Nerding out with Buttondown’s now-free API

I made a li’l Apple Shortcut to publish any writing to a Buttondown email list, thanks to their API being free now.

Now I can write my blog posts in my writing tool of choice (IA Writer for those who care), publish it, and immediately after send it to my subscribers, rather than a bunch of extra steps or waiting on RSS feeds. This is very unnecessary but very fun and saves me time.

How it works:

1. Set up a email newsletter for free on Buttondown
   
2. Get your API key from the Settings page, and copy/paste it somewhere
   
3. Get this shortcut I made
   
4. Open the shortcut and, when asked, paste in the API key
   
5. Write something in your Notes app or whatever
   
6. When you’re happy with what you’ve written, go to the share menu, and choose “Buttondown Draft”
   
7. It’ll open up your post in the Buttondown editor for you to once-over and then send to your subscribers

Kid Lightbulbs self-review, 2024 edition

Every so often in a corporate environment you are subjected to a performance review, and a common part of this process is the self-review. For much of my career I loathed having to write about myself, but now that I’m 36 and my body is starting to literally fall apart, I’m feeling a bit more reflective. (Everyone sharing their Spotify Wrapped / Apple Music Replay findings a few weeks ago also got me into reflection mode, too, although I agree with most people that the Spotify version was pretty underwhelming this year, and more so when you realize it was due to layoffs.)

And so I am sharing my self-review of everything I accomplished as a musician this year.

This is a big deal for me to even write at all because, despite being technically a musician for almost my entire life¹, outside of a few years in a previous band, I never took music seriously enough to justify writing something like an “end of year reflection.” It was always just a side thing I did to scratch an itch, to gain some sense of creative fulfillment using a craft & format I seemed good at. I didn’t set any goals for this year. I just put myself out there to see what happened, and then reacted and reflected as I saw things happen.

What I accomplished this year

(I wrote a version of the following on Threads a few weeks ago, I’ve updated it a bit.)

I’m not gonna focus on the Spotify Wrapped stuff, because that’s not what I’m proud of in 2024. Literally 65% of the plays & listeners are from botted playlists so the numbers don’t mean much of anything to me beyond the fact that they are greater than zero. Which is basically where they were in late 2023.

In addition to that, I somehow accomplished all this in 2024 too:

• I got out of my creative shell and figured out how to talk about my music and myself as an “artist”, and people from all over the world are talking with me about it all
  
• I finished & put out an album I’ve sat on for 10 years (STEP INTO THE OCEAN), & finished another one I’d sat on for 6 years (RUINED CASTLE). A few people have said that each of these are among their favorite releases of 2024.
  
• I impulsively made a piano music album and people liked it, such that I now plan to make more piano music
  
• I collaborated with some great folks here on some remixes & an entire covers album
  
• I proved that my music has value via $1100 $1350 in Bandcamp sales
  
• I went on tour with my friends in Earthside, reaffirming my love for both live performance and playing bass (and the fact that I can still do both, if I’m honest)
  
• I made and sold some merch! (Kid Lightbulbs t-shirts)
  
• Someone wrote a poem inspired by lyrics I wrote!
  
• I got some true fans: 13 Spotify folks have me as a top 10 artist + 6 folks subscribed on Bandcamp to support my stuff on a recurring basis with real money
  
• I received some of the kindest compliments about my music and my ideas as a musician from other artists I respect.

This is wild to me. Stuff like this is what matters more than any listener or play count. I’m grateful for all of it.

(photo credit: roaming roach photography)

What I’ve learned

There are more than 8 billion people alive right now, and more than 5 billion of them have internet access.

This is a really pretentious way for me to introduce the idea that I’ve learned that niches not only exist, but have potential to be hugely important in music. You don’t need to worry at all about appealing to the vast majority of people. You only really need a few thousand true fans, maybe even less. The idea of 1,000 true fans isn’t new — but I think that, given the extreme over-saturation of all music across all high-level genres, it benefits most independent artists (or at least “alternative” ones) to really invest in finding the small niche of fans that love their stuff and want to dig deeper instead of seeking broader appeal. And with the size of the internet-ready populace, that may not actually be too hard to achieve with the right framing and strategy.

I haven’t landed my strategy in full yet, but I’ve done a few things that I’ve landed on and tried to share what’s worked (and not worked) for me. Because I’ve also learned that not nearly enough folks in music are transparent enough with their knowledge and insights. Gatekeeping still is everywhere in 2024, even among supposedly fellow small independent artists. We all need to be more transparent – not just Spotify, not just the major labels, each and every one of us. If anyone wants serious change in the industry or the tech companies increasingly running it, we benefit each other & ourselves by sharing everything we know that both is and isn’t working. Everything from your Spotify metrics (in full) to the obscure knowledge you’ve built that may be useful to an artist. And the more of us that succeed, the larger a voice we collectively have.

Above all: there is zero agreement among musicians on what success looks like, and therefore there is no single goal or strategy that unquestionably works for everyone. And it’s extremely empowering once you accept that and just start doing what feels right to you.

Kid Lightbulbs in 2025

I don’t have any major specific goals for my music in 2025. I’ve found that I don’t handle concrete goals well for this part of my life because (1) I have very limited time to work on it, and (2) Kid Lightbulbs is inherently a passion project of mine and creating undue pressure takes the passion out.

That said, I have a set of principles I want to keep sticking to, and a rough list of things I’d like to say I’ve done by the end of 2025:

• Play at least one live show as myself / Kid Lightbulbs. I’ve finally found a few local open mics and communities thanks to some helpful folks on Threads. I would love to make a full-on band for this, but I’d be happy even just playing a solo set with an acoustic guitar or digital piano.
  
• Release physical versions of my first 3 albums. I am currently testing a vinyl process via Elastic Stage, which would unlock single LP and CD releases. I’ll aim for simple vinyl LPs and deluxe CD editions.
  
• Release another set of piano music. This will be easy, because I have one ready to release — just need to decide when to release it (likely on a Bandcamp Friday).
  
• Collaborate more. I’m already signed up to remix one track and produce/arrange another, each for different artists I’ve met online. I’d like to also keep making covers of independent artists I like, building on the Death Waits cover I’m releasing in early January.
  
• Make significant progress on a fourth album. I’ve already got musical ideas for roughly a full length album and about 5 songs’ worth of lyrics already. (Some may even argue that this is already significant progress 🤪 )
  
• Decide once and for all on PR and commit. I try to keep Kid Lightbulbs cost-neutral, but 2025 may be the year where I am willing to put some money into promoting the project and/or getting help with making promo content, something I struggle with a lot (especially video). Given how busy I am in work and in life, and how much early (small) hype Kid Lightbulbs has, I suspect that it may be the time to invest in a little help here to keep my momentum going.
  
• Write a lot more. I’ve been frustrated with short-form social media for a while — video continues to both elude me & shift to mediocre e-commerce, and short-form text social is quickly devolving into echo chambers and rage-bait, even on platforms intended to be reprieves from this. That all said: I have gotten so much fulfillment out of expressing my thoughts in longer form (such as this here post), and these longer-form explorations seem to be resonating quite well with folks online. So aside from my above musical aspirations, I want to get more ideas out into the world as prose. I think this may be a more important contribution to the independent music community than my music itself.

I’ve said it before: I am very busy. I’m hoping that this is not too much for me – especially since I’m already deep at work on some of these things.

Overall I’m absolutely blown away at what happened to me creatively in 2024. I am insanely grateful for the attention I’ve gotten and the friends I’ve made along the way (I know this is a silly thing to say but I mean it genuinely). I don’t expect the same for 2025, but I am at the very least excited to keep this going.

Accepting the Spotify “problem”

I am coming to a grand unified point of view about Spotify. The purpose of this post is to present it, so that I never have to talk about Spotify again.

If you want to skip to the good stuff and move on, here’s a short summary:

1. There are exactly 2 ways Spotify can be useful to small indie artists: (1) as an unpredictable marketing channel, and (2) as a barometer for your audience growth achieved in other ways. It is not something to “work on” outside of occasional marketing activities.
   
2. Streaming in general is not viable as a primary revenue source for musicians; do not think of it as one.
   
3. It is not worth my time as an independent artist to fight for or expect Spotify’s downfall; expect it and the streaming model generally to stick around for a long time.
   
4. It is respectful to a potential listener to have your music on Spotify or any possible place where music can be heard; not doing so is a missed opportunity to find a potential fan.

Okay now for a rant:

I haven’t been able to stop thinking about Spotify much in the last few weeks, but I’m also extremely tired of having to think about Spotify. It seems to constantly pop up in my social feeds. It’s regularly talked about in both tech and music news. The company is everywhere. It’s been the elephant in the music room for years now.

Most recently it became profitable, mostly through multiple layoff rounds, de-monetizing 80+% of the music listened to on its platform, and continued investment in sourcing other content (like audiobooks, podcasts & production library music made by “ghost artists”) to offset the share of listening done by its users of music requiring a royalty payment.

None of these developments are good for smaller independent artists. No doubt. It’s infuriating as a musician who cares a lot about his craft.

But also nobody should be surprised by any of this. Artists living in a late-stage capitalist society (ie. basically all living artists) need to accept that Spotify is not for them. This is a for-profit business whose biggest cost source is royalty payments to artists. The only ones they cannot avoid are major-label artists, due to the outsized influence of the 3 major labels (oh and Tencent Holdings, the massive Chinese conglomerate, which has a stake in both Spotify, Warner Music Group, and (full disclosure) Epic Games which formerly owned Bandcamp). Therefore, it is not a surprise that the labels and Spotify peacefully coexist in a rat-king of entangled investments, including from private equity.

Spotify, like most publicly traded companies, is designed to be in service of its shareholders (including major labels & private equity, which are minority shareholders per the above point) first, and its revenue sources second (in this case, customers & advertisers). It never has been and never will be in the service of independent music. The only musicians it will serve are those represented by Universal Music Group, Sony Music and Warner Music Group, who represent the collective majority of music revenue but a tiny percentage of the actual musicians in the world. It is not viable for Spotify as a business to support the rest of the world’s musicians, because they’ve played a massive role in cheapening and commoditizing music, packaging the entire catalog of recorded music into a nice $10 $15 monthly subscription.

You could argue that other streaming services are slightly more in service of independent musicians – particularly YouTube seems to be the most friendly in terms of tooling / network effects, and a few offer better payouts – but most of the other streaming services are a side revenue stream for a much larger tech conglomerate, which means it’s lightly invested into at best, and the artist is usually the last to be invested in. Apple is happy to keep bankrolling Apple Music as long as everyone keeps buying their phones at a massive premium and naturally upgrading to an Apple-owned services bundle which includes Apple Music¹.

Also, none of these other services have the market share to yield a decent payout, and even if they did, the payout would not be enough to sustain the cost of living for the vast majority of artists.

Spotify does not have the luxury of being a subsidiary of a larger tech conglomerate, which is why it’s unsurprising that they invest in podcast, audiobook, “ghost artist” music and now user-generated video content. The ironic thing about this is that, as J Herskowitz put so eloquently on Threads, each of these involve “real musicians getting paid to make music.” Think about it: audiobooks & podcasts need intro music. Where do they get it? From a production library service. Where does the library get its music from? Either on-staff composers or by licensing music made by others. Spotify is now licensing that music directly, because it turns out many casual music listeners can’t distinguish between lo-fi chill beats made by a ghostwriter artist and, like, Boards Of Canada.

Things that “real artists” do not like about Spotify are almost certainly legal, and in many cases great for consumers. Assuming, for example, that Spotify is not actually paying itself royalties for stock music libraries it’s licensing and putting on its popular playlists (and even if they are indirectly, there are loopholes to make this possible), this is entirely legal and not unlike Amazon buying cheap products in bulk, white-labeling and selling them as low-cost alternatives under the “Amazon Basics” brand. We’ve all bought from that brand before.

It is also extremely unlikely that independent artists will form a union together to stand up to Spotify, because artists are fickle and we’d never have enough swing because Universal Music Group commands more music playback than all independent artists combined.

And as much as I don’t love this reality, Spotify is the most widely used streaming platform and arguably the easiest way for most people to find and stream my music. As much as I loathe aspects of their business model (the free tier relentlessly destroyed with ads, the heavy weighting of major label and cheap audio content in their interfaces & algorithms), they do have solid AI and editorial playlists and the best music app in many ways for most people. As much as fellow independent artists complain about Spotify, a massively high percentage of my fellow independent artists use Spotify to listen to music. I’ve literally had multiple public conversations on platforms like Threads and Bluesky inviting real fans of my music to listen to a Bandcamp exclusive, only to have them tell me they’ll wait for the streaming release — and then listen to it on Spotify two weeks later. (I don’t say this to complain, but to reinforce the point about the convenience of streaming and point out the hypocrisy of it.)

This reality does not stop me from promoting the formats and platforms I prefer – which is why I occasionally do advance & exclusive releases on Bandcamp. However, what happens when a fan I’ve earned decides they want to listen to Kid Lightbulbs, and can’t because they lost the link I shared and my music is hidden from their easiest way to listen to music? It is a disservice to my potential audience to not have my music on a service like Spotify.

So that leaves the question of whether Spotify can work for me in light of the frustrating points. Does it help me grow my audience? I’m not sure that it does. It’s helping me maintain an audience I seem to be building on my own in other places like Threads & Bandcamp & (maybe a bit) YouTube, and giving me opportunities to maybe snag a few listeners here and there, but none of them seem to translate into fans without me actively promoting myself via my channels.

The ways I see independent artists trying to “grow” on Spotify don’t seem viable at all. You can play their ads game, which is not affordable for most artists; you can buy into a “growth service” which is almost certainly using farms of smartphones run by robots to generate fake plays and listeners. To organically “market yourself” on Spotify is to be constantly pitching to playlist curators, which range from Spotify itself to your friend’s dad, many of which are gatekept through “vetting” services like Submithub, Musosoup and Groover. You can do this, but it rarely pans out. I have spent probably $300 on promotions this year via these platforms and have effectively nothing to show for it beyond a few flattering reviews, some (not all!) actually going into some depth, which have yielded almost no new listeners. In fact the most successful press I’ve gotten is from one review I landed via a mutual Threads connection, and word-of-mouth.

If music is so deeply oversaturated, and the average playlister is a random online content creator focused on vibes instead of taste and critical analysis, of course the average small artist is going to be rejected from almost any playlist and for no constructive reason.

Occasionally you do get lucky – and suddenly notice 15 concurrent listeners listening to your stuff on a Saturday evening, which in theory sounds exciting! – but more likely than not these are scams simply looking to either take your money or terrorize you as an artist. Enter Chartmob, Wavr.ai and the countless other bot playlist scam companies. Many artists I know have run into these, but if you’re unfamiliar: these are services that offer “growth on Spotify” by “guaranteeing” a massive increase in plays and listenership. They do this by adding your music to one of their playlists and using a massive farm of smartphones to shuffle that playlist on infinite repeat for some specified period of time (3-7 days, usually), despite insisting that “these are real fans!” with no way to contact them to ask for more information on those supposed fans or how it works.

I’ve gotten “placed” on one of these playlists, outside my control, 3 times in the past year. (They also randomly scrape songs from indie artists for their playlists, as a bizarre form of sales lead generation I guess.) While one of those times triggered a bit of a Spotify algorithm boost for an obscure piano piece of mine (“into the bay”), though didn’t actually yield me any new followers or consistent listeners. The other two did nothing but throw off my Spotify metrics for a month. It’s now the end of 2024 and I’m basically where I’ve been most of this year, as far as listeners and weekly streams go.

This is my listeners chart for the last 4 weeks. A song of mine (“things I might say to you”, a collaboration with Badyears) got scraped for a Chartmob playlist, and suddenly got almost exactly 1,000 players over 72 hours. I got nothing out of this as an artist other than a to-do to report Chartmob to Spotify, and my “monthly listener” count now looks artificially high until roughly January 4, after which it will likely return to measly low-triple-digits.

I’ve also seen small artists band together to make their own playlists to “help each other grow.” Enter what I’ve been calling the “community playlist extortion” strategy. The idea - I think - is a classic word-of-mouth playbook which also, if executed well, triggers the Spotify algorithm to take note of the increased attention to the playlist, and boost the artists on it:

• Someone makes a playlist that vaguely follows a theme and invites a bunch of current and potential musician friends to feature a song on it
  
• That person asks every participant to regularly play the playlist, and/or promote the playlist to encourage a few new listeners outside the circle of musician friends
  
• Time passes; some percentage of the participants and their followers listen to the playlist for some amount of time

I’ve done a couple of these. They never achieve the goal. Participants forget or bail. Listeners forget. The vibe/theme of the playlist is contrived and therefore the playlist isn’t tightly focused. Most of the listeners of the playlist are friends of the artists and therefore don’t actually help anyone’s audience grow at all. And so nothing happens and we move on.

I’m not convinced at this point that there is a viable playbook for building an audience on a streaming service, without either paying lots of money to manufacture one (and this is likely not a sustainable or even real audience), or by coming to streaming with an audience you built elsewhere.

• Streaming has given everyone access to the entire catalog of recorded music. Listeners have always been fickle with regard to their music preferences, and are arguably more so now given the overabundance of listening options they have. An extremely small percentage of them notice the artist making the music they like.
  
• The incentives of streaming services are aligned with consumers, not suppliers (artists/creators of music). The enshittification theory explains how, and I think the why is simple: because in Spotify’s case, retention of paid subscribers (listeners) is how they make money.
  
• Therefore, artists are forced to be in service of the streaming service, not themselves, and unless they have enough influence on their own to drive a successful business relationship with a company like Spotify, there’s no happy path to achieving one.

It has me wondering what the goal of “building an audience” online really is for a musician, and how we define success here. What kind of audience? How big? Is it to be discovered? If we talk about “being discovered”, by whom? The industry?

It feels often like the ones who talk about this are the ones who are either (1) industry people or (2) artists who were discovered, either by a large fan base or record label, often before the current phase of music & technology in which Spotify, TikTok and Instagram dominate how music is heard. I haven’t done this research, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find that the growth of follower & listener counts among smaller independent artists has flattened over the last 5-10 years. (The data is publicly available to determine this). There are obviously exceptions, but I suspect many of those exceptions are either now signed to a major or meaningful indie record label (based on a following they were cultivating elsewhere), or artists who paid for some artificial growth of these numbers in order to “legitimize” themselves.

And when I talk to these artists, they often hustled for years and shelled out massive amounts of money, and caught a wave before this period began. Some of my best friends are now in the echelon of artists where they can make some money each month on streaming – and they largely attribute their success to working extremely hard (in a nearly full-time capacity) and being excellent at their craft, putting tons of money and time into investing in and promoting themselves, and catching a wave of significant Facebook and YouTube growth before TikTok blew up.

I would argue I’ve honed my craft over nearly 20 years of consistently composing & producing music, but I don’t have the time or money to either buy a lot of PR or get good at video so I can ride a TikTok wave, which I’ve likely already missed, and short of a viral sensation I don’t see a way through this unless I put far more money into this operation or try something wholly different. (Maybe I’ll catch a long-form writing wave, who knows?)

Here is my grand unified point of view about Spotify as a small independent artist in our current era of music. This may not work or make sense for everyone, but it comes from some deep reflection on the points above.

These are the 4 components:

1. There are exactly 2 ways Spotify can be useful to small indie artists: (1) as an unpredictable marketing channel, and (2) as a barometer for your audience growth achieved in other ways. It is not something to “work on” outside of occasional marketing activities.
   
2. Streaming in general is not viable as a primary source of income for most musicians building an audience post-2018; do not think of it as one.
   
3. It is not worth my time as an independent artist to fight for or expect Spotify’s downfall; expect it and the streaming model generally to stick around.
   
4. It is respectful to a potential listener to have your music on Spotify or any possible place where music can be heard; not doing so is a missed opportunity to find a potential fan.

At the highest level, we need to stop talking about Spotify as if it is something to proactively work on as a small artist. Yes, the industry seems to care a lot about the vanity metrics it puts out (monthly listeners, plays, etc.), but I suspect this is to reinforce the influence of the major labels. These are not metrics that we independent artists should strive to grow on their own. Instead, these should be a reflection – the result — of promotion activities we do elsewhere: PR pushes, new music releases, building a social presence, cultivating a brand/image, creating & promoting other media, playing shows, surprising fans and potential fans.

You can get lucky with Spotify, if a song of yours gets on a special playlist that causes your listenership to (temporarily) skyrocket, which may trigger some perks from the algorithm. But I am not convinced this is a repeatable activity you can drive as a smaller artist. The bigger and longer-tenured artists (thanks to label support, heavy PR and money) dominate any meaningful editorial playlists, and most other playlists don’t generate enough meaningful listenership to drive any sort of audience growth because most Spotify users simply use the options the algorithm sends them. Neither listener habits nor black-box algorithms are in our control, so we need to stop acting like they are.

You can also choose to take your music of Spotify in protest, but I wouldn’t. I think it’s disrespectful and a form of gatekeeping, but more pragmatically it’s a missed opportunity to gain a repeat listener by forcing that listener to find your music somewhere else if it’s less convenient for them.

So the streaming service serves as your back catalog, a reflection of your work as an artist and therefore the audience who wants to listen to that work. You can leverage features like Release Radar to notify your existing listeners about new releases, try to get on some good playlists, and hope that a few prospective listeners will catch them across those placements. But at the end of the day this serves as unpredictable, low-touch marketing of you, the artist, where your song is the marketing asset.

To end this very long rant: I just think we need to worry about Spotify a lot less and let it do its capitalist thing. We can both make more impact as artists, and inspire real change in listener habits and the art form of music generally, by focusing on other things. Like Bandcamp. And organic connection with potential fans on social platforms & elsewhere. And playing shows. And touring. And merch. And generally making more art and putting it out into the world. And other innovative offerings that we haven’t come up with yet, but we will because we’re creative people who do the music thing because we need to do the music thing.

On those music business influencer types

I love how most advice about being an artist/creator is like “sign up for my newsletter and also pay me $ for advice on what to do instead” and the “instead” is basic business & project management advice

This is exploitation.

If anyone really cares about artists & the arts, we should be sharing as abundantly as possible with the entire community. The most vulnerable artists are often ones who can’t afford courses or coaches but may not have other ways to gain this knowledge. Especially when those courses cover basics that everyone can/should know for the betterment of society overall.

I try to not do this by sharing publicly what I try that works & doesn’t work for me on this website. I can do more to organize these findings, but they’re there for anyone to read. If you find this useful or want to support me sharing more of this, you can optionally buy me a coffee or some kind of recurring donation.

For context, I adapted this idea from my employer Buffer, where we share a ridiculous amount of knowledge about social on our public blog (which is not completely overrun with ads, clickbait, or other garbage), with the hope that people find it genuinely useful and consider trying our product. It’s working well for us.

More “creators” should consider this model.

The RUINED CASTLE story

My third album, RUINED CASTLE, is now available everywhere. If you missed the early release on Bandcamp or don’t want to buy the album, you’re in luck: you can now listen via your favorite streaming service.

I decided to write a long-form backstory to this album. I like writing about my music process, even if nobody asks to read it. This time 2 (!!!) people actually expressed curiosity about where my latest album RUINED CASTLE came from, and this album has both an arc and a history, so here goes.

The arc of RUINED CASTLE

RUINED CASTLE is the third part of a trilogy made up with my other albums THROW MYSELF INTO THE BAY and STEP INTO THE OCEAN. It’s not entirely based in truth - quite heightened and forms a clean arc - but it certainly is inspired by real life. The basic premise is this:

As the protagonist (let’s call them “B”) of the first two albums gets life thrown at them, and attempts to grow through these events, their partner (let’s call them “A”) deals with their own particular suffering (alluded to in my earlier song “she’s too good for me”), without the support A needs, leading to a spiral of pain, loneliness and apathy. The titular ruined castle serves as a metaphor for the state A finds themselves in without support from their partner, until the couple is able to come together, understand each other, and move forward.

A starts at a similar place to B does in THROW MYSELF, struggling to fit in and handle the increasing chaos of daily life. But due to A’s suffering, instead of feeling comfort in individualism, they feel jaded, distrusting, beaten down (“belong 2”).

• I didn’t intend for this originally, but the musical relation between “we don’t belong” and “belong 2” came to represent this contrasting place the two partners start in. You can almost think of this little saga as parallel journeys which are set off after the two first tracks on THROW MYSELF, “arrangement”/“the honeymoon is over”.

B recognizes this and wants to offer hope and support, but doesn’t know how (“hope inside my baby’s heart”). They each think back to the start of their relationship, which has always felt vital but particularly thriving in years past (“sun loop”) – but A is suddenly dragged back to reality with their pain back in focus (“bay reprise”).

• You may notice the callbacks in “sun loop” to tracks on THROW MYSELF as well: a few lyrics reused from “hive mind”, and the bay reprise revives the chorus from “lashing out!!!!!!”. One could argue that the “bay reprise” shows the partner’s parallel feelings in the scene heard earlier in “lashing out”. B doesn’t handle it well; A feels as if they’re drowning as a result. This is also alluded to at the end of the next track in the THROW MYSELF sequence, “oxycodone”, the final section of which is from A’s point of view.

As time goes on, A suffers more, feeling aged, neglected, more jaded and even feeling a loss of memory (“old lady”). This is amplified as they watch those around them in daily life. They try turning to creation and consumption, but even that feels fleeting and useless (“I made a totem”). When in public, A needs to draw up an appearance of doing fine to hide their suffering, which proves exhausting to maintain (“puppeteer”).

They eventually hit a breaking point. They plead for B to do something to help, even being willing to abandon their current situation to do so, though A expresses frustration that they don’t expect much to change (“don’t wait”).

• If you think of STEP INTO THE OCEAN as happening in parallel to the above, you could argue that the final 3 songs are told as a result of A’s breakdown in “don’t wait”. Perhaps “st. alphonsus” shows B expressing self-pity after witnessing this breakdown. He then tries to help by romancing A in “ritual”, doubting themselves in “confession”, and succumbing to intrusive thoughts in “forget everything”.

By “waste me away” A is at rock bottom, expecting to just fade to becoming a shell of their former self. At this moment B tries to stop and focus on their partner and lets himself in. Upon doing so they realize just how deep A’s rock bottom is; it shocks them (“inside the castle”).

B takes a breath, and doesn’t know what else to do other than to be vulnerable about their own lingering insecurities despite all the time focused on their own growth (“when I sleep”). This ends up being cathartic for B, and is a direct contrast to their conclusion arrived at in “forget everything”. It opens a door up a crack for B to truly listen to A and support them moving forward. They share a bleak outlook on things, but also find companionship & belonging in their shared desire to suffer no more (“aquarium”).

That’s roughly the plot. Here’s where the music came from.

I. “a city behind closed doors”

Back in 2010, I recorded this trip-hop/industrial album called KID LIGHTBULB, which was meant to be my debut album under another name, Taken By Name. It was very angsty and dark; much of it came from a bad breakup that put me in a depression spiral for a few months. I don’t love some of the lyrical & production decisions on that album, but it was my first true complete work as a solo musician, and I was proud of it.

The other thing I was extremely proud of, at the time, was my senior thesis work in music school: Music Behind Closed Doors, a six-minute experimental electroacoustic piece entirely comprised of samples of creaking doors, choking and screaming sounds. The concept behind the piece was to capture in sound the horrific sensations many of us feel (or even experience) behind our own closed doors. (This may have come from a similar dark place I was in at the time.) It debuted in April 2010 at a church on the Northeastern University campus, played through an 8-speaker sound system which surrounded the audience. Hearing the work in this environment fundamentally changed how I think about the role of music. Specifically it made me appreciate the experience of active listening, which has become a more common hobby of mine over time and is something I aim to encourage with my music as Kid Lightbulbs.

I started on the follow-up to KID LIGHTBULB in late 2010. I had an idea for a concept album called A CITY BEHIND CLOSED DOORS, combining the themes and parts of Music Behind Closed Doors with new songs I was writing. The idea was to expand on MBCD and, through each song, tell some kind of story or express a dark, private feeling felt by these city-dwelling characters I’d invent for the concept. It was a big concept: I had at least 20 song demos in play, plus ideas for album artwork and a whole low-budget mini-series more deeply exploring these people, evolving into almost a political thriller (lots of characters in this narrative apparently wanted to tear the city down and rebuild in their own design, feels timely, doesn’t it???).

But it was a lot to take on, and I didn’t have the time, stamina or production skills to finish it. I’m not sure it would’ve worked in retrospect. So I put it aside, except for a few songs that were simpler and more upbeat & optimistic, and started reworking them into a more indietronica / indie rock style for my next project, Sophomores. “When I Sleep”, “Skyscrape” (which was reworked into “we don’t belong”) and “Smile” (which formed the lyrical basis of “belong 2”) were from this bunch, and several other ideas originate from the original ACBCD sessions (including the bassline from “don’t wait” and the piano riff from “hope inside my baby’s heart”.)

II. my friends are liars

From 2012-2019 or so, I recorded several songs and even (quietly) released a few under the alias Sophomores. The first proper album I envisioned for this project included quite a few important songs of mine:

• A refreshed, tighter “when I sleep”
  
• An early version of “aquarium”, a song written by my friend Tess when we briefly considered making this project a duo
  
• “off the rocker”, which was meant as a bombastic lead single but with sparse lyrics - including “listen to me i’m begging please”. (I ended up reusing this for “don’t wait.) This song also briefly had an interpolation of “music behind closed doors”. I may still release this one.
  
• “we don’t belong”, which was a reworking of the earlier “skyscrape”. I think I tried recording 4 or 5 completely different arrangements of this before ultimately putting it aside.
  
• “the sun’s coming down upon us”, centered around a guitar loop I’d recorded back in 2007 while experimenting with delay effects. This was meant to be a straightforward indie synth rock anthem. I could never get the production to my liking, and the lyrics felt forced. I reluctantly included it but wasn’t happy with it.

This album was going to be called My Friends Are Liars (from the “when I sleep” lyric) but I wasn’t happy with the result. I quickly wrapped it up and shifted focus to the album that eventually became STEP INTO THE OCEAN ten years later. I don’t think MFAL was ever published in full online.

III. sleepwalker / sleepwalking

In 2017, shortly after my wedding, my wife & I had an amazing opportunity to live abroad in Berlin for a year via my job at the time. We brought very little with us; I’d sold most of my music gear, and after arriving in Berlin I bought a cheap MIDI keyboard and microphone to keep making music. My setup was quite stripped down compared to before, and it forced me to start producing more minimally as a result. This was a hugely important development for my songwriting & production skills, and is what led to the sound of RUINED CASTLE.

In January 2018, still in Berlin, my wife suddenly got sick and was stuck in bed for a few weeks. Her body just shut down. We got her to a doctor who, after some tests, determined she had celiac disease and an autoimmune disease of the thyroid, both of which were left untreated for some unknown number of years. The diagnoses offered clarity for her condition, but forced her into a set of major lifestyle changes in order to recover fully. The suffering and early recovery period was particularly hard.

I didn’t really know how to handle it other than to help her with the basics, support the necessary lifestyle changes, and channel my own feelings of self-doubt, empathy and frustration with her lack of prior medical care into something (naturally, music). So the tone and subject matter of my songwriting changed a lot, and an album’s worth of music came together quickly to attempt to express myself during this period. The specifics are hazy in parts, but here’s what I remember from 2017-2018:

• I had been noodling with a piano-first rearrangement of my earlier song “we don’t belong”, which I’d never felt happy with (until 2023), so I wanted to try stripping it down. I pulled a bassline from this experimental work for bass guitar I wrote in college and it turned the song into an anxious, funky thing. I struggled to land the lyrics until I revisited the lyrics from my previous song “smile” – rather than expressing paranoid delusions about a city collapsing, it came to express (for me) the increasing jadedness and anxiety of not fitting in anywhere and needing to take care of oneself. That quickly became “belong 2.”
  
• The lyrics for “hope inside my baby’s heart” came quickly during her bedridden period, and fit quite well with a piano riff from the CITY BEHIND CLOSED DOORS sessions.
  
• “sun loop” finally made use of that guitar loop I’d been sitting on since 2009, and a bassline from the coda of “the sun’s coming down upon us” became the main bassline of the song. This song, combined with some poetry my wife wrote from earlier in our relationship, served as a sort of light during the otherwise testing time we were in.
  
• “old lady”, a cover of a Mary Esther Carter song that I love, quickly came to represent the dark sense of bodily decay my wife was feeling. Mary and I had attempted to record this song together in 2014 as a demo (she hasn’t released her own version). In this scenario I found myself in, it suddenly made sense to cover it but with a low, Tom-Waits-esque vocal delivery to almost simulate the persona captured in the song as best I could as a man.
  
• “totem” made use of a phrase (“from totem to trophy then to trinket”) that I’d heard at a talk about the hunting of endangered species in 2015 and had stuck in my head. I liked the phrase but had no use for it until a while after settling in Berlin when we stopped living as minimally as we’d been. The main piano riff was lifted from a short unfinished piano piece dating back to 2009.
  
• “puppeteer” quickly came together after revisiting a poem my wife wrote during a Hauschka performance we saw in Berlin. I’d recorded a piano improvisation one night I’d called “throbbing” (later retitled “grayscale hands & a throbbing left foot”) and the two oddly fit well together over a weird hip hop drum loop I’d found.
  
• “don’t wait” was written very quickly once I relearned a specific bassline from the 2011 ACBCD sessions, from an even angrier song called “sophomores”.
  
• The bedridden period directly inspired me to revisit “waste me away” from the 2010 KID LIGHTBULB album, but with the stripped down setup I had to work with. Stock samples from Logic Pro gave that song new life.
  
• I revisited a song I had written from a prior band I was in, called “forget everything”, which was sort of a groveling apology, and turned it into a dark abdication from a relationship. I think there was one point during this period where I felt I was failing her, which inspired this intrusive thought.

At this time, the album didn’t have the end of the arc that RUINED CASTLE has. It was meant to end abruptly with “forget everything”, as if to suggest the narrator of this tale was just crippled by the situation they were in and bailed. I now regret that narrative decision - while “forget everything” is more upbeat and optimistic in its tone, the lyrics are somewhat pathetic in context of the album and not in a way I am proud of. In my opinion, it fits better in the sequence of STEP INTO THE OCEAN.

I aimed to release this album, called SLEEPWALKER, under the Sophomores alias in late 2018. But I once again struggled to put any effort into promoting it or myself as an artist, between work, life, impostor syndrome and an uneasiness about some of the subject matter. The artwork may look familiar:

In September 2018, Abigail Breslin, the actress perhaps best known for her role in Little Miss Sunshine, announces a music project called Sophomore (singular), and her debut single is called “Sleepwalking”.

This psyched me out. It felt like a sign.

I ended up throwing my SLEEPWALKER on Bandcamp in February 2019 but didn’t promote it at all. It sat there for a bit until I took it down a few months later. I stopped making music a year or so.

IV. Kid Lightbulbs

Over the course of the early COVID pandemic, I started revisiting and recording ideas that became the basis for my next album, tentatively titled FULL-LIFE (a reference to a magic spell in the Final Fantasy video games). I planned to release it as Sophomores and intended to keep the minimal production choices from before, but with a more upbeat sound. When working through a song called “lashing out”, I needed a chorus, and then I came back to “the sun’s coming down upon us” and reapplied its chorus, but in an angrier context, and ended up rewriting the lyrics to “don’t wanna throw myself into the bay”. This led to me landing the tone for a new sound, and a new title for the album; the sound signaled the need to start fresh. Enter Kid Lightbulbs.

This material got a little bit of hype on Threads, and encouraged me to keep putting stuff out there. I didn’t have a lot of physical energy or time on my hands, being a new dad with a tech job – this led to the quick reworking of my 2014 Sophomores album Bedtime Rituals into the 2024 Kid Lightbulbs album STEP INTO THE OCEAN, which ended up working well as a spiritual sequel to THROW MYSELF. During this time, I was high on excitement and momentum. My day job was going great, I was creatively re-energized, my stuff had appeal! But life still happens.

My wife was not well during quite a bit of this. She was exhausted from being our daughter’s primary caretaker; she still was suffering from postpartum health challenges; she was in the middle of her own journey making sense of an ADHD diagnosis; she struggled with working again part-time while being a neurodivergent, burned out mother. We both struggled to communicate during this time, and I struggled with balancing my job, supporting her & our daughter & our home, and finding the little time I could to keep this music project going forward. At times & on multiple levels I was not there for her in a way she needed me to be.

I’m not sure we’ve fully addressed this. Marriage & parenthood are both constant rollercoasters & journeys of immense growth. There’s always more to work on together & separately. But she’s (mostly) doing better and I’d like to think that I’ve done better by her as of late.

A lot of this period brought back up the same feelings and songs that I had explored in Berlin in 2018. My cover of “old lady” in particular felt very prescient. So I started listening back to these sessions and found myself tearing up. I needed to revisit this story with fresh perspective.

Feeling more confident in my mixing & production skills, I started remixing them for release. This went quickly - fortunately many of the tracks were in a great state for me to improve upon quickly. But the album sequence didn’t work; I had already scrapped “forget everything”, repurposing it as the final track on STEP INTO THE OCEAN, and otherwise the album would’ve ended with “waste me away”, abrupt and bleak. I realized that “waste me away” transitioned nicely into my earlier piece Music Behind Closed Doors. They quickly became attached to each other in my head. I laid out this sequence and almost called the album done, ready for a quick release after LP2 and the THREADS ON MY ART compilation, which released in July. This edit (ending with “music behind closed doors”) felt more honest than the previous iteration of the album, but still quite bleak while also incomplete.

While sitting with the new sequence for a bit, I realized I needed to do some re-recording, because the vocal tracks on a few earlier songs were not up to par (specifically “I made a totem” and “don’t wait”). So I opened myself up to reworking something that may fit. I considered “when I sleep”, but was unsure about this fitting in stylistically – it’s more ethereal-sounding than the other songs, which are mostly quite dry and piano-led, with electronics serve more as minimal texture. Also in my head was “aquarium”, which for years has been inextricably tied to “when I sleep”. Back when exploring My Friends Are Liars, I had these as a 1-2 closer, and considered the same here. I tinkered with an old version of “aquarium” but was unhappy with the vocal take and how it transitioned from “sleep” – and then found myself re-recording the entirety of “aquarium” impulsively on a Saturday night, just me, a piano and a little glitchy kick drum loop. It was meant as a demo, but I was so happy with it that it’s the version you hear on RUINED CASTLE.

And so the album had a closer: after the rock-bottom reached in “waste” and “music behind closed doors” (now edited down to a shorter length and retitled “inside the castle”, once I landed on an album name), “when I sleep”/“aquarium”, two songs from an entirely different era of my musical development, lift the listener up from that bottom and finish the story.

The crazy thing about this whole final part of the story is that it happened over the course of ~3 months earlier this year, after releasing both STEP INTO THE OCEAN and the THREADS ON MY ART covers compilation. I was trying to figure out what might make sense for a third album, not wanting to rush things, and this material was just sitting there top of mind.

I’ll be doing a listening party for my new album RUINED CASTLE

I’ll be doing a listening party for my new album RUINED CASTLE! It’ll be on Bandcamp on Thursday 12/5, 9pm eastern.

RSVP here →

RUINED CASTLE pre-orders now live

I am thrilled to open up pre-orders for my third album, RUINED CASTLE. This album is a long time coming, and the final album in the trilogy made up by my previous albums THROW MYSELF INTO THE BAY and STEP INTO THE OCEAN. It’s a stylistic shift as well, to darker and more minimalist territory, but still Kid Lightbulbs.

The album will release on December 6 on Bandcamp, and will be available everywhere else the following week. Pre-ordering or buying it on Bandcamp lands you a super-secret bonus track. Here’s the link.

Today I’m also releasing the single “don’t wait”, track 6 on the album. It’s already live on the streaming services, but you can also listen to it here. I hope you enjoy and I appreciate your support!

Please don't get tired of me

I have a number of releases already planned and/or ready for 2025, after LP3 drops:

• LP3 outtakes
  
• another set of piano music
  
• 4-5 singles (though I may rework 1 or 2 of them)
  
• possibly an album (I have demos & lyrics for about half of it already)

I hope y’all don’t get tired of me 😅

I think the independent artist community would be in a much

I think the independent artist community would be in a much better place if we simply worried about Spotify a lot less

On podcast culture

Podcast culture is a hot topic now thanks to the election.

This is interesting to me. I basically swore off all podcasts in mid 2023, around when I started making music seriously again, because I realized that all it was doing was feeding other people’s personal brands & perspectives into my brain without any time to form my own perspective on anything. Even the progressive podcasters I’d agree with become suffocating after a while. Plus ads.

It became more freeing to take space and reflecting on things silently or with art as a vessel for reflection.

To be clear: I don’t say this as advice or with condescension to those who like podcasts. And not all podcasts are bad. I still listen to certain ones from time to time.

But I do think it’s right that mainstream podcast culture is influencing more than we realized, and I wonder even if it’s a negative for critical thinking & personal growth.