A Message To Love
"A Message To Love" is the first album I have recorded and officially released. I worked on it for a little bit over a year, with varying amounts of involvement over time, mostly waiting until my fragile ego will allow me to finally choose the right collection of songs and then smooth out the rough edges. And, well, here it is.
True to my longtime dream of becoming a one-man studio band, I wrote, recorded, mixed and performed all of the instrumental and vocal parts myself. The only exception being the track "She's a Contradiction", where I had my longtime friend – the ambient musician and multi-instrumentalist Szelest – play the drums. Other than that, all the electric and acoustic guitars, basses, various percussion instruments, sitars, trumpets, violins, mandolines, ukuleles, lead and backing vocals were performed by me.
In the grand tradition of "concept albums", I too wanted this to be one, and I suppose it did work out fairly right (though I'm not so sure it's clear to listeners who never heard me babbling about it). Throughout the 11 songs I invite the listener to the world of a fictional and unnamed couple, to hear from first, second and third perspective narrations the beginning, flourishing and end of their relationship. The finishing touch was added by the Chinese graphic artist and photographer Damagenius who provided me with the cover photograph.
The concept wasn't a clear thing from the start, so the songs – at least in my head – always have a double entendre. I wrote them with one thing in mind, but they serve another purpose in this story. Or they don't serve any purpose in the story, and I included them simply because they sound ****ing cool to me and fit the style I was going for.
Allow me to quickly go though them (as is their purpose in the story):
1.
A Bedtime Story – The title says it all. The speaker invites us to tell us a story and we meet our protagonist. He is a human male, and goes on walks with his beagle.
2.
Lonely Boy – During a day as any other our protagonist meets a girl he falls in love with. She reciprocates the feeling, and now they're not lonely anymore.
3.
Smoke Screen – First instrumental track. Interpret it as them being happy I suppose.
4.
She's a Contradiction – Ah, love, what a complicated matter. Inner thoughts of a boy lost knee deep in the feeling.
5.
What a Shame – Well, what can you do when you can't even remember the name of the girl you're about to meet. You can act smart and try to figure it out during the meeting, or you can follow in the footsteps of our main character and just guess. Predictably, she leaves him then and there.
6.
Where's the Wine? – A trip down the anxieties and psychosis of being alone and utterly disliking that state.
7.
Until Dawn – The second instrumental track, what's the point of drowning your sorrows in alcohol, if you don't stay up all night.
8.
Miss You – The usual state of pretentious and overreactive feeling of missing somebody.
9.
Helping Hand – Third person perspective monologue to the protagonist about how all that's happened he brought upon himself. You always have friends to turn back to though.
10.
Red Ears – Third instrumental track. No idea why I put it at #10, but here it is. I just like the composition, and thought it's a good idea to have a cute little break between the psychedelic rock of "Helping Hand" and folk-rock stomp of "Southern Skies".
11.
Southern Skies – However bad life may seem, there's always the warm sun and kind climate of the south to turn to. Serves as the closing statement of the story and as a general philosophy idea – don't worry, be happy, go bronze yourself on the beach
As I said, most of these songs however were not written with the album in mind. I basically made a compilation of my creations that I thought fitted each other best stylistically and then realized that
actually if I put them in the right order, there is a tale to be deduced from them. The original ideas for them (if there ever was any original idea) were as follows:
1.
What a Shame – By far the oldest composition here. I wrote it way back in 2019 or 2020, and only recorded it with acoustic guitar and vocals. The lyrics were supposed to be humoristic, but so far nobody laughed when listening, so I guess I failed. I always liked the melody and the chord changes, so now when thinking about the album I decided to rerecord the whole thing with a brand-new arrangement.
2.
Red Ears – I wrote it two or three months ago inspired by my love's poem for me. She's Chinese, but she found someone on the internet to help her translate her words to Polish (my native language) before giving it to me. It was a short and cute little thing about finding a creature with red ears underneath the quilt and not being able to stop herself from biting them.
3.
Southern Skies – Written and recorded about a year ago when I was in the town of Sète, in the south of France. I had a lot of things on my mind before coming there, but then the sleepy seaside town put my mind at ease. I recorded just the acoustic and vocals on my phone and then finished it when I was back the next month back in Paris.
4.
Lonely Boy – First song I wrote after meeting my current girlfriend. I was a very lonely boy living just outside of Paris and first met with her in a park. She's not a lonely girl, quite the opposite, but, well, the lyrics are what they are. I had no clue what other instruments to add to the arrangement, and then I realized that it's because I just like the song the way it is. I only added the electric guitar at the end for a little excitement for the listener during the long fade-out.
5. Both
Where's the Wine? and
Until Dawn were my graduation projects during the first year of my sound engineering school. I thought they. sound ****ing cool, so here they are.
6.
Miss You – Written and recorded about a month ago when my love went for holidays and I missed her, and needed some pathos.
The rest of the tracks were just impulses of the moment, when a riff, melody or chord progression struck me and I just sat there for the whole evening or two trying to figure out what would sound best with that and what with what. Usually the instrumental parts come first, and when the whole thing is nearly done I'd be listening to it plenty of times humming under my breath until I find the right thing to sing. The lyrics are often improvised or found in my collection of notebooks I constantly fill out with thoughts, drawings and little poem parts ever since I started high school. As you can imagine, there's quite a lot of them, and I don't remember even 10% of all the nonsense I wrote in them, so they're a really great source of inspiration.
Well, long story short, I'm happy this project is finally done. Making a fulll album of songs I'm satisfied with has been my dream since I started playing music and writing songs way back in 2016, and now that an official release is in place, I can – with my conscience clear and clean – go and produce next ones, which I'm sure will follow shortly.
It's now live on all streaming services and available for purchase on Bandcamp.
Kisses, and see you when I write something about the singles or the upcoming stuff