Looking Back on Somniphobia

So…Somniphobia, that acoustic album I made. It’s been out for a month already. It’s time to go over some stats some thoughts, and some fun audio clips!

First, let’s go over some stats.

SPOTIFY
So far, there have been 64 streams of songs on Somniphobia on Spotify. It’s a pretty even split, but “Ooh La La (Ooh La La La La La La)” has the most at 13 plays. That’s interesting, because I don’t think I linked out to that track anywhere. “Pretty Little Ditty (Acoustic)” comes in second place with 8 plays. That’s worth mentioning because the non-acoustic version is my all-time top-performing song. I’m curious to see how popular that particular track gets. In a more general sense, I had 4 more unique listeners than the previous month. I was hoping for more, but I’ll take it.

YOUTUBE
Over on the YouTube front, the most popular videos are, predictably, the “Ooh La La” music video with 66 views and “Tomorrow Is a New Day” with 37 views. I shared the “Ooh La La” video quite a bit over the Internet, so that doesn’t surprise me. “Tomorrow” has a bunch of views because Roses1401, the lady whose vocal recordings I used in it, commented quite a bit there. That made me glad. I had asked for her permission to use the recordings, but I was concerned she wouldn’t be happy with the song, but she was. Oh, and I did get a couple new subscribers, which is cool.

The activity on iTunes, Amazon, etc. is so miniscule that they’re not worth mentioning yet.

I didn’t get much feedback from other people, and I don’t think I would have received any had I not solicited them for it. Anyway, as for me, I’m still in a weird place with it. It’s likely because I spent so much time recording, re-recording, and re-re-recording all the guitar and vocal parts. It’s funny because I expected the opposite. So even though it’s been a month now, any time I listen to any of the songs, it’s difficult to not think about the trouble I had recording.

On the upside, I think even though I doubt I’ll record acoustic songs again, the experience will help me record electric guitar and vocals in the future. I don’t know how flawless the guitar or vocal recordings sound on Somniphobia, but I’d like to think they sound better than my previous albums. The recording process took a little longer than I had planned, but it was still faster than the sessions for any of my other albums.

I don’t know. Maybe I’ll check-in with the album in another album and talk about how I feel about it. And maybe I’ll get some comments about it by then and share.

What’s next? Definitely not another acoustic album. My head is definitely in an electronic space. I have a huge abundance of unused songs over the years. It’s possible that I use some or all of that for a new album. I could do an instrumental, electronic album. Or I could do all new songs. I have no idea right now. But I don’t want to mess with an acoustic guitar for a while…unless I do another music video…

Now for some audio! First up is an early, instrumental version of the title track. The biggest difference in this version is the inclusion of this extra section that shows up a few times. The lyrics for that section were too perverted and silly, and it just sounded bad in context of the rest of the song, so I took it out.

Next is a raw acoustic guitar track from “Do It, Screw It.” It’s one run through all the guitar parts from the song. Some of this got used and some of it didn’t.

Yeah, so I have more to say, but I’ll wait a little longer until I can be less objective about it. Stay tuned.