This is a post I’ve been meaning to write for awhile now. I’ve mentioned my abruptly abandoned EP The Awakening a few times before, but never with much detail. My reasons pretty much come down to the fact that its inspiration is highly personal, and divulging all the details publicly isn’t in anyone’s best interests. Unfortunately, some of this stuff needs to be discussed, since understanding my last project and the effect it had on me is useful if you want to understand my next. I’m not going to get into all of the gory details, but here goes…

A little background

Three years ago—almost exactly, coincidentally—I broke up with my longtime girlfriend, who I’ll refer to only as She. The breakup itself wasn’t particularly difficult; I had deliberated over it for awhile and convinced myself that it was the right decision, and excepting a few brief moments of weakness, I never really questioned it. The difficult part was making sense of it all. Naïve as it may sound, at the ripe age of 24, I still believed in the notion of a “one,” and up until just before the breakup, I was sure She was it. When convinced of such a thing, you start making plans, and my plans were hopelessly intertwined with hers. Post-breakup, the hardest part was figuring out what to do with my life now that her part in it was so greatly diminished.

As is often the case when I find myself at a loss, I started contemplating projects. I needed to do something that would at best help me figure things out and at worst keep me occupied. More than anything, I wanted, no, needed to create something positive and tangible, something that could fill the void I felt in the wake of the breakup and make sense of my life. Creating an album seemed like an obvious solution, and I reasoned that a concept album about the circumstances surrounding the breakup would be even better. My hope was that by writing songs about the whole ordeal, I would have to understand what happened and why. So in September 2006, I started throwing around some ideas of what I wanted the album to sound like, what its feel would be, what the story would be, and how I wanted to convey those ideas to the listener. While I had plenty of ideas about what I wanted the album to sound like, the lyrical concept wasn’t really making itself known. One dreary October day, in a moment of inspiration while having my oil changed—it can come to you anywhere—, the structure of the album revealed itself as four song titles scribbled on a piece of torn newspaper. Thus The Awakening was born.

The madness

By early November, I began developing song ideas for the record. I had already come up with the record’s basic structure, which was to consist of five songs:

1. The Awakening
2. Lost Again
3. Should (Of Course It Matters)
4. Apology
5. Hope

Note that at this point, I had not written a single note or lyric, but I had an extremely detailed idea of what the songs were to be about, each song’s feel and style, and how each song would flow into the next. This, I would later discover, is a terrible way to go about making a record.

My process was woefully convoluted. Since the songs existed as well-formed concepts, I had to write music and lyrics that fit those concepts, rather than working in the opposite, more natural way. I started off jamming for a few weeks and wrote a lot of music pretty quickly, though little really managed to fit in with the ideas I had developed. This led to a plethora of unused material, and very little progress on the album for some time. By Christmas 2006, I had most of the music and some lyrics for “The Awakening,” some music for “Lost Again,” and some music and lyrics for “Hope,” which by that point I was calling “Skylar’s Song.” “Apology” had been dropped from the record altogether, though songs being added and dropped was an almost daily occurrence and by no means final. In fact, none of my decisions were final. Were one to describe the writing of the album at that time, perhaps the most fitting description would be “paralyzed by indecision.” I was so fiercely committed to my original ideas that I spent most of my time trying to force the material I was writing—most of it quite good—into these neat concepts that I had conceived of months earlier. When that didn’t work—that is, most of the time—, I would stress out and devote all my intellectual resources to figuring out how to make it work. That would eventually lead me to reconsider whether the song was right for the concept, but rarely would I question the concept itself. For me, the concept was all that I had. My plans had all gone awry, and this project, this album, in all its constructed conceptual purity, was going to save me. The concept was the ideal, and my job as a songwriter was to live up to that ideal, no matter how unnatural that was.

A phone call

By the middle of February, progress on the record had very nearly come to a halt. One particularly bad week, I discarded all but one song and basically had a nervous breakdown. In need of a little perspective, I called a close friend to talk things over and get his opinion. Having gone over the whole thing, I asked him “What do you think? Am I just being stupid?” His response: “Yeah, pretty much.” We talked a bit more, and by the end of the conversation, I had a much needed boost in my confidence, and perhaps a bit more faith in my natural tendencies versus my so-called ideals.

Within a week of the phone call, work had begun again on the record, and six songs were starting to take serious shape. A seventh was added in March, and within a few months, music had been completed for nearly all of the tracks, which were now:

1. The Awakening
2. Lost Again
3. Should (Of Course It Matters)
4. Requiem née Apology
5. Should Reprise
6. Solace née Skylar’s Song
7. Where Are You?

By July, all that was left to do was to write lyrics for “Where Are You?” and “Lost Again.” The latter was to be my Moby Dick: a positive love song adults could take seriously, which I had been trying to write for over a year by then. I worked on those tracks intermittently for the next few months, mostly without a great deal of stress, while recording updated demos for the other songs. By late November 2007, a full year after I started it, I had finished all the writing.

Abandonment

The beautiful thing about making a record that’s supposed to save you is that every now and then, despite your best efforts, it actually does. Writing The Awakening left me completely drained, both creatively and emotionally. The process decimated my self-confidence; caused a minor nervous breakdown; and drove me, and by extension some of my closest friends, absolutely crazy. But by the end of it, I was better. I had written seven of my best songs up till then, not because they fit the original concept that I had concocted at the beginning, but because they were natural expressions of the things I was feeling and the ideas I was having. It wasn’t what I had envisioned; it was better. And having gone through the whole process, I realized I didn’t need it anymore, so I decided not to record it.

This came as a shock to many of my friends. Some found it rather sad that I wouldn’t have anything to show for all my tribulations, but it seemed very natural to me. Writing The Awakening was always supposed to be a cathartic experience. At the end of the catharsis, I had effectively closed a rather large chapter of my life; recording the album seemed the wrong way to start the next. So, I didn’t.

It really is too bad; I’m really quite proud of everything I wrote. ”The Awakening” is easily one of my strongest pieces musically, and “Lost Again” is by far the best pop song I’ve ever written. It also remains the only positive love song I’ve ever written that I’m not ashamed of. Of all of the tracks, “Where Are You?” stands out as my favorite, and its strong guitar work and fundamentally good songwriting has informed a lot of my work now. Perhaps one day, years from now, I’ll be able to come back to The Awakening and record it, but I doubt it. There’s rarely any sense going back.

These days, while working on what will hopefully become my next album, my main memory of The Awakening is a piece of advice my friend gave me on that oh-so-important phone call: trust yourself and don’t over-complicate things. Since then, I surely haven’t eradicated my penchant for over-complication, nor have I done away with my fear and self-doubt—I likely never will—, but I have realized that my instincts are good and that I can do work that I’m really very proud of when I get out of my own way. As long as I keep reminding myself of that, I think I’ll be all right.