Alien Nation Released

Tomorrow is the "official" release date (which gives me time to actually print up the inserts and burn the CD's tonight) but my debut single, "Alien Nation" is now available on the website Bandcamp (devintait.bandcamp.com).

In my mad rush of planning to get everything done for this single and album release, I had gotten it timed down to the last minute of course. Once I had finished the album and mastered it, I sent it off to the factory and while that was happening, I finished up the b-sides for the single (mainly just recording new vocals as the instrumental tracks were pretty much finished) and creating the artwork. Thanks to Shawn Sagen, of www.thestrangerpage.com, who directed the video for "Alien Nation" which we filmed way back in October 2010, and took the photos that appear on the cover of both CD1 and CD2.

Speaking of the multiple CD format, I chose to do this just for fun. In the 90's, it became a trend in the UK for new singles to be released on two discs, the first disc usually having the song and some b-sides, and the second disc containing remixes and the video. I guess it was designed by record label to boost sales of singles to get them higher in the charts, but I just always liked it because it meant more songs and more photos. I used to buy lots of the Spice Girls and Aqua singles packages. Despite being completely unnecessary and even wasteful (obviously 6 songs would fit on one CD), I decided I wanted to do this just this one time.

The b-sides are "Man Vs. Nature" and "Imaginary Greenland," both of which I had intended at once point to include on the album. MVN is a fairly 'old' song for me. I wrote it, in my head, back in 2001 when I was just making my way in Los Angeles. After I moved in the summer of 2000, I made a New Year's Resolution on 1/1/2001 to get in shape, and for the first six months of that year, I jogged and ran stairs on my lunch breaks, would eat vegetables, chicken breast, grapefruit, etc., and did aerobics workouts on VHS tapes in my studio apartment. I lost a ton of weight and felt better and more confident than I ever had before. Despite the new-found confidence I still struggled with the dating scene in LA. MVN was my attempt at addressing the struggles we face that come from all over the place, but mainly from Human Nature. The title and the lyric is supposed to be a play on the term "Man Vs. Nature" which is usually a story about a person facing some type of natural disaster or hardship. By looking at human nature instead, I thought I was cleverly turning the phrase around. My roommate at the time was confused and said he didn't get it so that kind of caused me to forget about it, as I had been trying to demo it on my crappy PC, but just gave up after that. Years later when I started recording this album, I did a demo in a completely new style (the original idea was to have it be a piano-based rock song). I wasn't thrilled with the way the vocals were working out and it felt so old to me, so I decided to leave it off the album, but it was the first song I came back to when deciding on b-sides. I ended up simplifying the track a little, especially the drums, and completely re-recording all the vocals, in a style that was truer to the original idea. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.

"Imaginary Greenland" was a song I had written to blend in with some songs I had been working on that used my grandma's poetry. Before I started recording for "It's Never The Way You Imagine It," I had this idea to do an album of songs based on poems that grandma Irene wrote. I couldn't find enough poems that would work to fill up a whole album, so I wrote this one to kind of incorporate her style with my own lyrics. I used to dream about moving to Greenland when life in LA became too hectic and stressful. I've never been there but would love to visit. I based a lot of the lyrics off of childhood insecurities and fears. In the end, I like how it turned out, but just thought it was too moody for the album. Also I used a drum loop from Garageband that is pretty easily identifiable so that was another big reason for not putting it on the album.

As for the remixes, Brandon did the Turbo Sunshine mix, which I really like, and I decided to do a "dub" mix like they used to include on 12" singles back in the 80's. I wasn't a huge fan of dub mixes at the time as a lot of them were very minimal and almost instrumental. I decided to make my mix trippy like a dub mix, and I did simplify it from the original song, but I didn't go completely minimal. In parts it actually sounds closer to the original version, because I was working with my original tracks before I had passed them on to Brandon who added guitar and mixed the album version. If I had more weird effects, I would have used them, but I think I did a good job with my limited technology.

The last track is a live version of "Strange Season" from the Traitor's show at Cafe Muse back in December. I really love how it turned out and I'm so glad Brandon was able to record it so well.