I Wasn't Trying to Make an Album. Then Scars in the Silence Happened.

I wasn't trying to make a new album. Then Scars in the Silence happened, and here's how that shit happened.

I try not to put too much personal information into these blogs because I don't know who reads them. Friends, strangers, people I haven't spoken to in years, or people just looking for something to talk about. But then again, at the same time, I don't really give a fuck. Because once you start realizing what the truth of a situation might actually be, sometimes holding that shit inside bothers you more than putting it out there. And that's pretty much where this album started.

Through a lot of thought, conversation, and going back and forth over things that happened throughout my life, I started looking at one particular situation differently. We're talking about more than 20 years here, and sometimes you don't see something when you're standing right in the middle of it. You have to get away from it. Then you start pulling apart the knots. You start remembering conversations. You remember who said what about whom. You think about decisions you made, people you stopped talking to, people you kept talking to, and advice you were given. Eventually you start wondering: How much of my life was actually being influenced by somebody else?

That's a fucked up question to ask yourself after more than two decades.

So I decided to test something. I reached out to somebody I hadn't spoken to in months. Nothing crazy. Basically, Hey, how have you been? Sorry I haven't been around. Life has been fucking crazy. Are you alive? Are you dead? I don't even know anymore. I got one response. "I'm alive and well," basically. And that was it. No real interest in what was happening with me. No continuation of the conversation. The rest of what I sent wasn't even read.

Okay. Whatever.

Except almost immediately, that same person reached out to somebody else involved in this whole situation, and that's what caught my attention. Because for a long time, I had been told not to talk to this other person. Don't trust them. Don't associate with them. Here's why. Here's what they did. Here's what they're really like. Except I never completely listened because I don't need a fucking mediator deciding who I'm allowed to have in my life. If I've got a problem with somebody, I want that problem to come from my experience with them, not somebody else's.

And now suddenly the person who had been telling me to stay away from somebody was trying to get back into that person's life. Interesting. That's when a lot of little pieces started fitting together. Maybe I was right about everything. Maybe I wasn't. But it made me start looking backward at a lot of years of my life from a completely different angle, and that fucking hurt.

That realization sat in my head for days. Three days, four days, five fucking days. I couldn't shake it. Eventually I realized something I've known about myself for a long time: every time something gets stuck in my head badly enough, I make music out of it. That's my journal. Some people sit down with a notebook and write. Some people talk it out. Some people scream into a pillow. Apparently, I make fucking songs.

Once I turn something into music, it's outside of me. It's still mine, and the experience doesn't disappear, but now it exists somewhere besides inside my fucking head. Sometimes people hear one of those songs and relate to it because they've lived through something completely different that made them feel exactly the same way. That's probably my favorite part about music. You don't have to know exactly who or what I'm talking about. Maybe you're not supposed to.

So I went into the program I'd been using to make music and tried turning all of this into a song. And it sounded like shit. Not necessarily bad music, but it wasn't my music. It was too dancey. It was too far away from what I was hearing in my head. No matter what I tried, I couldn't get the sound I wanted.

Instead of forcing it, we started looking around. I canceled that membership, tried a completely different music platform, and started over. Then the first generation came out.

Holy. Fucking. Shit.

After almost a year of working with the other program, the first song this thing generated sounded better than anything I'd been able to get before. I listened again, then again. We tried a couple of versions, but I kept coming back to that first one. Sometimes you can spend all fucking day trying to improve something and eventually realize you already fucking had it.

That song became The Space Between Us.

That's where Scars in the Silence actually began. The Space Between Us is about that entire situation. There's more than one perspective represented in it. There's more than one relationship behind it. There are years of shit buried inside it. But there aren't names, and there don't need to be. The people who know may understand exactly what I'm talking about. Everybody else can hear it however it relates to their own life. That's exactly how I want it.

Here's the weird part, though: Scars in the Silence wasn't actually new. I had already announced this album last August. I put it out there that an album called Scars in the Silence was coming. The idea was simple: You want to know my story? Listen. Read between the lines. Take a seat. There's a chair waiting for you.

And then... nothing. I never made the fucking album. I couldn't. I'd already dumped so much of myself into other songs that I didn't know what else I wanted to say. I wasn't going to manufacture misery just because I had announced an album. So Scars in the Silence sat there. A title. An idea. Something I thought I'd eventually get around to.

Until The Space Between Us happened.

Suddenly, I knew what the album was.

Once that door opened, other shit started coming out. Things happening around the house. Feeling like you're carrying everything. Feeling like everybody needs something from you, but wondering who's there when you finally need somebody. And that idea wasn't completely new either. A couple of years ago I made a song called Why Me. Looking back at it now, Why Me feels almost like an earlier version of what eventually became Who Carries Me. Except time passed. Life changed. And some of the feelings didn't.

So Who Carries Me became the second piece of Scars in the Silence. It's basically asking one question: If I'm the one carrying everybody else, who the fuck carries me?

Some of what inspired that song has already changed since I wrote it. Good. That's life. A song doesn't have to describe where you are forever. Sometimes it just captures where you were on one particular night when you needed to get something the fuck out of your head.

So where is Scars in the Silence now? It's growing. I'm thinking it'll probably land somewhere around 12 to 14 songs, but I'm not rushing it. I'm not sitting down and saying, "Okay, I need Track 7 by Tuesday." Fuck that. The material comes when there's something worth saying. It takes time to figure out what you're actually feeling before you can put it on paper, and then you have to turn those words into something that actually sounds like the emotion that created them.

There are already other things sitting in my head. Some are probably songs. Some are probably blogs. Some might become both. And one of those involves something that recently happened involving Ken Urker. That's an entirely different fucking story, and probably an entirely different blog. That one is coming soon.

But I think I finally understand the album I announced more than a year ago. Scars in the Silence isn't twelve songs about one person. It's not one story, and it's not supposed to be a timeline of every shitty thing that's ever happened to me. It's a collection of things that stayed quiet for too fucking long. Things you carry. Things you question. Things you finally see differently when you're far enough away to look back.

And sometimes those things don't need to be confronted, explained, or screamed at another person. Sometimes they just need somewhere else to live.

For me, that's music.

Those are the scars. This is the silence finally making some fucking noise.

Angry Archie