premiere: Sun Cop - Golden Son (feat. Cadien Lake James)

// Letters to YVYNYL //

premiere: Midnight Garden - Something Blue

 / Everyone who puts their focus and energy into creating something bigger finds that the roads they chose change corse in ways they never imagined, and sometimes those roads lead right back to where they started. Chicago’s Nick Donlin wrote me about this experience with his collaborator San Diego’s Zach Vouga.

Good evening, Mark, 

We hope this letter finds you and your readers well. It’s cold and rainy here. The seasons are changing. Something about this change effects me subconsciously for sure. It puts me in transition mode, gets me ready for the next thing, and gives me an opportunity to reflect on the past.

Zach and I met in high school. Sort of weird kids, and where we grew up the weird kids did drugs and made music. Not that abnormal really. We were each working on separate projects at the time and I think each of those projects and hit some sort of lull. I don’t know, it was just the right moment to try and work together on something. We called ourselves Glitter Bones. We experimented around for the next couple years, releasing a couple of EP’s and playing super hot and crowded house parties in Chicago and opening for some sweet people around the city. For whatever reason, as life tends to just happen, we parted ways. Zach moved across the country to San Diego and I moved back home. I think of these as sort of the soul searching years, doing a lot of growing up or whatever.

Around a year ago I was working on the rough draft of what would eventually become the song Time. It just sounded to me like Zach should play on it, so I emailed him the basic tracks I had recorded for it. I felt it was kind of an experiment. Like, could we write music together without being in the same room? We got pretty excited about the song, so we wrote another. It turned out to be a great formula. Rather than like writing a whole record and then going into the studio, the recording and writing processes went hand in hand. I’ve always loved records where you could tell the band sort of used the studio as an instrument. So we kept writing, and piece by piece it came together. It’s kind of cool to have the freedom to let the record evolve naturally in such a way.

We decided to call ourselves Midnight Garden. While it definitely felt like we were picking up where we left off with Glitter Bones in some ways, the time apart also made it feel like something new and fresh to us. Midnight Garden is sort of a feeling. Like the way night life makes you feel, or a chilling on a porch late on a summer night kind of thing. I don’t know, I hope other people hear it and think about their own thing.

I said before that the time Zach and I spent apart before sort of reconnecting was a time of growing up and soul searching. Our songs are definitely about that. Lots of self reflection, songs about love, and relationships. Big life stuff. There’s some storytelling mixed in there too. I think all that stuff is better left up to the listener to figure out for themselves though. I just know that for me, writing music helps me get things off my chest, so I think a lot of the songs are about working through something.

This past summer, Zach and I finished up our debut record Ruined and decided to put it up on our various social media outlets, Spotify, Apple Music, etc. It took nearly a year of this back and forth writing and recording to finish the record. It may not have gotten the exposure or attention we wanted, but in the grand scheme of things that doesn’t matter that much. Some people heard it and loved it and shared it with their friends and that’s really what we’re after. Connection through something pleasurable.

Since we don’t really have an opportunity to tour right now, we are always in writing mode. This can be a good and bad thing. Sometimes we write things without any sort of clear direction of where this material might end up. As I mentioned earlier, we’ve been writing music together in some form or another for the past six years. YVYNYL even premiered a music video for us during the Glitter Bones days, so I can’t really tell you how many of these songs we’ve written that have gotten lost in the cracks of time. Songs that didn’t make it past the transition to something new.

As soon as we released Ruined, we were already writing new things. It’s sort of a trial and error process to find the sound that feels right. We decided this time it’d be interesting to share a couple of these songs rather than lose them forever. Something Blue is one of those songs. It’s one that we’re really excited about, but just don’t know if it’s the direction we’re looking for when feeling out the next record. So I hope people can listen to it and get excited about what’s coming next and hopefully we can share some information about that soon.

I think we just really love making music together and want to share our experience with as many people as possible.

Peace,

Nick & Zach

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premiere: Gregory Uhlmann - It’s Not Your Fault

Greg tells me “the lyrical content [of this song] is mostly me being nostalgic about Chicago (my hometown) and more specifically, walking along Lake Michigan in the winter with a significant other as a teenager. Also, it’s more generally about how often we blame ourselves and others for things we/they can’t help.”

It makes sense as he continues, that “musically the song was very much inspired by Jeff Tweedy’s songwriting and it seemed to make sense topically with all the imagery of Chicago (in my head at least).“ Certainly sounds like it.