///01 Living Room Ghost (2019-2020)

Hi, thanks so much for listening to this collection. As the description states, this is a compilation of old, hard to find, unfinished, et cetera, music I've written in the time I've been writing, from 2014 through now. Its name, "Connections and Feelings", is a lyric taken from the Popcatcher song, A Rough Draft (Copy). It just sort of felt right, given the song's title

I decided to break up some of the tracks with interludes like the one you're hearing now because without them, the lack of context would make this pretty indigestible, and the variation in quality would be disorienting. If you'd rather read along to my notes as you listen to this release, I've included them in text form in the "lyrics" section of each of these interlude tracks. And be sure to check the credits down below the track listing

Before I talk about the song you just heard and the batch of songs you're about to hear I wanted to give a brief overview of this collection as a whole. Essentially, it goes in reverse chronological order, but with some exceptions. Up next immediately are songs I wrote for a band I was in called Living Room Ghost, all but one of these haven't seen the light of day until now. The next are a sampling of the commissions I wrote as a secondary source of income over the course of a few years. Following that are songs I wrote for Youtube videos of mine. Note that these don't include many of the songs that play during the end card sequences, those are demos for future completed releases of mine. After that are the soundtracks to three games I composed for. Then, outtakes from my EP "Never The Same Again, Thank Goodness", which vary in completeness from "sketch" to "nearly completed". After that, my formerly offline debut EP, "Orange", as well as three early demos from before its conception. Lastly, a "lost EP" if you will, of material that was recorded by a friend, who helped out in many other areas of its development

This is a long compilation, I think the songs themselves clock in at over 2 hours, and these interludes are going to make that even longer. Because everything I release is pay what you want, I urge you to give this release a download, and to maybe, just, organize the songs you like and construct a more reasonable, concise playlist. Personally, I have a rough idea of how I'd present an album's worth of the material in here if I were to have done so, but I don't want to influence expectations much. I'd also recommend you take this in chunks. I cannot imagine listening to this entire thing in one sitting, and I'm familiar with these tracks. I feel like it'd be way too much to take in all at once

As for that first song you just heard, it was written in early 2018, but just never fit on any subsequent release despite being pretty finished when I went back in and gave it vocals in 2019 as I was writing for As Much As I Forget. It's been long enough now that I'm fairly certain continuing to try to retrofit it into releases will remain fruitless, although funnily enough it also doesn't really fit with any of the other sets of songs here. Technically it was written as I was writing the material that actually wound up on Never The Same, but the demos in that batch of songs are much older, and most of the B-sides from my subsequent material wound up getting repurposed or wasn't close enough to being finished to carve out a spot for them, so I couldn't put it there. I love this track though, I hadn't heard it very much since I finished it, and I'm impressed by how different it is from the material I was writing at the time. It's one of, like, three Twinkle Park songs with a verse-chorus structure, that's weird!

The set of material you're about to hear is, as mentioned, from a band I formed after moving to southern california. I reached out to a craigslist ad and wound up meeting my primary co-songwriter for the project, Christian, who shared so many sensibilities and interests with me it was almost uncanny. So I guess I'm one of few people who can say in full sincerity I met one of my best friends and favorite people on craigslist. We wrote some songs, found a few other musicians in the area, rehearsed twice, quarantine hit, our drummer left, our bassist got busy with grad school, we cycled through about twelve names, but we still continued writing. Eventually, when I realized it was time to move out of the area, we decided to cut our losses and scrap the project, salvaging what songs we could for personal projects. While I took a few of the songs I wrote for Living Room Ghost and incorporated them into what will be my next release, the majority of them were left on the cutting room floor. These are the five songs I felt were worth assembling and releasing

The eagle-eyed among you may realize that one of these song titles is familiar, and yes, it was previously released as a demo. What you hear on this release is altered, although I don't know how noticeable all but one of the changes will be, and I suspect the one noticeable change will probably come as a disappointment to some and a massive relief to others, so I'm sorry, and also, you're welcome. I'll explain my decision on that and a bit more about our process after you've had a chance to hear these songs