My Heart to Heaven

Next Tuesday is the 16th. It's the release date of my bands full length album, My Heart to Heaven. This album is 4 years in the making.

I started Echo Broke Alone in the summer of 2006. It was just a renaming of my project Old Town Heroes. I was looking to go in a new direction musically and needed a new name for the transition. In the fall of 06 I recorded an album called Lost in Paris. The original goal with Echo Broke Alone was to be a shoegaze outfit, in the vain of My Bloody Valentine ands Slowdive. So I recorded an album and in the mix phase I had decided I didn't like the album. The songs were subpar and not really in a musical direction that I was thrilled with. So I threw the entire out except for the title track, Lost in Paris.

Lost in Paris musically was very sweeping and grand. It had a lot of reverb and delay and had a Slowdive feel to it. And that was the song I intended to base my new writing direction in. So I started to write an album.

The album remained titled Lost in Paris for a year or so longer while I was writing. While I was writing the album I started to really get into John Cage, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass. I started reading John Cage. I started to explore ambient music more. I started paying around with reverb and delays and looping. And the music slowly took on a new shape. I wrote the song Something Beautiful and somewhere along the line that became the name of the album. Lost in Paris still had a place on the record but it didn't fit as a title anymore. I continued to write and work on music and even performed with a bass player for a couple of months. The music was moving in a weird ambient, post rock, Philip Glass world, and it was exciting.

But I had a perspective shift. And the idea of recording an album was weighing heavily on me. It wasn't that I didn't want people to hear what I was doing musically but the dynamics and the way things were put together didn't fit recording an album. Everything was spontaneous and a beautiful chaotic mess that putting it to tape and saying this is how these songs sound seemed so wrong to me. This was art. This was performance art and having it captured and having a representation that wouldn't be true to what it was didn't sit well with me. And I had decided to again, shelve making that record.

So I started working on ambient drones. I was listening to a lot of Stars of the Lid and decided to hang up my guitar for a while and sit at the keyboard and compose a drone based album called My Heart to Heaven. The title of the album and the idea for the drones were to have them be companion pieces to poems I'd written about my struggle with God and spirituality. About halfway through the writing process for My Heart to Heaven I decided to not have it be a ep but to make My Heart to Heaven a full-length album that would contain the drones I had been working on and to go ahead and record the songs that had been written for Something Beautiful.

My Heart to Heaven never got recorded... Not in that form anyway. The drone pieces didn't feel right with the music I had written for Something Beautiful and I took a pause. I had decided to record the songs and continue writing My Heart to Heaven. To make an album. But I had decided to work on ep first. Just so Echo Broke Alone would have something to show for, other then a handful a crappy demos on myspace.

So I began work on Heart Condition. Heart Condition took shape really fast. It probably took me 5 days to write and record the album. I had taken a bunch of concept photos for a flyer for the first Echo Broke Alone show and one that didn't get used I used for the Heart Condition cover. I honestly had no intent recording that album. Just to put down a bunch of new songs, that would tell a story and stand on their own as a body of work. I did use Something Beautiful, adding some cello and violin to the guitar tracks (I had recorded the guitar track at least a year earlier). And when I listened to Heart Condition I was proud of it. It was short and simple. I'm very proud of that ep. It was something I'd never done and until I had started writing, had never even considered doing.

That album came out in February of 09. My goal was to then start My Heart to Heaven, and record that in ernest for a fall release, possibly summer if I buckled down. And I didn't. There was always something with the songs that didn't seem to be quite what I wanted.

The first song written for My Heart to Heaven was The Speechless Heart. I was fooling around on the guitar one day and came up with the chord progression. I didn't want to forget it, so I set up a mic and recored the track. Played the chord progression once through, got it to my loop station and record the "lead" line over top (what you hear on the album is me playing it for the first time). I threw a little reverb on the guitar, recorded some cello and was done.

To Fall Asleep in Your Arms was the second song actually written for the album. I wrote and recorded a demo version one night over the summer. Just two chords, a lead line, and a lot of reverb.

Out of To Fall Alseep in Your Arms came Save Me a Sinner. Save Me a Sinner is one chord, drench in reverb, played backwards, and a lot of e-bow love. The idea was that the reverb could drown away whatever musicality the chords had because I was going for a sound more then a song.

All That's Left is Broken was only one of two songs record in parts. Every other song on the album, all the guitar parts were played at the same time. I tuned my guitar down to C. Played two chords from an Old Town Heroes song. Went back and recorded the lead line over top of the base chords. Did a little e-bow and fades at the beginning and end of the track. Added cello sometime later.

My Heart to Heaven I recorded one night on a whim. I had a chord progression in mind, and it was kind of a song I had written when I was writing Something Beautiful but it didn't really work with what I had recorded so far. So I added a ton of reverb to take away any distinction in the chords. There's a lot of weird things happening on this track but I love it. It's just one guitar.

The rest of the album I recorded one day while I was on vacation in September. I had three songs and in two hours knocked them out. I rerecorded Something Beautiful, making it slightly slower and giving it more reverb. The last two tracks on the album, To Small For This World, Yet Not Small Enough and I Have Yet to See Life on The Other Side of the Looking Glass are both hold over songs from when I was writing Something Beautiful (the album). To Small For This World was a more upbeat song with a grooving bass line and strong kick drum backbeat. I removed those, added reverb (because you can never had too much reverb) and record cello.

I Have Yet to See Life as recorded has more reverb but is basically in tack from when it was written. I had intended to just leave this songs as recorded, one guitar, very ambient. But the second half of the song seemed very blank and when I played it live I did a lead guitar part that I went back and recorded and then recorded drums with that. Giving it a fuller sound.

So the album was finally finished. 4 years in the making I had the music recorded.

The album art work was done by a talented young artist named Jenni Tousignaut. The concept for the artwork was an idea I had when I first decided to do My Heart To Heaven. She did a great job and I'm thrilled with her work.

I'm really proud of My Heart To Heaven and if it took 4 years to come up with something this good that I can be proud of then it was worth the wait. It'll be available online next week and physical copies will be available for those that want one. I can't wait for you guys to hear the album.