I just impulsively made a new album of piano music 🎹 🤪

I cannot overstate how much of an impulse project this was. It came together super quickly:

On a Monday night a few weeks ago, I was noodling on the piano as my daughter wound down before bedtime. I found myself playing quiet, deconstructed versions of the songs from my latest album as Kid Lightbulbs. They sounded quite good, and chilled my whole family out, and so I thought I’d record the ones that worked.

On Tuesday night, I recorded said piano reductions in one take, about 30 minutes. I later went back and re-recorded 2 or 3 of them, and updated the mix of a previous improvisation I’d recorded back in 2017 that fit in with this material.

On Wednesday night, I mixed and mastered them quickly (I had a good template for my piano music I’d made earlier) and organized them in a folder, which I promptly uploaded to my self-hosted music site built with Faircamp. (It’s now also available to stream/purchase on Bandcamp.)

It’s called SOLO PIANO 2. My second collection of piano music in just over a year.

At some point during the above 3-day stretch I thought about how to promote such an album of piano music… but I hit a realization that my new Faircamp-powered music site is turning my whole thinking about how to release music (or release anything, really) upside down a bit.

With zero fees, strings or weird network effects in play, I can just impulsively upload an album of piano music I impulsively recorded and people can just listen to it. I can just… do the thing, and tell people about it.

And I don’t need to worry about marketing or fees or optimizing my release schedule for either, unlike what I would have done if I’d release this to a streaming service: sit on it, attempt to build some sort of hype, prep a bunch of videos (a process I really don’t enjoy), push it hard on my socials for a single day, and hope for the best.

Instead it’s just there. And people are listening to it!

A fun aside for parents: We continue to play it in the evenings to wind the kid down before bedtime, and it actually has worked really well - so what I’m saying is, if you have kids, listen to my music 🥴