Music composer & producer, product leader, writer based in central MA, USA.
Tinkering with the internet in pursuit of creative independence.

RUINED CASTLE listening party

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: https://kidlightbulbs.bandcamp.com/merch/ruined-castle-listening-party

November 28, 2024

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!

November 22, 2024 music announcements

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 😅

November 17, 2024 thoughts music

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

November 17, 2024 music thoughts

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.

November 9, 2024 update

Announcing Kid Lightbulbs LP3: RUINED CASTLE

The next Kid Lightbulbs album will be called RUINED CASTLE. It will be out in December.

Below is the artwork, this time taken by me.

I need to get this album out of my head and into the world. It is an album of suffering, and while much of it was written years ago and about a different suffering, it feels oddly prescient and timely. I’ll share more between now and its release.

The first single was “hope inside my baby’s heart.” The second will be “don’t wait”, another offbeat industrial banger for the time many of us are in, out November 22.

November 8, 2024 update music

It bums me out a bit that, as I’ve gotten older, I can’t listen to music when trying to focus. It’s too distracting. I can only really listen to specific stuff (steve reich, brian eno’s ambient albums, a few trent/atticus soundtracks, my own music) and not get distracted by the music.

This makes it hard to keep up with all these new discoveries I’m finding on all the platforms 🫠

November 8, 2024 update

“hope inside my baby’s heart”

I released a new single today. It’s available everywhere, or you can listen here:

This is the first single from my upcoming third album. I’ll be sharing more about the album over the coming weeks, but it’s worth mentioning now that a theme of this album is suffering. Something it feels like a lot of folks are doing these days.

“hope inside my baby’s heart” is important to me because it represents a crucial moment in my marriage: my wife’s autoimmune diagnosis in early 2018, and the suffering that both led to it and happened as a result. I found myself revisiting this song (and much material I wrote around the same time) recently, given the amount of suffering and worry happening both around the world and right inside my home. One needs optimism when they’re suffering, and this song is about me trying to provide that.

Compositionally, it’s dead simple: an ostinato of major thirds played on the piano, almost heartbeat-like in rhythm. It follows that rhythm across a verse, a harmonic development, a collapse, and then a cathartic swell. Everything supports that structure, and there’s not much more to the production than that. Even the rhythmic shift during the final section is just the same beat time-shifted ahead by 1 quarter note.

The lyrics are sparse - just one verse - which signifies to me the fear of bad news leading to despair, and wanting as a partner to inspire hope in light of that despair.

The opening lines (“sun high in the sky…”) come from a DM conversation I was having with an old estranged friend about 9 years ago, when brainstorming ideas for cover art for the album that ultimately became my previous album STEP INTO THE OCEAN. We had an idea about the front cover with the sun high over a landscape, with the back cover showing a sunset over an empty chair. The words of the chat felt poetic for some reason and stuck with me. Years later, they bubbled back up and seemed to represent the knife point on which things can go from bright to dim, like flipping an album over.
The “read all the books” and “rocking chair on wheels” bits come from the desk chair on which my wife would sit in our apartment at the time of her diagnosis, reclining and spinning slowly and anxiously reading about how to cope with said changes.

That same whole verse is shared with the interlude track on my first album (“??????”). I wrote “hope” first (back in 2018), and the lyrics worked as a sort of flashback / fever dream sequence in the loose plot of THROW MYSELF INTO THE BAY: after the protagonist spirals in “spiral song”, they’re suddenly pulled back to reality with a reminder that their partner is also suffering, but they’re not present for it (hence the fever dream), and when pressed, they lash out (“!!!!!!”) in the next song.

I’ve fallen into this trap (hell, I made a whole album about it already) and I know I can still do better as a partner and person. Releasing the original “hope inside my baby’s heart” is a weird way of me committing to be more present and supportive than I had been, I guess.