rest of the rhythm section so well. In particular, the guitars on Anything But are layered so densely and yet the overall sound is so light and airy. Whatever the intensity level of the music is, it's being played in a way that makes it apparent that real people are the ones doing it, and I love it.

All this talk and I've barely even mentioned the lyrical themes of the album, but that's not exactly what I listen to Unreal Unearth for. The lyrics are genius of course, and I appreciate them, but I'm here for the music. I'm here for the soundscapes. I'm here for the grooves, and I'm here for the stellar vocal performance that reminds me the voice is an instrument too, and it can be infinitely nuanced and expressive. What he's saying with that voice is profound and deeply interesting, but it's not what I'm primarily here for.

Unreal Unearth was easily my favorite album of 2023, beating out competition from Metallica's 72 Seasons and Olivia Rodrigo's GUTS, both of which I've enjoyed thoroughly since they came out. It's hard to pick a favorite song from Unreal Unearth, but if I had to pick, I'd go with the first song that I really loved from this album- my favorite track is De Selby pt. 2.

Francesca (Hozier cover ft. Soleil)

 

This is the first song I've finished since my album, and it's a really exciting one. It's always exciting for me to collaborate with someone else, and that goes double when it's one of my best friends. Hopefully this will be the first of many to come.

For this song, I played the electric guitar parts on my Fender Telecaster Deluxe using a tube screamer, the acoustic part on my Hohner dreadnought. The sax writing was AATT, which is becoming my new standard practice now that I have a tenor sax.

Autumn (Original 2014 version)

 

Autumn is the oldest track on Radio Rachel, and the only song on the album that predates my YouTube channel. I thought it was time to upload it to YouTube. I still think the original version has a lot of charm.

Match day vlog: Chelsea vs Celtic

 

Unlucky Number (Acoustic)

 

What I learned from making an album

 In my announcement post, I explained why I chose to make an album this year. Since then, I've finished mixing and mastering, finalized the album title and art, and the album has been released! This isn't the first time I've made an album, but I've never done it quite like this so I wanted to take some time to write down my thoughts about what I've learned from the process, what went well, and what I'm going to do differently next time. 

Almost none of the songs on Radio Rachel were written to be on an album together. "Tele Gang" and "Interlude" are the two exceptions, but the vision for the album was to bring together my best preexisting songs and make an album out of them. Two songs were written for past albums, but the remaining eight were all written as standalone songs for my YouTube channel. They weren't written with a coherent creative vision, which seems unhelpful at first, but it actually helped develop Radio Rachel's greatest strength- variety. 

The most intimate song on the album has a very sparse texture. "Optimism: Take Two" has one guitar, bass, drumset, and one saxophone for the majority of its runtime. In contrast, "Tele Gang" boasts three lead guitar parts, two rhythm guitars, synths playing chords, bass, drums, and a full saxophone section consisting of two altos and two tenors. All of these instruments are playing at once. The range of this album, just in terms of texture, is staggering. And yet, the core instrumentation of guitars + saxophones stays pretty consistent throughout, so there's a line of continuity despite the dramatic changes in ensemble size.

Stylistically, this album is also very diverse. I've pulled from all my influences, including jazz, rock, pop, metal, hip hop, and even classical composition techniques. The fact that these songs were all written at different times in my musical journey also adds to the diversity. I know I couldn't have written "The Katocaster" five years ago, but I also haven't written anything like "Autumn" in the ten years since I wrote that song. The contrast between my 2010s and 2020s compositions only make the album stronger.

The recording process went exceptionally well for Radio Rachel. I made a spreadsheet with a row for every track and a column for every instrument, and for the most part I picked up each instrument and played through the entire album in about a day, give or take. Rhythm guitar took the longest, because there are usually multiple rhythm guitar parts for each song, somewhere between one and five but typically three or so. Woodwinds, on the other hand, took almost no time to record everything. Every song has at least one alto sax part and at least one tenor sax part, and many have a second part for each.

My process for recording each instrument was more or less the same: I pulled up the sheet music on one half of my screen, Reaper on the other half, and played the album down from start to finish. Sometimes I'd record songs out of order for variety. I started out with MIDI stems for every track in the album, and each time I recorded an instrument I found that MIDI track and deleted it. That way, I was hearing the entire arrangement while recording each part, with the parts I hadn't yet recorded being represented by the midi imitations. After each placeholder had been replaced, I was ready to mix.

My recording order was bass first, then clean rhythm guitars, distorted rhythm guitars, lead guitars, and then woodwinds. Throughout that entire process I would take breaks to work on the programmed drums and synth parts. I didn't actually play any keyboards on this album, it's all sequenced MIDI running through VSTs. But keyboards aren't the focus of this album, so I didn't think it was worth the time and effort to learn and play every keys part when I already had the MIDI ready to import directly from the score. It's not like anyone would listen to a Rachel Hoots album to hear keys, after all.

Mixing and mastering the album took quite a while, and I still feel like it wasn't completely perfect. I learned a few new tricks, and made use of pretty much every mixing technique I know. It was very difficult to get such a diverse selection of songs sounding coherent together, but I think I did an alright job. I made extensive use of busses in the mixing process- I grouped my tracks into lead guitar, rhythm guitar, bass, drums, keys, and woodwinds. Once I got all of the parts within each section relatively balanced to each other, I focused on finding the right balance between the larger sections. I still feel like I could have done a better job, but I had to finish at some point, so I called it done when I got sick of listening to it.

The mastering chain was pretty simple. I used a compressor, a saturator, and a limiter- all stock plugins in reaper. I aimed for about -9 LUFS but let's be honest, every streaming service these days normalizes the volume of every song so I'd imagine this isn't as big of a deal as it used to be. But of course, because I've got some very sparse jazz and some very dense metal both on the same album (and sometimes on the same track!) I let the LUFS vary from song to song so that hopefully the big songs would sound bigger and the soft songs would sound softer.

All in all, I'm very proud of this album project. However, there are things I would do differently. I think I could have done a better job mixing, and I think it would be nice for my next album to have a coherent creative vision from the start instead of trying to organize pre-existing songs into a tracklist. It's easy for me to think about all the things I could have done on Radio Rachel, but I need to keep reminding myself that Radio Rachel wasn't meant to show off everything I am capable of- it's just a little showcase of some of my best work, and I'm very much operating in my musical comfort zone. That's okay. Maybe next time I'll push myself a bit more. Next time, I'd like to make the fast songs faster and more technical, the slow songs slower and more expressive, and the middle tempos more rock solid. But that's for next time.

In the week since the album came out, I've been very happy with the positive reception that Radio Rachel has had. I think I met my goal of creating an album I can be proud of, and it makes me very happy to see people enjoying it.

Radio Rachel is out now!

 

My album, Radio Rachel, is now out on all the big streaming platforms! I'll have more to say soon, but for now, go check it out on your streaming service of choice!

https://rachelhoots.bandcamp.com/album/radio-rachel

Album Review: AFTERTASTE by Hey Violet

 

It's been a few years since I last did an album review, but I've been thinking about bringing them back. Today's release of AFTERTASTE by Hey Violet gives me a perfect excuse to bring this format back to my blog.

Previously, I reviewed Hey Violet's first album under that name, From the Outside. That album is one of my favorites of all time, so of course I had been waiting for a follow up album ever since. What I didn't know at the time was that it would be a seven year wait for Hey Violet's follow up album.

Hey Violet released a few EPs and plenty of singles in that time, but I am an album lover. It's not like those releases were bad or anything, but an album has some extra weight to it. There's a prestige to an album that an EP or single doesn't have. AFTERTASTE being an album puts it on a pedestal along with From the Outside and The Edge of Control in a way that those other releases won't be. Leading up to the release, I was a little bit worried that AFTERTASTE wouldn't stack up. And with this being release day as I'm writing this, I've only heard the album a couple times. My opinion could change in the years to come. But on day one, I think this is a fitting final album for Hey Violet. Yeah, I found out this would be Hey Violet's final album shortly before it came out. That sucks a bit as a big fan of the band but I'm happy we at least get one final album after all this time.

Musically, AFTERTASTE is much more mature than either of the previous two albums by the band. From the Outside was a dramatic departure from the style of The Edge of Control, but AFTERTASTE seems to bridge the earlier two albums' styles nicely. It's clearly a pop album first and foremost, but there's plenty of rock bite that was missing from From the Outside. If From the Outside was pure pop and The Edge of Control was pure rock, Aftertaste feels like a mix of both but with its own flair. Maturity is the word that comes to mind first when listening to Aftertaste, especially in contrast to the previous albums, which I would characterize as playfully immature and unapologetic of that decision. Aftertaste is an album made by adults. The song "Hazy", the album's closer, spells out the thesis of this album. Hey Violet is a successful band that made it in the music industry, but they've grown up now.

AFTERTASTE perfectly captures the feeling of early 2020s discontent. It's defiant, sarcastic, at times hopeless, and at other times rises above the hopelessness. It feels both deeply personal and also kinda universal in a way that the best pop music does. I feel like I can connect with this album today just like I connected with From the Outside all those years ago.

Hey Violet means a lot to me. I have the day I first discovered their music marked in my calendar as my Hey Violet Fanniversary - November 24, 2018, by the way. They're one of the few artists where I would preorder a new album as quickly as possible before even hearing it. Unfortunately for me, though, Hey Violet did not release AFTERTASTE on CD anywhere I could find it, so I had to settle for a digital download. That does bother me a little bit because I have the other two albums on CD, but I can't really blame them. Both CDs and Hey Violet are past their respective heydays. It still makes me a bit sad, though.

If you can relate to feeling the dread of the 2020s lately, you might enjoy this album. If you've ever been a fan of Hey Violet or their previous incarnation as Cherri Bomb, you probably owe it to yourself to hear their final word as a band. I'm not exactly expecting AFTERTASTE to be a massive hit or widespread success, but for the community of fans who love this band, it's something special and I am thankful we have it.

My favorite track from AFTERTASTE is Uncomplicated.

Why I'm making an album

 

I've been writing music since I started playing music. It's a key part of my identity as a musician that I write, record, and share music on a regular basis. For years, my creativity has been poured into my YouTube channel, and for a while I uploaded a song every week. I used to frequently have a queue of videos ready to go for months in advance. Recently, however, I've slowed down. Eventually that long queue of videos ran out, and my uploads dropped in frequency. I just haven't had the drive to write new music lately. But that doesn't mean I don't have a drive to create and a drive to make music. So, I decided it was time to distill my years of composition into an album. Here's why. 

Albums are important to me. If you've read my blog for a long time, you may remember my series of album reviews where I discussed how some of my favorite albums impacted me. Ever since I became interested in music, I have thought of albums as one of the pillars of musical expression. I love albums as a medium. I love how an album is both a collection of individual songs and a single work of long form art. Nearly every album tells some kind of story, and I love looking for that story even if it's just an indistinct feeling. Albums are an important part of music as an art form, and especially in the genres of music that I love. So it was only a matter of time before I took a crack at making an album again. 

This isn't exactly my first album rodeo. Way back in 2014, when I had only played guitar for about a year and some change, I wrote and recorded an album with some help from my friends. And in 2019, I wrote and recorded instrumentals for an album that was a collaborative project with one of those same friends. That album was never completed, but a handful of songs have seen the light of day. Those two albums were five years apart, and another five years has passed now. I guess that's just my album making cycle. 

For a while now, I've held on to the incorrect impression that if I were to create an album, I'd need to write an album's worth of new material. I found that prospect to be very intimidating, so it took until I realized it wasn't true for me to start making real progress on a 2024 album. At some point in the last month, I realized that I already had a back catalogue of songs I'd written for YouTube that would be perfect for an album. What if I just picked the best ten or so songs from my YouTube channel and recorded them the best way I knew how? That became the vision for this album. 

Almost all of the songs on the album have been heard on my YouTube channel before, but not all. Every song has been completely re-recorded, though. There are also new songs, completely new arrangements of songs, and one song so old it predates my YouTube channel entirely. This album features tracks written in 2014, 2018, 2019, and each year from 2021 to 2024. There are a couple of tracks that were made specifically for this album and have not yet appeared on YouTube, and a couple of songs so completely reimagined that they bear little resemblance to their original versions. 

I've written a lot of music that I like, but just uploading those songs to YouTube isn't really enough. I want to put the best music I've written since 2014 on an album. I want to do something bigger with these songs, and I want to have something to represent me that I can be proud of for years to come. I've already written music that I'm proud of, some of which I've been lucky enough to perform live. Now it's time to make a collection of recordings at the highest level I know how. It's an opportunity to push my limits and discover what I'm capable of. And it has also been five years. 

Right now, I'm nearly done laying down tracks. Mixing the record is about to begin, and I'm going to be extra thoughtful about this release process. I haven't settled on a name for the album yet, but I've got one that I'm probably going to use: Radio Rachel, coming July 2024. 

Techbobabble Acoustic

 

I am currently in the process of recording an album. I'm not going to say much about that right now because it's pretty early in the process and my plans might change as the work goes on. One thing I knew I wanted to do, however, was include bonus tracks. The idea of playing Techbobabble on acoustic guitar had also been floating around in my head for a while, and it felt like a perfect fit. And of course, because it's a bonus track and not part of the album proper, I felt like it would be okay to post it to YouTube.

This recording went very quickly- it took just a couple of hours. I have been playing this song as part of my guitar practice ever since my 2024 re-recording, so the lead part was under my fingers already, but I also had just recently recorded the bass and rhythm guitar parts for my album. The sax parts were easy enough to transpose over to acoustic, and the drum part worked surprisingly well too. 

For the drum loop, I recorded the kick drum by hitting the soundboard of my guitar with the palm of my hand and the snare by hitting the upper bout with my fingers- classic 2010s acoustic flair. The clap sounds in the original were changed to snaps and layered up to fill out the sound, and for the outro I added a muted strumming sound as a hi-hat. With the exception of that hi-hat part, all of the percussion was recorded as a two bar loop that repeated for the length of the song. 

Also new in this recording is the addition of an outro solo which I felt was needed to add interest to the outro. Normally, the outro features heavy use of modulation effects such as phasers or flangers to provide movement and keep the repetitive riff from feeling too static. On acoustic guitar, I didn't have that option, so I instead chose to layer another part on top. Besides, the outro changes modes from natural minor to phrygian so I had a different tonal palette to play with which kept the solo interesting. 

That's really all there is to it. Most of the parts were played pretty much exactly the same on acoustic as they would be on woodwinds or electric guitar. The bass part didn't even have to be moved up an octave or anything. I did also bump the bpm up to 210 from the original 208 just to inject a tiny bit more energy into this recording to make up for the thinner texture, but the affect is hardly noticable unless you listen to both back to back. 

As mentioned, this recording of Techbobabble is intended to be a bonus track on an upcoming album of mine, which will also feature a rendition of the song that is more true to the original but with changes informed by my recent re-recording projects. The ethos of this album is to take existing songs that I've written and polish them up to the point where they're worth publishing more widely than just on YouTube. There's a couple of brand new songs, as well. No release date or title have been decided yet.