///06 First Songs & Orange (2014-2015)

Yeah, we're kinda getting into the stinky stuff now. Never The Same Again was technically written over the course of three years, but the songs that actually made it onto that release were written in late 2017 and early 2018. I wrote like, thirty fucking songs for that EP, originally envisioning a full length, but it was, like my writing for Living Room Ghost, a process of simultaneous explosive creative energy and rapid improvement, so each time I'd writе a song, I'd scrap an old one, and I eventually had to comе to terms with the fact that I only liked four of these songs, four of the newest, and that's what became Never The Same

I remember there was a point while I was writing where I showed a demo to a friend of mine, and when it got to the chorus he was like, "this is the part in the commercial where the car drives at the camera and the narrator tells you what its horsepower is". Brutal feedback but he was so right. Which is the reason there aren't more of those in this release, they at most have, like, one good idea in a sea of utter garbage, and it'd bloat an already extremely bloated compilation to have a ton of fifteen second snippets

That first song has a brand new mix, I hadn't heard it in so long that when I did I was like, wait, this is fucking cranked, what the fuck? I knew I had the ability to mix it in a way that'd capture the energy I was going for, so I did. It was only ever performed live once, so like, seven people have ever heard it before now. This was the only mix of this batch I really touched with any depth. After that was Seafoam. I wrote this when I was listening to a lot of the calypso music my grandma and her brother would share back and forth with one another. Don't ask how that was the end product. It was supposed to get vocals eventually but a melody never came to me. I struggled a lot with writing lyrics at the time because I just kinda didn't know what to write about. You might recognize that, as well as the following tracks, from an older compilation record that's not around anymore. I realized this next one's original title, Electric Super Loving You was too similar to an indie game I hadn't heard of at the time. The working title was "Apple Soda", so I just went with that. Shouts out to Manzanita Sol. This song embarrasses me more than most because there's a riff in there that's like, almost exact to one that appears in the Emperor X song "Defiance". I swear, for all the deliberate compositional references I make, that one was completely unintentional. After that blunder is the song Coconut Soup, which was co-written by the co-founder of Pop Spirit, Tim Lindsay. I had a rough, rudimentary midi piano demo, and he really brought it to life. It was supposed to be an intro, but I liked it as an outro here

After that are three tracks, that are really more like four, but also kinda more like four, but like, a different four. I labeled two of them as "sketches" because they're not quite demos, they're very gestural. The first track of these three opens with an original stab at the verse of my song Legs. I'm gonna be honest, I like this more than the final version, because it sounds better to me faster. I know that's shallow, but Legs is a song I was never truly happy with, and part of that was loving so many of the individual ideas, just not how they came together. What follows is another section of Legs that I completely forgot wasn't originally written for legs. I left some sections from that scrapped song in after it that I thought were cool. I want to say that's a demo from 2016, so it was old by the time I decided repurpose it. Following that is an ancient Twinkle Park song that originally went under the name "Two Word Title". It was easily my most ambitious track up to that point, which is why it fuckin sucked. It took me a long time to learn how to make sudden tonal shifts in a song blend together okay. What you hear here isn't the full thing, it's just a few parts stitched together. Primarily, a guitar riff I always loved that I wound up repurposing for Probably Inevitable, and then a verse that would occasionally get stuck in my head that made it into Leash, albeit with altered lyrics. Honestly, I think that jump is the single greatest example of my growth as an artist. It's also got the greatest span between having an idea and implementing it in a finished song. The original was from 2016, and Leash was from 2021, so five whole years. Just a little math lesson for you

After that is an early version of Blood Fountain. Some of it is still really similar to the final version, just much less polished, and there's some stuff in there I forgot even was in there. Hearing that original verse with the extended melody and the wrong chords is so funny now. Rewriting that with the bitcrushed guitar and the slowed down breakbeat really feels in hindsight like the moment Twinkle Park became what it was. The only reason I still have a version this early is because it was unlisted on my soundcloud for a number of years, which I didn't even realize. I probably would've deleted it to save space a few years prior if I had

Next up is a set of three demos from 2014 and 2015, followed by my debut EP, Orange