I've never made an entire album like this.

During the pandemic, I saw many friends engage in creative pursuits with their extra free time. It was inspiring, but I felt a creative void without a project of my own. 

Eight years prior, in 2012, I had the idea to create the "Great American Hard Rock Album" and collected a few riffs and song parts, along with a car-based theme and a name: Revlevel. While I had big plans for an album, a website, and maybe even a band, these ideas remained on my hard drive until 2020.

I decided THIS was my pandemic project and set out to the absolute best 10 song hard rock album I could make. Little did I know it would take four years from this point to see the light of day.

To get started, I needed to define the 10 songs. I started by piecing together riffs and giving each rough idea a title. This gave each one life and a potential personality based on its title. While some of the songs remained rooted in the 2012 car theme, others branched out into other aspects of my life.

As to the one cover, "you should see me in a crown", I had a heavy rock vision for this song the very first time I heard it. Like the other song nuggets, this remained in my brain until it found a place on the album.

As I kept working with the raw ideas, I came up with titles and full arrangements for 10 songs on guitar. Done! Uh, no. Now is the tough part (for me): melodies and lyrics.

Here's where I did something I've never done before: I created melodies for all 9 original songs in my head and never recorded them until all 9 were complete. I am notoriously bad at remembering how to play songs, so I was taking a huge gamble not recording these ideas so I didn't forget. Why did I do this? I had a theory: if I could come up with melodies that I could not forget, then they must be catchy.

I spent many days walking and humming melodies and rhyme patterns. After this was complete, I had the extremely difficult task (again, for me) of figuring out what to write about. Also, I made this even more difficult on myself as I had to find words that matched rhythmically with a completed melody.

Again, I did the same thing as the melodies, I didn't write down any lyrics until the song was complete. Writing lyrics are my least favorite part of songwriting as I rarely pay attention to lyrics in any song. I didn't want to write complete nonsense, but fortunately this is rock music, where lyrics can be a little more obtuse and abstract. I gave myself permission to get lyrics to a point I could live with them and then move on. Otherwise, I would've been stuck in this phase FOREVER!

OK, now we're done! Again, no, now I have to re-record all the instruments FOR REAL and this happens to be my least favorite part of recording. Read about this arduous process...