DAR – Solitude Of Mind {FULL EP}

0:00 A World Gone Mad
1:18 Hard Crash
5:41 Subterfuge
10:28 Rally Cry
12:38 Change Destiny

So this is where it all started; the big turning point in my music journey!

As mentioned in one of the previous vid descriptions, its time to talk about the backstory and importance of this EP. If not for this EP, this channel and all of its covers probably wouldn’t exist. I’d probably still be recording a song idea here and there, but nothing complete.

For this story, we’ve got to go back to sometime in 2013. Things were pretty rough back in the late-2000’s and early-2010’s. However, while going through all of that, playing my keyboard and my guitar served as my relief.

However after a few years of feeling like I was totally stuck and not going anywhere, I began to question if there was any point to my hobbies. For a while, I began to wonder if music and my other creative hobbies were just a waste of time.

I had hundreds of various little short song ideas at the time (somewhere around 250-300), but nothing really fully fleshed out. For a bit, I contemplated putting music on the backburner, thinking that maybe my time would be better spent indulging in some other hobby. A couple of close friends at the time had encouraged me to not give up on music, so I stuck with it.

However, I decided that it was time to finally make something happen. Though at the time, I didn’t think a solo musician would garner much interest. I believed that I needed to be part of some band to hopefully reach more people.

After going through a huge amount of band ads, I finally came across one listing for one particular online band project. Up to this point, I had also been doing a bunch of research and had plans laid out for where to post songs and other stuff. I wanted to be ready and able to have good info to help out any group I wound up being a part of.

So in early 2014, I teamed up with a nice gal and dude, and we were going to do a bunch of pop-punk stuff. Now, while they were friendly, they were awful at getting any progress done. They wanted to be a band without actually putting in any effort. For two months, I was the one doing the majority of the work. I was handling the production, drums, guitars, mixing, and composition.

For a bit, the one dude kept missing meetup times online, and so it was just me and the singer. I figured I’d tough it out and try and make this all work, as I thought she had a nice voice.

For those 2 months, I dealt with shoddy recordings (our singer recorded with her laptop mic, bassist mic’d his bass cab with his webcam, etc.), and playing tech support for those two (they had absolutely no idea how to record and send the correct files). Its quite funny, on one occasion, the singer couldn’t even stop herself from taking selfies while recording some vocal tracks. I still have it somewhere, you can clearly hear the camera shutter sound in the take…

After those couple of months, I log in one day and see a new message in the group chat, and it was the singer basically telling us she’s quitting and that we needed to find a new singer.

That was the last straw, I uninstalled Skype (only used it specifically for this) and was like “the hell with that!”

Instead of being disheartened and defeated, I was mad and salty! I was doing all of the work here and these two couldn’t even be bothered to take this at least a little seriously! Then I realized, “wait, **I** was doing all the work.”

I took everything that I had learned and decided to give things one more shot. I was going to make something all by myself, I didn’t worry anymore about how many people it would reach. This was something I wanted to and had to prove to myself.

After putting things on hold for a bit (wound up moving and got a much needed change of scenery), I was finally able to sit down and get crackin after unpacking some stuff.

I wound up changing a lot of things in my process, like my guitar tone and drums (among several other things). I wound up making Hard Crash shortly after finding my new tone.

I quickly wrote and recorded the 3 other original tracks and even used what I learned from art stuff to draw up the cover art for SoM. I drew up my (old) signature logo and slapped it on there and was really proud of the whole thing. I finally found “my sound” and I didn’t even mind not having any following. I was now having a lot of fun playing pretend-rockstar over here!

Then one thing led to another, made a couple more albums, and then I made the covers channel, and… here we are now!

In retrospect, the tracks in here are all pretty “hopeful-sounding”, despite the dystopian theme of SoM. I think the hopeful vibe came through as a reflection of my hopefulness to finally make something at the time. Never thought about it like that until writing all this.

Anyways, hope you all found this interesting, and hope you all enjoy this remake of Solitude Of Mind! ~DAR

Bandcamp: https://davester2296.bandcamp.com/album/solitude-of-mind

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