The INFINITE NORMAL story
Part of what has allowed me to release 4 albums in ~2 years is my large backlog of half-complete songs, therefore a huge repository of ideas I can pull from – and the same (partly) applies to my latest release INFINITE NORMAL.
While this album was almost entirely recorded as new in the last ~year, many of the ideas go back a long time, but form a full narrative arc and reflection of many of my feelings as a white male American progressive tech-forward artist father in 2025. And the narrative is a natural continuation of the ideas and overall journey that I’ve explored in my prior 3 albums. So this post is an overview of the narrative of the album, with some context on where that narrative came from, and a recap of how each song came together to play a role in the album sequence.
the (loose) narrative of INFINITE NORMAL
INFINITE NORMAL picks up where RUINED CASTLE concluded – with A and B having reconciled after a dark period. They each have a bleak outlook on things given the constant unrelenting news cycle of chaos and suffering around them, and each want to curl up and hide from it together for their own protection and sanity (“womb”).
B decides to touch grass as a coping mechanism. He stands out in the rain alone, leaving his phone behind, and has a moment of clarity about his privilege (“i stood in the rain part 1”), recognizing that he can do awesome, terrible things with it if he were to play his cards right, and becomes manic in his desire to leverage that privilege to better his family’s life. But doing so is overwhelming given his increased awareness of the corruption and destruction all around him. He tries to worry less about these things, like he observes many of his peers doing, but struggles to enjoy many of the activities he’s invited to partake in (“simple”). He pursues creative work in addition to his day job, but immediately bumps up against the extremely large pool of fellow creatives competing for attention, who in turn are angry about the inevitability of AI both rendering them obsolete and therefore outing their work as derivative and unoriginal (“poor man’s version”).
This all quickly overwhelms B, and he seeks relief to numb his brain by mindlessly doomscrolling, playing shallow video games and experimenting with various methods of numbing himself (“softener”). This combined with his persisting burnout from overwork starts to affect his relationship with A, causing him to regularly act distant and, in some cases, literally fall asleep while they’re attempting to connect (“stay awake”). He grows frustrated with this situation and lashes out on social media, satirizing and criticizing his fellow artists & creators for their shallow & exploitive content that ultimately serves as entertainment for those in power and changes nothing (“performance”). He nearly drowns himself during a livestreamed attempt at performance art; A urges him to stop despite the livestream going viral. B then reminisces on how much easier and more care-free their lives were before, and struggles to accept his aging body & distance from childhood memories (“nostalgia”).
B reaches out to a friend he’d previously lost touch with – C, who struggled to find a sustainable career in his field and has ended up working in a warehouse for the last decade to barely make ends meet. During their meetup C gradually realizes how unhappy B is despite his privilege, and lashes out at him for his naïveté and entitlement (“the grass is quicksand”). B realizes how much worse it’s been for everyone else, and begins to grasp how common and widespread the feelings of misery and exploitation are (“precariat”). But he recognizes his the “golden handcuffs” situation he’s in: what’s in the best interest for his family is directly at odds with his desire to suffer less & help those suffering worse than him, while those in power tease him to keep to his ways (“i stood in the rain part 2”). He feels his sense of agency fade.
B returns to the rain even longer this time. While outside, he struggles with this predicament, but ultimately comes to the realization that no matter what happens, he and A will always have each other’s support (“you know”).
origins
Almost all of INFINITE NORMAL is new in terms of its recording – but quite a few of the ideas come from years ago, in many cases carefully reconstructed into the album you hear today.
“womb”
“womb” was originally written in early 2016, during a time where I was engaged to marry my now-wife and the current US president was about to be elected for the first time. I made a complete recording of it with a very different, uplifting, almost 80s Genesis-style sound. Some specific elements of that version are in the final INFINITE NORMAL version – the ending guitar solo, and aspects of the synth textures (though they’ve been significantly manipulated from the original takes).
“i stood in the rain” (parts 1 and 2)
I first conceived of a song involving the phrase “I stood in the rain” back in 2016. The line comes from a poem my wife wrote and shared with me while we were engaged (around the same time I first recorded “womb”). This version was similarly uplifting and more of a positive musing on feeling clear and empowered.
Sometime in late 2024 I was feeling down – I think it was around the US election – and, sitting in my basement noodling on the piano, I revisited the simple piano line from the original “rain” (in E major), and brought it into G minor. It’s very similar to the piano line in “hope inside my baby’s heart”, which is in F and uses Lydian mode as well – in fact, “i stood in the rain part 2” is almost a dark reimagining of the piano swells found in “hope”. The G minor shift made it start to feel more ethereal, meditative, vaster, more honest, and I started singing the words for “rain” in the lowest register I can sing in. I felt it deep in the lungs, and it was cathartic to perform in the darkness of my basement at night. It quickly became the thematic center for something.
It took a while for me to develop the full 2-part song you hear on the album, because I struggled with where to go from that meditative beginning. I first shifted the rhythm to 7/8 to give it some sense of unease despite the slower tempo, and aimed to create a slow build to some kind of dark chaos at the end. I also knew I wanted it to be long, feeling inspired by the more recent albums by Swans, and Ethel Cain’s songs “Thoroughfare” & “Family Tree”. There are several old takes on “rain” that just looped the piano line, accompanied by a simple drum rhythm, where I gave myself space to try things, but nothing landed.
I eventually tried to incorporate a chord progression from this old post-rock instrumental I’d written, and that’s what made the song work for me. (This chord progression is used in the first “so big” chorus, and the guitar solo sections.) This instrumental goes back to 2012, and was originally intended as an instrumental coda to a different song, “soften” (see below), and my friend Tess Canfield had written a poem (titled “vessel”) that seemed to fit the instrumental. I ended up incorporating parts of that poem into this album at several points, specifically the “so big” chorus in “rain” (as well as the spoken word section of “performance”).
Once I incorporated the “liars” progression and lyrics as a new chorus to “rain”, I was feeling like the song came together nicely, but I still wanted a way to make the chaotic ending I envisioned still feel surprising and a bit unnerving. I found myself noodling on the piano again, and thought that a full breakdown to just piano could achieve that. The breakdown section in “rain” serves as the first of 4 piano improvisations on the album, and is an interpolation of the chorus and bridge from “poor man’s version” – thematically this represents a feeling of impostor syndrome that B feels while having his moment of clarity described above.
The second part (track 11) was originally conceived as the final sections of a larger, single piece – I envisioned the whole thing as a big 10-minute funeral dirge thing – but then cut it off after integrating the “liars” chord progression and solo piano breakdown in part 1. I almost didn’t include it, but felt the album/narrative needed a way to wrap things up, so I reworked this “second half” into its own piece. This ended up forming the complete narrative of the album for me, creating a sort of dark climax for the story.
“simple”
The actual song “simple” came together in 2 days in early July 2025, directly inspired by much of the post-punk and prog I was listening to at the time. But two key elements are lifted from other shelved work of mine:
- the synth bass line in the verses originate from a song idea I noodled with around 2007, when I was still in Bushwhack, called “pyromanic loverboy”. This was a hectic upbeat prog instrumental in 5/8 time and using slap technique on the bass guitar. I reworked the bassline into 3/8 time and performed it with a wobbly synth bass tone.
- the breakdown section of “simple” is entirely lifted from another song of mine, “sabbatical”, which I initially wrote for live-looping bass guitar in ~2009 (here’s a video of me performing it last year). I had reworked “sabbatical” completely in ~2011, writing a new, uplifting chord progression based in F# major. I almost included it on an early Sophomores album but was never happy with the end result. The bridge of “simple” uses this reworked version of “sabbatical”, this time in A major and further stripped down.
poor man’s version
I’ve had an idea to write a song called “poor man’s version” since probably 2019 or 2020, potentially as a candidate for THROW MYSELF. I originally conceived of it as more of a hard rock thing, but since I’m not a very good guitar player, I was never happy with where it was going until I sat at the piano late one night and quickly came up with the plodding E-flat piano riff that makes up most of the song.
The bridge sections (in A-flat major) come partly from a song I wrote for the band I was in from 2011-2013, Socialist Salesmen, called “saturday night capitalism”. This song is not some of my finest lyric-writing, but the song contained this dreary intro section that resurfaced in my brain as a counterpoint to the aforementioned plodding piano riff.
The lyrical subject matter focused on the increased feeling of artists becoming factories for content in the 2020s, a topic I struggle with constantly at the moment. Musically I wanted the song to reflect that feeling of a factory. I took a beat from my recent cover of Death Waits’ “empty me”, to extend the intro to nearly 90 seconds and slowly build that mechanical factory feeling, layer by layer.
softener
I wrote the lyrics to “softener” back in 2011 or so. I originally imagined it as a sort of healing song, like someone came to help you fix the broken pieces of yourself.
But in the context of this album, and with the changing of the chord structures, its meaning pivoted to something about numbing oneself – as if that someone came too late and found you hazy & withering, with the TV playing something you don’t even recognize.
stay awake
“stay awake” is a relatively new song, but the piano line has its roots in “skyscrape”, a song I wrote in 2009 and was gradually stripped for parts to also form the basis of “we don’t belong” and “spiral song” (both from THROW MYSELF INTO THE BAY). The chord progression of the verses are shared, and the bridge section is a reframing of “spiral”'s chorus but in 6/8 time. I had an idea for this ballad version back when recording the first album, but never landed the lyrics until earlier this year.
Lyrically this is another one of the more personal songs I’ve written, though I think young parents nowadays can probably relate.
performance
This song is arguably the album centerpiece. I wrote a bit about this already, but without the context of the song’s second half – a deeply uncomfortable and vulnerable spoken-word piece set to improvised piano. This song directly calls back to my earlier track “loser in the free world”, a song I think which contains some of the best and most biting lyrics I’ve written but would never work as a single. The idea that I wrote those lyrics mid-pandemic, and nothing’s really changed, is a wake-up call on its own.
I wanted the song to also feel like a performance, more so than I’ve done before, so it takes on a very theatrical air with a few elements of “meta” performance throughout:
- the vocal vamp from Brenna as the conventional “pop song” section fades away around 4 minutes in
- the improvised piano performance following this
- the spoken word piece describing a sort of performance in itself (also a semi-improvised word salad, but AI-generated social content sometimes feels that way let’s be honest!)
- the voiceover at the end chanting “we want more!”
I want to also call out here that having a song critical of the performative nature of social media is really weird thing to talk about because of my day job working on a product that’s supposed to help people on social media. I think my mixed/complex feelings about social media ultimately help me be better at my job - it’s important be ultimately optimistic about how how being online as a creator/business is changing, but one must be honest about the pitfalls and bad incentives that we need to deal with in order to survive on these platforms
nostalgia
I originally wrote most of “nostalgia” (including the 90s-rock references in the end section) back in 2022 or so, alongside much of the material for THROW MYSELF INTO THE BAY. But it was too calm stylistically to fit with the rest of that material. I then considered it for my second album, perhaps a totally new thing that happened to also incorporate “trendsetters” and “ritual”, two older songs I was revisiting. But I then gained the motivation to fully revisit my albums from the past, and put aside “nostalgia” again to finish up the albums that would become STEP INTO THE OCEAN and RUINED CASTLE. The session for “nostalgia” wasn’t touched again until roughly May 2025, when I landed on the tone for LP4 with which it felt much more naturally a fit.
The choruses and end section of “nostalgia” contain deliberate references for millennials: Nickelodeon, blink 182’s “all the small things”, the Twin Towers, and lyrical nods to Green Day, Third Eye Blind, Len, Chumbawamba and Donna Lewis’ “I love you always forever”. I envisioned these references as sort of evoking the feeling of your brain fighting for comfort in the midst of total exhaustion, as if these nostalgic references aimed to create solace.
the grass is quicksand
This is one of the few songs entirely written in 2025. Musically, it’s equally inspired by Tool (specifically a play on the riff from “Lost Keys”) and The Knife’s “A Tooth for An Eye”, but also originated as a sort of blues-y acoustic guitar + vocal ditty.
There’s a deliberate, oblique reference to my earlier song “oxycodone”, in which the subject can’t sleep/eat/breathe/see; in this case, the subject is lashing out, reiterating their need for these things as the source of the frustration in the song.
precariat
The word precariat refers to a social class formed by people suffering from precarity, which means existing without predictability or security, affecting material or psychological welfare. It’s pretty clear that the lyrics speak to this.
The piano that drives this song is a short piece I recorded back in 2017, I think around the time I was exploring song ideas that ended up forming the basis for RUINED CASTLE. It was left to be a piano piece at the time, but in late 2024 I found myself playing it again on the piano. I wanted to release as a short solo piano piece, but found myself humming parts of the melody and decided it could work as a minimal pop song.
The production doesn’t add much to the original piano piece – piano, 2 vocal tracks, some light electronic percussion, and a wobbly bass in the second half. I think of it as an intentional stripping-down after the density of songs like “performance” and “quicksand”, as if the protagonist has no more smoke & mirrors to see through.
you know
The chords and general structure of “you know” go back to 2015, around the same time of “womb” and “rain”’s origins. The lyrics are partly interpolating some other lyric ideas from my friend Tess, and I’d envisioned it (again similarly to “rain”) as this upbeat, uplifting thing using a big flanging synth sound. Given the shift in INFINITE NORMAL’s narrative, it felt good to have a very stripped-down track as its closer, and the lyrics here somewhat felt like a place where I could end things. So I tried performing “you know” with just a small-sounding tack piano sound and it achieved what I was hoping for.
The ending line (“I’ve got all these demons in my head”) was intentionally meant to loop infinitely and abruptly cut off. I’m not sure if I’ll have this serve as a transition into my next album, but for now it felt like an interesting way to end the album – as if your whole existence can just instantly collapse on a knife point of bleak clarity.
Stepping back a bit
Unlike my last 2 albums, which were largely refreshes & remasters of older recordings, almost everything here is re-made with fresh perspective despite many of the songs having roots a decade+ old.
Thinking about this point more deeply, I realized that the chronology of Kid Lightbulbs album is a bit wonky because of the order in which I conceived these albums. The sequence of my development as a songwriter/producer looks a bit more like this in reality:
- 2015 - step into the ocean (fka bedtime rituals)
- 2019 - ruined castle (fka sleepwalker)
- 2023 - throw myself into the bay
- 2025 - infinite normal
This should make it clear that I’m not “wildly prolific”, having released 4 albums in 2 years, but that these ideas have been gestating for over a decade. It also explains (for me at least) the growing cohesion of my albums in a way that is a bit more honest. Personally I find STEP INTO THE OCEAN a sprawling mess, and as I’ve written before, RUINED CASTLE was cohesive but without a compelling ending until I figured one out 5 years later. THROW MYSELF and INFINITE NORMAL, on the other hand, were both constructed end-to-end with a clear narrative arc in mind. And I’m proud of how my storytelling ability has developed over those years.
