About the LONG SONG DEMO PROJECT

I recorded the LONG SONG DEMO PROJECT in my childhood bedroom through May and June of 2023. I finished recording just in the nick of time to get on a train to Philadelphia, then to New Jersey, then New York, and spent every moment of transit editing the tracks (with the exception of my final hours returning home to Massachusetts, which I spent watching Wall-e, a long time coming).

I finished editing just in the nick of time to play and nitpick the demo twice through (in between one car inspection and two police reports, among other things). I then raided my dad’s remaining store of CD materials—I burned 25 discs, manipulated my home printer’s conservative capabilities to print 25 double sided CD inserts on paper far too heavy for the poor machine, and, with the help of my mom, got every CD and insert safely labeled and jewel-cased, all in time for a last minute CD release show scheduled for two days later (thank you Dre and Chris @ The Ashfield Lakehouse!!).

It was a significant but necessary challenge to limit the album process to a stripped demo format. Many of you have surely heard me say that this album has been many many years in the coming—the ultimately successful completion of these demos absolutely depended on a simplified recording & mixing process.

It could be agonizing (really!) to shut myself off from the intoxication (really! really!) of pure creative flow, to turn away from the deliciously exciting ideas that tugged at me while I edited these songs—A panned and layered harmony could sound like a little ghost choir there! Can I make this sound like a train somehow? What if I record my own cough and just distort it until it gets kinda synth-y and then I can—you get it. I had to pass by all of my potential genius for the sake of the final product.

But I am very satisfied with the intimate nature of these recordings. I think they sound as close to the actual experience of me singing right into your ear as anything could without me actually perched on your shoulder. My music is largely about that unfiltered, unapologetic realness of who I am and how I feel, think, do. This is why I love to write and why I love to perform—to fully experience and share that vulnerability with others. I am beyond excited to dive into a more expansive production process for many of the songs on this album (as well as many still hidden away in my room, under mattresses and inside acorn tops), but for now I am really happy with the album’s simple integrity and I hope you find some comfort and beauty in that as well.

The songs on this album are an assortment from the past few years, the oldest being over x3, and the most recent being face to face. It was an interesting process not only to select the songs to be included, but also to determine the order to play them in. As the songs stand today, I find that they take their listener through an appropriately disjointed and non chronological journey of life and the ness of being. I am perpetually concerned with exploring the “I am” so I really liked the cyclical sensation of starting and ending the album with two different but no less definitive “I am” declarations. And although the track order is not tied to the chronological creation of its songs, I am particularly fond of the way that the final three tracks together depict a (my) very honest, and very human process of personal development.

When I listen to all of these songs, and recall where I was when I wrote them, what they meant to me at the time, what they say about me now--

I am provided with this vision of birds, or fish, or skilled weavers’ hands, spinning and criss-crossing and knotting and being hurled this way and that by their own free will, or the west wind, or something much more profound and less explicable—and that’s me. That’s all of me. Every part of me within one me and every iteration of me, dancing and colliding and weaving into and around each other.

I am increasingly aware of the growth I am undergoing as a person and a musician, and I have undeniably come face to face (ha) with that evolution through this project. There’s no real endpoint to the growth process, and the benchmark I reach in the album isn’t about finally knowing yourself, it’s not about figuring it all out. It’s an honest reckoning with the very presence of self, which then allows the self to actually participate in (rather than observe or interpret) this eclectic experience of play, dance, and ritual—life.

I can’t say how much of all this is for me versus for all of you, but both are deeply connected to everything I’m doing, and I am so grateful for all of the support I have received so far on my journey. I am so grateful for those who have opened themselves up to me, who have allowed my words and my songs to touch and move them. And I am so grateful for the space that has been made for me to simply feel as I feel, when I feel it. When I’m on stage I find myself simultaneously: alone in a single-lit corner of my bedroom, and also engulfed in the warmest, most authentic and populated embrace. That dual experience of vulnerability is a magic that I cannot, with any due justice, put into words (but maybe a song someday) and I hope it’s something that others feel too.

I am so ready to keep moving forward and I just can’t express enough thanks to anyone who finds themselves a part of this thing that I’m doing. I’ve always known this is what my path needed to be, and it’s finally beginning to walk itself out beyond the confines of my own singular personhood. The thought of my music being a part of anyone else’s life is just the greatest gift.

Peace, love, grace, thank you. Excited for more.

eva

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