The THROW MYSELF story
A few months ago, I wrote 3,500 words, somewhat impulsively, on the narrative and gestation process for my third album, RUINED CASTLE. I really enjoyed doing this and was indirectly prompted on Threads to write more about how my songs have come together and changed over the years. It’s no secret that much of the music I’ve released since 2023 is many years old (though some have been updated or reworked) and the meaning of songs have evolved for me over the years.
It felt appropriate to start with THROW MYSELF INTO THE BAY (my first album as Kid Lightbulbs), as I left out a fairly significant gap in time in the original post: how in 2020 I started getting back into music after putting it aside for a year, and how it ultimately led to everything I’m doing musically today.
Structurally, THROW MYSELF INTO THE BAY is a rock opera simply about a privileged person not handling well a number of curveballs life throws at them. Whereas my other albums use a lot more symbolism, this one is pretty direct & autobiographical and came directly out of the pandemic period. It’s almost not worth the time to summarize the plot, because the story likely becomes clear as you read the story of how the album came together.
I almost called this post the “belong” story, because “we don’t belong” (and its various iterations) is both the song of mine that started the journey to this album and one of the main foundations for its sound. I put together a compilation of all the recordings related to “belong” I recorded over the years, exclusively for Bandcamp subscribers. Check it out and consider subscribing here.
But I digress:
I. skyscrape
I mentioned in the RUINED CASTLE story how, in 2011 or so, I worked and then shelved a whole album concept called A CITY BEHIND CLOSED DOORS. One of the songs from these sessions (which actually goes back to 2009, if I’m remembering correctly) was called “skyscrape”. It was this odd, loud, almost post-hardcore thing but in 6/8 time and with all these little industrial textures powering it forward. I thought it was one of the coolest musical ideas I’d come up with to that point. It was sort of the intense catharsis song of the proposed album; it still blows me away a bit in 2025. But I never wrote another song like it. It didn’t seem to fit anywhere in an album sequence, and the vocals sounded grainy and I couldn’t recreate them again successfully. So I put it aside.
After I ended up scrapping ACBCD and started the Sophomores project (in ~2012), I had this idea to take elements of “skyscrape” and turn it something more accessible - ground it in some kind of more conventional guitar or keyboard riff, but because I’m a horrible guitar player, I came up with this incredibly minimal one using a couple of power chords but still using the syncopated rhythm from the original “skyscrape”. There was one version I left in 6/8 time, but it felt more right switching to a more conventional 4/4. This version could serve as a true pop song.
At the time, I had also started a new power pop / stoner rock band with a few friends in Boston called Socialist Salesmen — I brought this new “skyscrape” idea to the band and we finished & recorded a 4-piece rock band version of the song, sometime in 2013. It’s quite similar structurally to what eventually became “we don’t belong” — after I left that band, I took the idea back, recorded my own version with electronic drums, added the “no we don’t belong” refrain, and changed the title.
This was around the time I was working some other ideas humoring other sonic interests of mine. I was really into the indie rock & indietronica acts at the time, like Baths and Yeasayer and Young Magic, and I wanted to have a solo project making use of these sounds — lush, a bit frenetic & glitchy, rhythmic, fun but (in my case) dark. The material I wrote following this vision ended up being an album called BEDTIME RITUALS, and mostly captured the increasingly complex feelings of my relationship with my girlfriend (now my wife), who I’d just moved in with for the first time. (This album I later finished and released as STEP INTO THE OCEAN.)
I originally had a sequence of BEDTIME RITUALS that included this 2014 version of “we don’t belong”, but it was far too joyful in tone compared to the otherwise brooding and messy material making up the rest of the album (think about this back-to-back with “she’s too good for me” 🫠). So I shelved it again, moved on, recorded some more, moved to Germany, and wrote the album that became RUINED CASTLE. As mentioned in the other post, I had stripped “we don’t belong” for parts, rearranged it primarily for piano and synth bass, brought in new lyrics, and renamed it “belong 2”. Then I stopped making music for a while.
II. farm country
In October 2019 my wife and I moved into the house we currently live in. I was excited to have a basement that was oddly well-suited to become a mini home studio, and between that and the new rural surroundings I felt a new energy to make music again. Prior to our actual move, I had seen a religious ad on an MBTA bus I was riding in Newton (a suburb of Boston), that mentioned the phrase “come and see” – but the ad felt otherwise ridiculous and over-to-top to me, so I quickly imagined a satirical pop-punk song around that idea, wrote a few lyrics on the bus, and then quickly recorded a demo for it. This became the inspiration for the sound for my next album – steeped in late 90s pop/rock nostalgia. I didn’t necessarily want to stick to pop-punk, but I felt an urge to pay homage to the music I grew up with.
I think the next song I wrote specifically during this time was called “full life” (later retitled “spiral song”), after contemplating what life would be like in the quieter surroundings my wife & I found ourselves in. I was noodling with some synth patches in Logic and found myself playing one of the original syncopated guitar melodies from “skyscrape”, but with the synth tone it took on an entirely different character. With some sparse piano chords underneath it and a frenetic drum pattern, it started to feel less cathartic, more anxious – like the storm after a calm that hadn’t broken yet. It embodied well the anxiety I felt around what life might be like in this new setting, and the song quickly came together (other than the guitars, which were notably missing from this original session).
Five months after our move to rural Massachusetts, the COVID pandemic happened. We found ourselves isolated but also somewhat liberated from the need to participate in “normal society”, which resulted in a lot of reflection in each of us. I wrote a lot over the next few months: “arrangement”, “hive mind”, “bubble” and “loser in the free world” all came fairly quickly as synth-pop bangers, the tone across all of them (again, still missing guitars) feeling urgent, frustrated and vital. I also wrote an early version of “lashing out!!!!!!” (without the exclamation points in the title) after reflecting on a few moments of frustration with myself in how I handled this time. I need a sort-of palate cleanser song in the mix, so I revisited this older song from the Sophomores days called “soften” and re-recorded it as this very slow, atmospheric jam. I envisioned as the ending track to an album, immediately following “bubble” in the sequence and meant to evoke what it felt like being inside the titular bubble.
Oh, and I had drafted a fun little cover of the 1997 Robyn single “show me love” as a more direct homage to my childhood influences (this has not yet seen the light of day).
This album was originally to be called FULL-LIFE (an homage to the spell in the Final Fantasy games – “spiral song” included a few other similar references). The track listing was to be:
- arrangement
- come and see
- lashing out
- full-life
- show me love
- free world
- hive mind
- bubble
- soften
I had envisioned releasing this album in late 2020, while my wife was pregnant with our daughter. I got so wrapped up with work and the pregnancy that I spent almost no time mixing or preparing any sort of marketing plan, and found myself unhappy with the album after putting it aside for a few weeks. It lacked the punch I aimed to convey through the lyrics and I couldn’t land a sound that supported the punch. So I put it aside for a while, instead focusing on my day job and supporting my wife during the pregnancy.
III. dad
After our daughter was born I was stressed out (this was March 2021). The childbirth experience was not what we expected. (I will not get into details as it’s not entirely my story to tell. It directly inspired “oxycodone”. I will leave it at that.) Plus the simple fact that I now had a small child that I had co-created and now needed to keep alive was daunting. Though I won’t take away from how wonderful the first few months were. Parental leave is amazing and it’s truly awful that so few Americans can actually experience it. It was wonderful and harrowing and calm and challenging all at once.
I remember noodling on the piano a few months after she was born and playing this little frenetic riff that made her laugh and thinking about how crazy all this was. I thought more about how I would wander around our house and yard with her in my arms one trying to calm her down from crying. And “hopefully” came from that.
I remember going back to work and struggling to balance it alongside supporting my still-recovering wife and now my daughter and feeling so exhausted but knowing I had to keep going for them. This led to “it’s for you”, which I later decided was the pessimistic outlook on this feeling and rewrote it as “sleepwalking again” after feeling my exhaustion turn a corner. By late 2022 I had an even larger set of songs that were roughly of a consistent sound and vaguely thematically connected – being a privileged, millennial white dude suddenly having a whole lot of responsibility and curveballs thrown at him all at once and not always handling it well – and it started to feel like a rock opera in my head.
IV. american metal
I finally found some energy to record these last few songs (including “honeymoon is over”, which was a sarcastic little ditty reflecting on the 2020 election and its aftermath, attempting to ground this album in some real-world context), and I discovered this silly little guitar tone preset in Logic Pro called American Metal. Tweaked a bit to my liking, it was the missing element to that urgent tone I was seeking for all of this material. Prior to that I had pretty terrible experiences recording guitar, mostly due to my own lack of practice or training. But modern amp simulation had come a long way since I’d last tried, and this unlocked the entire album for me.
I started adding metal guitars to everything in this set. My original demo for “lashing out” no longer fit the mould (it had more of a mid-2000s indie rock feel akin to The Temper Trap), so I set to rework it applying some more of the stress and frustration with myself I had felt during my wife’s pregnancy and the early days as a father. As mentioned in the RUINED CASTLE story, I had lifted a piece of an old song “the sun’s coming down upon us” to use as the chorus to this reworked “lashing out”, tweaking the lyrics to be much more active and aggressive, from:
i’ve gotta get these feelings out of the way
the city’s pulling me into the bay
to:
i’ve gotta get some feelings out of the way
don’t wanna throw myself into the bay
This became a thematic centerpiece for this album for me, and I ended up lifting the above line to use as the title for it.
Sequentially, the album came together quickly as well. I dropped “soften”, “come and see” and the “show me love” cover, none of which felt fitting anymore, and needed a few extra things to round things out:
“spiral song” never really had a proper ending, but I had this idea to transition it somehow into “lashing out”, with the idea that the protagonist of this rock opera would spiral to the point where they’d start lashing out at their partner unhealthily. I found myself digging into my archives, and revisited the lyrics to “hope inside my baby’s heart” – a song I had written back in 2018 reflecting on my wife struggling with health challenges. I found something poetic in reusing those lyrics, but from the perspective of someone spiraling and not handling that situation well, and fit them in alongside a pitch-shifted version of the “spiral song” synthesizer riff. The riff was pitched up a half-step to G# major, which then resolved to the C# root of “lashing out” – and thus the interlude track “??????” was born.
I had the idea for the one-two punch of “arrangement”/“honeymoon is over” for a while. Originally “arrangement” was to seamlessly transition into “come and see”, but the more abrasive “honeymoon” felt like a better fit both tonally and lyrically. But something was missing between this opening and the rest of the album sequence, which started with the mechanical, broken down “loser in the free world”.
Oddly, “we don’t belong” fit really well in this spot, but I had mangled that song so deeply by that point, having re-recorded 4 different versions in different genres, even writing 2 whole different songs (“belong 2” and “spiral song”) using its parts. But the original song, now with more abrasive guitar tones, seemed like it might work. The missing element was to switch it to a cut-time 4/4 beat, an idea I lifted from the Socialist Salesmen version of “skyscrape”. This combination of ideas is the resulting version of “we don’t belong” you hear as track 3 on THROW MYSELF INTO THE BAY.
V. linkedinfluencing
I had written this other song for the end of the album, called “I never know”, but it also started to not fit for me. It was quite meandering and I couldn’t land a vocal performance that I was happy with, and I wanted something more triumphant toward the end of this album (as a pairing to “sleepwalking again”). Now that “we don’t belong” was back in the picture, I had the idea to write a short reprise of its main refrain.
At the time (this was now late 2022), I was frustrated with my job. I started to post on LinkedIn to try and build a bit of a personal brand for myself, to try and drum up interest for a new potential job. (As a total aside, this I believe played a key role in me landing my eventual job at Buffer.) I posted some hot takes about product management, and suddenly started amassing a small audience on the platform. This felt very bizarre: out of nowhere, I started having random product managers and tech people “following me” because I said some things that nobody was saying but people felt. This was also at a time when certain other white men were doing similar, often in podcast form, but on subject matter I found morally reprehensible. The whole thing felt a bit insane, and this is where the “belong reprise” came from.
And then the album was done.
I almost put it out under my own name, but with how abrasive it ended up being, it felt weird under my own name. I joined Threads and started talking about the music, even publicly musing on whether I should adopt an alias. And from there Kid Lightbulbs was born, through the process of making and then talking about this album.
