Before Seventeen: Links
Before Seventeen
Twenty-one songs written before age seventeen, telling a story I've never fully told. Explore the full story below.
The Story
Introduction
From age thirteen through sixteen, I wrote 34 songs—essentially a song a month. Strung together, they viscerally chronicle a time in my life that has remained ever-present in me for decades, for many reasons.
I set out to record this album, “Before Seventeen”, with the goal of finally sharing these songs and this important part of myself with the world—but the process became so much more. I became immersed in that time again for almost two years as I worked on it, absorbing the undimmed energy I found jumping from the pages of old journal entries, handwritten notes and letters, archived instant messenger conversations, emails, and more—and channeling that into my performance, production, and arrangements.
Creating “Before Seventeen” was cathartic in a way I hadn’t expected—deeper than anything I’d experienced with creating any other musical work. I feel that my voice, that was screaming so loudly during that time, may finally be heard.
I truly hope you enjoy taking this musical journey with me.
I present to you, “Before Seventeen”; 21 of those 35 songs.
Already Dreaming
I wrote “Already Dreaming” in March of 2004, when I was fifteen. I have a vivid memory of picking up my guitar one morning before school (which I didn’t usually do but I felt the inspiration for a song,) sitting down on the edge of the bed, and immediately humming the chorus melody. I then went to school, and when I came home I finished writing the whole song, including in the lyrics some moments from my day.
Throughout High School, I used to make little CDs of my home recordings and hand them out to friends. I remember “Already Dreaming” being a favorite, and that then friends would light-heartedly taunt me with lyrics from it for literally 20 years.
Looking back, I think the song speaks a bit to the conflict of darkness and light within me then, and particularly how bright this one light in my life did seem to shine.
One cool thing about this recording- I was able to isolate my vocal in my original home recording from 2004, and in this mix we added it into the choruses as a double to my present day vocal.
A Million
I wrote “A Million” in July of 2004, at age 16. By this point, I had written a whole lot of love songs, which is where the idea for the opening line came from: “perhaps I’ve told you a million times, a million ways, a million rhymes.” This came from a place of thinking to myself- I can see this thing lasting forever.
A Day's End
I wrote “A Day’s End” in May of 2002. I was 13, but only for a couple more weeks. I had been writing and recording songs at home for several years at that point, but something was different when I wrote “A Day’s End.” Actually, everything was different. Everything had changed for good, and I was overcome with a feeling I had never felt before. I found myself so inspired that upon finishing the song, I just thought to myself “where the heck did that come from?” It had all just come out of me so easily.
“A Day’s End” remained an incredibly special song to me personally. Later, in December of 2002, I performed it at my High School’s variety show as a freshman. I can still hear the audience’s thunderous reaction. It was one of the first songs of mine which I gave out to some friends on CDs (and at the time, it was really high tech to actually record on a CD!)
I reimagined it many times over the years with different arrangements in home recordings. One version even had a drum kit in it, and I absolutely cringe at it. I found that I’d get the itch to re-record “the classics” whenever I came across some new recording equipment or felt that I had some newfound recording techniques, and so there were endless recordings of this song, including a simple acoustic piano version on my 2010 album “Something To Believe In.”
It was incredibly important to me, when I began this project “Before 17,” to create the definitive versions of these songs. So much of the journey I went on in creating these arrangements and productions was about deeply diving into my mind and my heart at the time when the songs were written, so that these new recordings were not reimagined versions, but actually what I had initially meant to say musically. I went back to my original recording, from May of 2002, and listened to all of the ideas I had put together. I had written some string lines for it then, some brass lines, and other things. I did a lot of work channeling the inspiration I had at the time, and then just like the song, the arrangement kind of wrote itself. It was an indescribable experience conducting the orchestra for this, and knowing so surely in my heart that this is exactly as the song was always meant to sound. This is the sound of exactly what I was feeling in that month 23 years ago. Here’s “A Day’s End,” officially.
Ash
I wrote “Ash” in September of 2004. A little less than a month into my junior year of high school, I developed psychosomatic seizures, in response to the full blown level of depression and emotional turmoil that I was experiencing; a later diagnosed conversion disorder. I had to be taken out of school for a few months, had to be studied, and had to undergo extensive treatment to be able to make my way back to the world. In that time, I made a lot of decisions and changes to my life which very definitively changed its trajectory for good. I was sixteen years old. I wrote “Ash” exactly sixteen days before the day I had to leave school early because I had started inexplicably trembling forcefully for the first time, and could not stop.
When I went to record my vocals on this song in this past year, I broke down immediately in front of the microphone on the first couple of words. I was actually really surprised by how fresh and raw this wound still was, and I realized how important it was that I was coming back to treat it. The vocal take I ended up choosing for this one was one of the first few, when that genuine emotional avalanche was still in progress.