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.
