More Awesome Than Awesome: What Is It?

More Awesome Than Awesome is my next album. It is awesome. It is more awesome than awesome. Sometime next month (probably), I’ll post a big retrospective with more details about what went into producing the album. Today I’ll give more of a synopsis. To start, here’s the cover art:

From the outset, I knew I wanted the cover to be sort of weird looking, and also somewhat drastically different from my other covers. It has a lighter and brighter color palette most obviously. The strange character in the lower right is something I commissioned someone to do one one of those websites where people get commissioned for things. It’s the first time I had ever done that, and it might be my last. In short, I asked them to create a creature with a head of an octopus, the body of a human, and big bird wings. And I wanted the watercoloring to be splotchy. It’s not exactly what I was envisioning, the process kind of sucked, so that’s how it ended up.

The paint splotches in the background were done by me. I created about a dozen different versions of it, and that’s what I decided on. Yep.

Now, I’ll talk a little about each track. Again, I’ll get super in depth with this stuff later.

1. Intro I always like to have an introductory track on all my albums to set the mood. I still want to leave the concept of this song a surprise for now, so I won’t talk much about it. But…it’s kind of rappy and funny…maybe.
2. What It’s Like This is possibly my favorite song on the album. It has a four-on-the-floor drum beat, the vocals are about as good as you’re going to get from my mouth, and the music is pretty interesting. I incorporated bell samples as a lead instrument.
3. Kill the Buffalo I released this as a single last year. You should already know what it sounds like.
4. Stick It to the Man I’m pretty sure I wrote this around the same time as “What It’s Like.” They have similar styles, I think. This one is weirder and heavier though. There’s some heavy guitars in the verses, weird German people speaking, and a guitar solo. It also boasts some crazy vocal effects, which I believe I employed wisely.
5. Eff It You know this song. It’s probably my most traditionally-structured song. There are verses, pre-choruses, choruses, post-choruses(?), and a cool breakdown section in the middle.
6. Things Unlikely I wanted to make some party type songs on this album. This was probably the first attempt at that.
7. Get Offended Man, this is a song that I have to say is probably not one of the better songs on the album. I like it, but I’m not sure if it’s weird enough. I don’t know. The lyrics were a little bit more provocative originally, but since the time I first wrote it, #MeToo stuff happened, so I didn’t want it to be too insensitive or whatever.
8. Orange Star Trek Is this a song? I don’t know. There’s drums, some bleepy-bloops, and some Wayne’s World quotes on top. Yep.
9. Slut I signed myself up to do a song about girls who eat bananas. It’s pretty weird and electronic.
10. Nutsacreligious, Pt. 1 This is one of the more sophisticated guitar-driven songs I’ve created. I’m pretty proud of the guitar sound too. But it’s basically a medley of phrases sourced from everything from I Love Lucy to The GameOverGreggy Show to Fallout Shelter.
11. Hwft I knew I wanted to make a song called “Hwft,” and I knew it had to have a certain motif, but other than that, I didn’t have any requirements for this song.
12. More Awesome Than Awesome This is the last song I finished, which means it’s the one that I have the least amount of quality with in listening to the final product. So I’m not sure how I feel about it. I guess I feel pretty good about it if for no other reason than because I rhymed “wang” with “everythang.”
13. I’ll Get You What You Want One day a cool dude on Twitter told me I should make a song with trombones and cowbells. This is it. It’s weird.
14. Nutsacreligious, Pt. 2 Part 1 didn’t get that weird. This one switches between new dirgy slow sections and the same thrashy/punky rock parts found in Part 1. Originally I wanted to have all of these parts in one, but it ended up being over 10 minutes long. So I decided to split them into 2 separate tracks.

When is it coming out?

…

August 31st! While you’re waiting to get it, there will be a presale on iTunes beginning August 10th. If you preorder there, you’ll be able to download “Stick It to the Man” immediately! How cool is that? In the past, you had to submit your album like 6 weeks in advance to be able to do something like that on iTunes. Now, I think the only restriction is that the album has to have at least 11 tracks.

On top of that, sometime this month, there will be some sort of song previews, and at least one new t-shirt that will be up on Amazon. So stay tuned for all that!