I’m having so much fun building an entire fictional universe with the music I’ve been making. I’ve been dreaming about this character — Cobalt Starstrong the singing spaceman — for nearly 20 years. Getting to finally actually make & hear his albums is a real highlight of my life.
The majority of my music so far is still song interpretations of the short stories I spent the last 20 years writing. It took about 4 months to turn all my collections into albums, and it was a great way of touring through different styles until I found one that really clicked.
Then I’ve spent the last month reveling in the sound I’d been searching for, alternating through three fictional artists, making albums in that sound space.
In addition to Cobalt Starstrong (the singing spaceman!), I’ve been making albums by The Event Horizons and Star-Shaker.
The Event Horizons are more loosely connected to my written universe of fiction. But Star-Shaker definitely gets mentioned in my books…
…and her albums are very much in conversation with Cobalt’s albums, right down to the album art for her first album being inspired by the art for his third, and the title of her second album — Cold-Blooded Girl — comes from a song on his first.
I see Star-Shaker’s relationship to Cobalt Starstrong’s music as similar to my own relationship to The Beach Boys’ music — she’s loved it since she was young, was formed by it, but can see its flaws. This lets me use my own feelings in writing her songs.
It takes a truly ridiculous amount of restraint to not immediately start creating the next album as soon as I’ve finished the last one….
But also, my brain hurts so much if I don’t force myself to take a day or two off between albums.
Restraint is hard. Burning out my brain is harder.
Me to myself: it’s not reeeeeally starting the next album to just start brainstorming the track list with Claude. As long as I don’t start actually making the songs, I won’t burn my brain out…
Also me: oooh, these lyrics are promising… maybe I should paste them into Suno now…
We’ve now got a lyric video for “Made of Words” from The Robots Singing Each to Each!
We should be getting lyric videos up for all my songs soon. It’s been a whole thing figuring out how to make this happen, especially since there are just so many songs.