Welcome to Instrumental Days.

For those of you who have been following my musical "career" from the start, I haven't been prone to slowing down. Thus far, I've maintained a pretty fast pace of releasing an album per year (and I probably would've exceeded that, had I not chosen to record and release D&C twice in one year), and I've been struggling to fight back against a mentality of competition and accomplishment, urging myself to meet arbitrary deadlines and to stick to invisible demands placed upon me.

So for 2023, I'm slowing down and letting Accidental Days have its moment. I have more plans for later in the year (probably along the lines of a deluxe edition and/or commentary edition), but for the summer, I'm releasing Instrumental Days: the same ten songs in the same order but with all the vocals removed. As reductive as that sounds, I'm incredibly proud of this version of the album, for the following reasons:

1. I've been wanting to release instrumental versions of my albums since the start. When I launched a Kickstarter for printing my first album to CD, having the album remixed and remastered as an instrumental version was a "stretch goal" that the campaign did not reach. For D&C, the producer made the option available to me to organize instrumental versions of the songs, but having effectively made the album twice, it didn't make sense to put yet more time and money into the album. Yet while making Accidental Days, it was part of the producer's standard process to provide instrumental versions of each song along the way, making it very easy to push the instrumentals through the same mastering process as the originals. Thus this instrumental version is fairly low effort - there isn't any unique mixing here to highlight the instruments, nor are there any new instruments being used to fill up the spaces left by vocals or to recreate the melodies. However, I ultimately think this worked in the album's favor, allowing elements to be highlighted that might normally be covered by the melodies, and the subtle differences in mixes allowed these final versions to breathe and fill out in a unique fashion compared to their "official" counterparts.

2. I have often said that "I create the music that I want to exist in the world," and I think this is a good rule for any artist to follow: record and release music because it doesn't exist yet and you think it should exist. If you're simply trying to recreate the exact blueprint of an artist who makes their brand of music better than you ever could by copying them, then why are you making music at all? But if your specific mixture of loves and influences and ideas is different than anything you've been able to find, then make your thing so we can all enjoy it with you! To that end, I truly think artists should be fans of their own work -- that we're creating recorded art so that we can enjoy listening to something that we so badly wanted to exist in the world that we took it into our own hands. However, it can still be hard to listen to my own voice, to my own lyrics, and to ignore the commentary in my head about how songs could've been better written, better performed, better edited, etc. Yet through removing my voice from the mix (literally), a distance of separation is created between me and the music that allows me to enjoy my music as if I wasn't the one who made it. Without the sound of my voice, I can listen to Instrumental Days in the same way that I would listen to any other artist.

3. There is one aspect of Accidental Days where I think I seriously leveled up from the first two albums, and it's an aspect that can best be appreciated by listening to the instrumental versions: I think this is the album where my performances and arrangements as a drummer and bassist (and occasionally keyboardist) actually feel like a real band, like individual musicians playing off of each other and crafting unique expressions, rather than a guitarist writing songs on guitar and creating the drum parts and bass parts that make the most obvious sense to fit on top of those guitar parts. Crafting a genuinely band-like experience as a one-man-band has been one of the most difficult aspects of the type of music that I've decided to make, hampered significantly by my own lack of expertise on instruments other than the electric and acoustic guitars. Part of this accomplishment can be credited to a handful of songs that weren't totally finished ahead of the recording sessions, giving me space to improvise the drum and bass parts in studio. I love improvising (there's at least a little bit of improvisation on all of my albums thus far), and here, I think it really resulted in parts that feel natural and couldn't have existed if I'd tried to compose them ahead of time. The other factor is that, the longer I play these secondary instruments, the more natural I become at them. I have a lot of growing to do on the drums, but as time goes on, I'm drumming more like a drummer and less like a guitarist. This is especially true on the bass guitar, where throughout 2022, something clicked in me (especially thanks to ample opportunities to play bass for my worship band at church) where I really feel like a bass player now, instead of a guitarist with fewer and thicker strings. This is a very exciting development for me, especially as I write more bass-driven songs for new material.

4. There is incredible work by other musicians sprinkled throughout this album, including piano from Theo MacMillian and Nick Schrader, trumpets from Brendan Dorman (who's now been featured on all three of my studio albums), and a multitude of subtle additions from the producer Brendan St. Gelais (including a real organ, additional keys, synths, programming and percussion such as shaker, tambourine, and even sleigh bells!). Even from the original version of Accidental Days, listeners have pointed out the solos from MacMillan, Schrader, and Dorman as their favorite musical moments on the album, and with Instrumental Days, I hope their expertful work is spotlighted all the more. I also want to take this opportunity to share about how a few songs on this album would be completely different without the significant artistic and musical input that came from Brendan (the producer, not the trumpeter). When I've got a rock song figured out, replete with lead guitar riffs throughout, then I don't leave room for too much to be added, but I can pinpoint five songs (so, HALF of the album) that were completely transformed thanks to Brendan's fingerprints: "Heart Reset," "Middle of My Words," "Settled in the Unsettled," "Choose," and "The Checklist." He helped me figure out arrangements for these songs, guiding me while I worked in the studio to come up with a lot of the drum parts based on my loose skeletons, and he pushed me against my hesitations to try out additions such as the drum machine in "Heart Reset." He threw in little details like the sleigh bells and extra percussion sounds, wondering whether I'd notice them or not, and he put in a crazy amount of effort to build out the soundscapes in "Choose" and "Checklist" especially, going totally ham on the outro of the latter. He would occasionally talk me out of adding in new ideas (like my efforts to fill in the choruses of "Checklist," which he knew would be cooler if they were left spacious), while sometimes he would encourage me to write new ideas that I'd never considered, such as adding the delay-pedal riffs to the choruses of "Middle of My Words" (a song that also received a hefty lift from Brendan's synth additions). It might seem readily apparent that Brendan had far more instrumental involvement in the end results of AD than the producers had for Unfall or D&C, but that says nothing about the capabilities of those producers; instead, that's 100% about my own willingness to relinquish control and accept collaboration during the making of those albums. It's something I'm getting better at as time goes on, and it benefitted the end results of Accidental Days (& Instrumental Days!) more than I can explain.

In conclusion, while I'm incredibly proud of the lyrics, performances, and vocal arrangements found on Accidental Days, I might be even more proud of the music on this album, due as much to the creative talent and generosity of my collaborators and friends as it is to my own growth as a musician, arranger, and songwriter. I hope that Instrumental Days gives you a fresh appreciation for all the work and ideas poured into these ten songs.