Cynical was the track that kicked off So Far So Good, not only in the track list, but also chronologically by a long shot. Unlike the first album in 2020, which I completely finished before releasing anything, Cynical happened way before there was an album to follow it.

 

The idea for Cynical popped into my head while I was in the shower. It was May 2020, so my first album wasn't even out yet (much less the second), but I felt like Cynical was somehow the beginning of a new, different thing, so I kept it separate and didn't touch it for a while.

 

The process of making an entire album sometimes takes so long that by the time I finish it, it feels totally different than when I started it. Songs are kind of like time capsules, so it's weird to me when I don't put out music the same year I started it. Because of that, I released Cynical in April 2021 without really having anything else to follow it, because I wanted to put it out while it still felt somewhat fresh to me.

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After that, I didn't think about working on an album for a long time and I kind of assumed that it wasn't in the books for 2021. But one day, I was looking back at demos and I realized I had way more material lying around than I thought. I started searching around for any demos that had potential, and a full track list quickly materialized.

 

Similar to Three's A Crowd on TGM, Little Something was probably the oldest idea on SFSG, originally from 2014 or before. I started a re-recording of it in January 2021, almost finished it, and then randomly forgot about it for months before I found it again. Mad was just a simple two-chord loop experimenting with guitar tone, which accidentally turned into a song in March of that year.

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Fine/Finite was one of those ideas that kept haunting me. I'd sung some rough demos on my phone and had a feeling like "there's something there," but it wasn't until September 2021 that I took a stab at writing and recording a final version.

 

Worse Things, My My, Change, So Long Honey, and Good, Bad, and Beautiful all kind of flew together in October. The melodies from Worse Things and So Long Honey were stuck in my head for ages, maybe even years, before I ever locked down the lyrics. Meanwhile, My My came about one day when I tried to play Just to Put Me Down by Mac DeMarco, but I did it wrong and came up with a new song instead.

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Once I had the ideas together, it was a thing of degrees: I went around adding lyrics here, restructuring there, recording drums, tightening up guitars, and trying to balance levels, until before I knew it, I had an album.

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Lyrically and sonically, the second album is a bit more controlled than the first. For example, on TGM I bashed the shit out of the drums and then botched the EQ trying to correct the overly loud cymbals, so in SFSG I played the drums quieter, with more control, and opted to record the cymbals on separate tracks where I could independently control the levels.

 

The vocals rely less on fuzz effects and talking/shouting than in the first album, and the lyrics tend to be more vague and reflective, instead of the half drunk, hyper-aware, self deprecating situational humor found in most of the first album. SFSG's lyrics were still inspired by real life, but not as literally or as on-the-nose as TGM. In SFSG, the lyrics are more of a mix of perspectives and styles, ranging from the internal struggle with mental health issues and existential threats to coping with dying relationships. I took new approaches on some of the songs, like My My, which is essentially a short fiction with two unnamed characters, and Suzie, which I wrote with my little sister, who was nine at the time, about a stuffed animal she'd named Suzie. As with several of the others, I had no idea it would end up on the album.

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Overall, I'm pretty happy with SFSG. I think my writing, execution, and mixing is improving, but I still have a lot to learn. Anyways I'm just going to keep enjoying the process and try to be less goal/product oriented.

 

As I'm writing this, it's now early 2023 and I'm working on my third full length album, A New Nothing. I meant to release it in 2022, but after a while I realized that was an unrealistic and stress-inducing goal, so I'm just gonna chill out and take it one day at a time.

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-Mad

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