Solo Songwriting

Songs from the College Era

Over the four years I was in college, I ended up writing quite a few songs, recording them along with some covers, and packaging them all together into an EP.



College Mixtape

Producer, Mixing, Song Writer, Guitars, Vocals, Drum Programmer

Compiling this EP was really a bit of an afterthought. Over the course of my time in college, I created, covered, and recorded a bunch of tracks. Eventually, I had all of the recordings in a single place, so I decided to give it a quick mix and master after all of my experience of the Free Parking! albums. Overall, I think this record displays my progression as a songwriter, and also snapshots my production skills pre-Weekends.

The first four songs on the EP are all of my original songs. Lyrically, they all tend to be a lot more uplifting (or sappy) and I think that was due to all of the music that I had been playing prior to writing my own songs was all much darker (or depressing). I was able to collaborate with my good friend Bogdan Niemoczynski on a few of the tracks (see "Lions, Eradicate! Alligators, Halt!"), which definitely helped fill out the songs with piano and give the them a whole different feeling. I also really enjoyed collaborating with Trevor Gilleece on the acoustic punk cover of "Flavor Ice" by Bigwig, because during college we were roommates for two years and honestly that was probably the most we actually hung out when we sat down, practiced, and eventually recorded the song. "Coffee" was tons of fun too, as it was just a random song Brendan Steere and I used to play at band practices, which I morphed into another acoustic punk track. "S.T.E.W" is a bit of an oddball track, and was basically just an experimental song to see what I could produce without actual instruments (read as mostly predetermined loops). I have since gotten much better at original electronic style music, which can be found under my alias bash explode. I hope to write more acoustic songs eventually, but for now I'm glad to have this EP as a reminder of my beginning steps into songwriting.