A Letter.

This is a note I wrote myself, just before I started making this album:

“What does it mean to choose to live?
What does it mean to be at all?
How do we define ourselves?
The world?
These things.
How do I respect solidity and embrace change?
I’m
Going
To
Love
As
Long
As
I
Live.”

The following is what I wish to communicate to anyone who listens to this record. Hopefully, it conveys the artistic purposes of some of the choices made during the making of this body of work and further deepens your experience of it.

Making my debut Daggy Man album “A Lazy Kind Of Pain” Gave me an important foothold toward recovery from a particularly dark period of my life. The journey was far from over and having made the important first step, I found myself somewhat lost. Crowded in uncertainty and doubt, I turned to music and my alter-ego “Daggy Man” to help deconstruct and clarify the overwhelming thoughts and emotions that were at the forefront of my mind, taking over my life. Making this album was about strengthening the hope within myself and giving focus and power to the goodness and light within me. This whole experience has been about battling the consistent pull from my darker impulses and destructive inner dialogues. Playing chess with the diseased mind within me.

The album is about dissonance, brokenness, and trying to piece myself together, to find out who I was, who I am, and what I want to be. This is still a flowing journey for me to this day.

The idea of Structure played a very important role in this album. Some parts feel stagnant. The use of repetition in some songs was a conscious choice that speaks to the nature of the greater experience I’m trying to convey.

There is a purposeful avoidance of intellectual choices, of flashy, ego-driven writing. I write music because I’m trying to say something, I’m trying to reach something and I’m trying to grasp at something that’s important to me. There are some songs on this album that feel very self-conscious to me, that is not to say I remember feeling self-conscious writing them, Rather, the anxiety and uncertainty is embedded in the personality of the song itself, the way it moves, the way it hesitates, and for me that’s the ultimate goal, for this music to exist as its own entity, outside of simply my memory of making it.

The structure of the album is loosely Shaped like a day in the life of this fight to rebuild myself. The energy of the songs closely mirrors that of my daily emotive experience.

There are moments of ill temper, moments of stagnation, of routine and repetition, sluggishness, discomfort, and existential boredom. These moments are asking you to be mindful, to fight through and to get to the other side.

The songs and melodies ultimately serve as canvases for the lyrics and the STORY I’m trying to tell. Beyond their inherent meaning, I'm ultimately trying to communicate a feeling. A feeling of what it’s like to see through the eyes of this worldview.

The use of multiple voices is conveying the maddening nature of having several different dialogues going on at once, some are saying what’s happening, some are pushing the narrator forward, and telling him to have courage. Some are second-guessing themselves.

I don’t know if the album is successful outside of my own experience, that’s not for me to decide. But I set out to make something true and honest to my experience, and this is it.

I’m incredibly proud of this work and want to thank you so much for listening.

Yours,
Daggy Man.