Soundtracks for Daydreams, my new EP of original piano music, just dropped on 04/04/24 and yes, I did pick that date intentionally because it looks and feel kinda magical to me. By the way, Apple Music subscribers can listen to SFD here & YouTube users can listen here (Spotify users, just click on the album pic above).
After I’d finished doing substantive revisions on Dizzie & Moto, my mixed-race prodigy novel, I wanted to take a break from my writing for a couple weeks and return to my first artistic love: the piano! So I sat down at my desk in my office and worked on recording one track a day and then spent another week or so mixing and balancing the songs, renaming the tracks, & finding the right song trajectory before I distributed it and choose my publication date. Normally, it would take me a couple months to lay down, revise, & master all the tracks if I’m writing an electronic or rock album, but with original piano composition, there’s only a couple piano tracks at most and often just one track. The only tricky part is you can’t make mistakes!
As many of you who’ve been reading MIXTAPE for a while know (or if you’ve known me since I was a young kid schlepping around volumes of Shakespeare and Bach with me in junior high to keep me company at lunch), I’ve been playing piano since 6th grade and I’ve been writing music since . . . 6th grade. In fact, at one point, I was an aspiring concert pianist. Even though my technique and sight-reading skills were mediocre for the first couple years, I attended National Music Camp and later Interlochen Arts Academy as a piano major and quickly got better. I just needed the opportunity, the support, the discipline, & the community to properly thrive. Within a couple months, I was practicing five to six hours every single day. I had a schedule for myself at the age of 14! And my technique improved leaps and bounds. I went from stumbling through Mozart’s easiest sonata (the C Major) in 6th grade to playing one of Mozart’s most challenging piano pieces (the C minor Fantasy) in 9th grade. My evolution was exponential during my first year at IAA. I was even going to start learning a Mozart piano concerto the following year so I could compete in concerto competitions as a junior. All it took was one concentrated year of study and practice with an excellent (some might say abusive) piano teacher at a secluded fine arts school in Northern Michigan where I could completely devote myself to improving my own craft for me to improve dramatically as an artist. And truth be told, I would have stayed at Interlochen until graduation if my parents had supported me financially for the remaining 25% of the cost of attendance that my scholarship didn’t cover, but they didn’t and so that dream came to a crashing halt.
Sometimes, though, I’m still haunted by the career in piano performance I never had but that I would have worked my ass off for if I’d been allowed to stay at Interlochen for three more years. I think about the improvements in my technique and repertoire, the emotional maturity that would have showed up in my musical interpretations, & my flair for performance. Maybe I still would have attended Oberlin, but at the nationally recognized conservatory instead. Other times, I’m grateful I couldn’t pursue a career in piano performance because almost no one actually gets to do that anymore and even when they do, they still need pupils. Considering how late I started studying piano, I would have been playing catch-up my whole life. And considering how creative I was but also how little time I had to practice after joining the debate and forensics teams, it was inevitable that I’d one day start writing my own music.
Eventually, I realized that piano composition was the perfect way to hold on to my love of the piano and my love of composition without the technical mastery that a career in musical performance would require. In other words, as a concert pianist, I’d have to practice upwards of eight hours a day, every day with little or no breaks, but as a composer, I could simply write a song on the piano and record it whenever I found a chunk of free time. And that’s what I’ve been doing since high school more or less. For as long as I can remember, I’ve always felt this magnetic pull every time I walked into an empty room and I saw a piano glowing in the sunlight like Mosaic tablets. Over the course of many years, I began to write songs (or parts of songs) whenever I found time, whenever I stumbled into a quiet space with a piano left unattended such as:
The chapel in my Jesuit prep school
The practice rooms at Northwestern
The practice rooms at Oberlin Conservatory
The stage of the performance hall at Balboa Park
LB’s cousin’s keyboard that she lent to me while we were living in Palermo Viejo
The band practice room at DePaul
The choir practice room at U Dub
The music building at Notre Dame (they even gave me my very own key!)
Random churches I’d visit out of the blue
The San Dieguito High School Library
Practice pods at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music
Countless living rooms of friends, girlfriends, neighbors, & classmates
In 2008, when I was living in Buenos Aires with LB, I taught myself how to use GarageBand, Apple’s free music recording software, and the rest, as they say, was history. Since then I’ve been writing music under the band name Mizu and this is the first album I’ve written that’s composed solely of piano music. Most of these songs have strong contemporary period conventions or Japanese modalities to them, but if you compare the melodic structures in this album to some of my older music (both electronic and post-rock), you’ll notice some similarities in themes and phrasing since I do have a musical signature like every musician/composer. Even “Manuscript,” the only baroque song in this EP, which was clearly inspired by Bach fugues, still retains some of my musical style and brand I think, though it’s subtle.
Anyway, I think art should speak for itself, whether it’s a novel, a work of acrylics, or a piano track, so I’ll stop contextualizing this album and simply encourage you to listen to Soundtracks for Daydreams when you get a chance. It’s a good album for writing, by the way.
Leave your comment down below and thanks for reading!
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