The Total Sound Of The Undergound

Lelahel Metal

Forged through profound personal loss and decades of creative persistence, Nothing Is Easy is Impulse Nine’s deeply emotional, genre-blending debut—music for your personal apocalypse, and a testament to enduring grief with hope.

1. “Music for your personal apocalypse” is a striking tagline. What does that phrase mean to you personally, and how does it encapsulate this record?

This record was marked by the passing of all of my parental figures: My mother, father, and stepfather, in addition to a friend 5 years younger who
died of heart sudden failure, and a few pets for good measure. It occurred to me early on in life that there are three possibilities when it comes to the question, “who dies first, the parent or the child?” The child could die before the parents. This is universally and correctly recognized as tragic. They could all go out at the same time in some spectacular, newsworthy accident. A plane crash, perhaps. Or, the best of bad options, the parents go first. So despite my grief, this was the way it was “supposed” to happen.

And so: If there is one thing we are going to experience besides our own deaths, its that of our parents’. And yet look around: There is no preparation for this in society. It emotionally destroys people constantly. And at least in America, there is very little talk about these personal tragedies. Miscarriages, illnesses, accidents, pets; it’s all tucked neatly behind masks of civility with the tears leaking out from behind. During COVID, I was an absolute monster about my father’s struggles in the hospital. He received incredible care due to being a combat veteran (which is more than most Americans can say). It took him 9 months in the hospital before he died, but during much of that time we got to reconnect. I’m grateful for that time.

So my personal apocalypse was this and the similar processes that took my other parents (and pets, and friend), and this album is my way of making it clear that everyone struggles with this. People aren’t alone, in our grief or the daily struggles to exist in the midst of it.

2. Nothing Is Easy is the result of more than two decades of musical exploration. What finally convinced you that now was the time to finish and release a full album?

My mom diagnosed herself with pancreatic cancer. We got a definite terminal diagnosis on the day after Election Day in 2016. I dearly hope that remains my worst day ever. My mom was infinitely supportive; almost too much so.

(A quick tangent on that: Her support was so unequivocal and unconditional that it had a bit of a backfiring effect: I simply don’t believe people who say they like my music. (Doubly so if, forgive me, I have paid them.) I know that I like it a great deal; I listen to my own album regularly because I think it’s great. But I also know that everyone connects with different music differently, and I don’t have a problem with that. Anyone who feels music deeply is doing it right, whether it’s the most banal Katy Perry song, the most ridiculously inscrutable technical jazz number, or a difficult 13-hour nosie/ambient tape-dissolution concept piece. Maybe that will be my album for someone.)

After a series of bad experiences trying for a music composition major in college that can be summed up as, “academics don’t like pop music, and pop music is anything they don’t like,” I had been telling myself I was going to make an album, on my own, that was professional-quality, and great. And I messed around with my guitar for years and years, making little musical doodles. But it turns out, if you just jog around a track for 15 minutes a day, you never actually become able to run a 5-minute mile. The Ramones never suddenly were able to play like Van Halen after playing power chords for 40 years. And I wasn’t able to write songs after making little loops and lazy things for years. And yet I convinced myself that, eventually, I would get around to it.

And then, not six months into retirement, my mom was dead, and the one project that I was going to show her where we both thought it was really good … she wasn’t going to hear.

So I had a choice: Either make the album I had promised myself I was going to make, or not, and be happy doodling. There wasn’t anything inherently wrong with it. I didn’t make the decision instantly. I carefully considered what software was available: Could I make the symphonic sounds I had always wanted? The drums? Could I afford a really good computer to handle it? Had I gotten to a point in my life where I could mentally handle the inevitable mental beating of the ups and downs?

I was listening to Taylor Swift, as one does. There’s a song called The Archer, from the album Lover. I love 99% of the song, and at the very end, for emotional emphasis the song just ends. I found it infuriating. I hated it. (And, I should note that in this way, it is very a successful ending, if her aim was for it to be emotionally jarring; I’m still talking about it years later.) I thought to myself: What?! Why didn’t you just write an ending? You have infinite songwriters! You’re a good songwriter! I could do better!!

And a voice in my head said, “Yeah? Prove it.”

It took over five years even from then, but eventually, I did write that album.

3. The album is purely instrumental, yet deeply emotional. What advantages did you find in telling this story without lyrics?

“Words make you think thoughts. Music makes you feel a feeling. But a song makes you feel a thought.”
             — Yip Harburg

First, let’s not pretend that I wrote an instrumental album because I chose not to write lyrics; I hate writing lyrics. There is exactly one published Impulse Nine song with lyrics, Resist!, and it was a Valentine’s Day present. But nonetheless there is storytelling with the songs. Oddly, though, they were telling stories before I realized it myself. My wife pointed it out. I had started picking my final list of songs that I would be working on for the album, and she noted the song titles: A Wake, I’m Sorry About Your Everything, It Might Be Fine (But I Just Don’t Know)... they brimmed over with anxiety. I had named them based on how I felt when I was writing them, and that was that.

As the songwriting came together, those feelings crystallized into more specific things. It Might Be Fine was about the surreality of day-to-day tasks while one enormous thing looms over your life (in my case, the sudden loss of a job because of a hideously incompetent executive). The ideas became clearer, and it guided decisions about the tempo, stress levels, tone, and so on. They became surprisingly specific in some cases, and it helped relieve me of songwriting decision fatigue. 

4. You mentioned recording in places like parks, hospitals, and even during funerals. How did these locations shape the feel or energy of specific tracks?

One of the big decisions I had to make before fully committing to making this album was whether I was able to invest in the hardware I needed, and one of the big-ticket items was not just a home computer, but I also wanted to be able to have a laptop that could work on the same projects during lunch or on trips. I save all of my projects directly to Dropbox, and the DAW I use, Reaper, has no issues as long as everything is in the same folders. Plugins are the big issue; they have to be installed on both machines, and the licensing has to allow for at least two seats, and also not be an enormous pain in the ass in general.

This has taken quite a lot of trial and error, but in general, I have it down to a setup where I can record at home, go to work, and during my lunch break, if the laptop has had time to download everything, I can be up and editing in a quiet spot in 3 minutes (I timed it), and have everything put away and in the backpack in 120 seconds.

This came in handy both for nice places and for terrible places. I should note, I wasn’t editing during any funerals. But I definitely was doing a lot of work in hotels immediately before and after, when I needed to clear my head a bit. There were also plenty of times when my dad was in the hospital—he was in the hospital for 9 months before he died—but was asleep or was being attended to, so I had my computer. Unfortunately in those earlier days, I was still mostly just trying to get things to work instead of getting anything done, which felt like a metaphor for what we were doing in the hospital with dad’s health.

But I’ve also taken it to very nice places. I particularly like being on the college campus, sitting in the grass, with all the students and faculty buzzing around, but paradoxically placid in my little spot. Tucson may have a well-deserved reputation for heat, but there are large stretches where it’s 72°F and sunny at 2pm every day.

5. Several songs are linked to family members who passed away. Can you share the story behind “Heavy Metal Mama” and its unique personal and symbolic significance?

In 2017, his mother died of pancreatic cancer. I grieved for myself and, frankly, the world; she was a force to be reckoned with and had just retired. I was really looking forward to what she was going to do to the world. Barely 5' and made of sunshine but with a backbone of steel, she joined the Navy Nurse Corps at age 40; when she went to Combat Medical School with recruits half her age, they had no uniform for her size. A framed photo of her, beaming, looking like a kid in an oversized costume with her helmet askew hangs in my house. An illustration of that photo is the first single for the album (made by my music friend Kid Without Curfew), and is named after her: Heavy Metal Mama. (She didn't actually like heavy metal, but she loved all of my songs regardless.) She became a Lt. Colonel, and was the officer on duty on 9/11 at her hospital in Okinawa. Her superiors were her son’s age and a foot taller than her. She didn't care. They were all her kids. They had no idea what to do with that woman. No one did. And she was gone, not 6 months into retirement.

The riff itself is very old. The first recording that I have date metadata is from 2007, but I am pretty sure I came up with it long before then. It was the perfect example of the kind of demo that had been plaguing my songwriting from the beginning: An interesting idea that went nowhere. 20 seconds of audio that just repeated variations forever, but weren’t really songs. I had hundreds of demos like that—days of music, if you put it all into one long playlist. So completing Heavy Metal Mama became a kind of white whale. If I finally caught that one, I might be able to finish a whole album.

This song went through an absolutely absurd number of revisions (see the screenshot). I kept about 60 versions of the demos, but there were many more more saved versions gradations inbetween. It came together essentially through attrition. I just kept bashing at it until it relented. The decisions got smaller and smaller until it was done. It helped that over time, I was getting better at production. Early on, I just wasn’t able to create the big, roaring sound that I always loved.

6. “Shadow Over Johnny Ringo’s Grave” is a cinematic epic with Spaghetti Western and Radiohead influences. What was the songwriting journey like for that particular track?

While Heavy Metal Mama was a brutal slog of attrition, Shadow Over Johnny Ringo’s Grave had a moment of clarity that really helped my entire songwriting process. The Muse song Knights of Cydonia is a great song, but it’s pretty unique with its Spaghetti Western + Hard Rock combination, and I always wanted to hear more songs like it. So I decided to just … make another song like it. That was the first thing I gave myself permission to “take.” 

I had an intro that I really liked, and I had a chorus that I really liked, but I wanted a good buildup to it and was stuck. I decided to borrow from a second source: the climax of Exit Music for A Film by Radiohead. I ended up having to change it substantially, but at 1:11 in the song, imagine singing “wis – dom – choke – youuuuuu” and you might hear it. The final section, borrows chord ideas from Moby’s Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad? Opening myself up to being directly inspired by others like this helped things immensely. I can now point at a huge number of bits and pieces of my album that come directly from specific inspirations, even though they sound very little like their source, and certainly are not recognizable as part of the potpourri of the new material. The remainder is influenced by fellow Arizonans like Calexico and Big Sand.

The song title and the initial idea come from a Pokemon Go excursion to the actual site of Ringo’s grave. He may or may not have haunted some of my friends who came along—that’s a story for them to tell.

7. You’ve been open about ADHD and past creative hurdles. How did those challenges shape your process, and what advice would you give to other neurodivergent musicians?

I was taking a piano class in college, and after taking a piano test for which I had been studying very hard, the professor noted that I had done very well except for the fact that I had played 16th notes instead of eighth notes throughout the entire piece. When she asked why, obviously. I didn’t really understand what ADHD was or that I had it, so I just said that I thought that it sounded better, but it was because my mind had simply substituted what it expected for what was there.This is great if you want to improvise or write music, but it is awful if you want to be in an assembly: You’re constantly and correctly paranoid that your own brain has lied about what you just saw.

So, part of my advice is to pick your battles: Be aware of your strengths and weaknesses. I was never going to be an excellent rote performer, but I have had a lot of fun writing and composing. (That’s not to say that you can’t be  an excellent ensemble musicians with ADHD, there are lots of people who are, but that is how I experience it.)

Second is routines, and finding ways to stick to them. It’s amazing how much better things go when you can put some things on autopilot. I especially like routine stacking; you can look that up, but basically it is just trying to develop one small routine at a time, and building it up slowly rather than trying to have a Big Massive Thing That Will Definitely Fix Everything (and you’ll fail because it’s too big). Routines help people with ADHD not be distracted by every last little thing.

Lastly, do not put up with people who don’t like your vibe. I am a lot; I talk a lot, I know a lot, and not everybody can handle my level of excitement about everything. That’s OK! You’re going to screw up a bunch of social interactions because you have odd questions and strange perspectives. Just be honest about it, come at it from a place of good faith, and move on if people aren’t moving with you. You’ll eventually find people who can keep up. It’s hard. Keep at it. We’re out here.

8. There was a failed attempt at building a live band in 2024. What did that experience teach you about collaboration, leadership, or even creative control?

First off, do not try to create a live band with 13 people at the same time straight out of the gate. That’s too many. I should have just rearranged the songs for a smaller band.

Second, just because someone agrees to do something doesn’t mean they’ll do it. It’s very hard to differentiate the sinking feeling in your stomach from a general fear of creative abandonment from a real and accurate sense that you’re dealing with someone who’s not going to show up for you. But if you’re dealing with someone who is enthusiastically present, that won’t be a problem, and even though that’s very hard to find, my experience so far is that you just kinda have to keep looking until you’ve found someone to work with who’s excited, and not just-barely willing to do something for money.

9. The album blends shoegaze, hard rock, post-rock, and even ambient textures. How do you balance those genre shifts without losing cohesion?

I wish I had a good answer for you that was more specific. I can tell you that as a general rule, I sought to have a high amount of contrast throughout the album. I was constantly seeking new and interesting ways to have contrast. The most obvious contrasts are in volume, louder and softer and tempo, faster and slower. But there’s also contrasts in texture (distortion or clean), instrumentation (guitars vs. piano), organic-ness (synths vs natural sounds), modes (major vs minor), the size of the intervallic jumps in the melody (just a few close notes in one section, and huge jumps in the next), how quickly the chords change, the overall average pitch (removing the bass or treble for a little while, for example). This was especially important in songs like Heat where I wanted to have a song that never lets up the high-tempo, high-octane feel, but still needs contrast throughout or it will feel stagnant within a minute.

10. You’ve described the production process as meticulous and layered, with “thousands of takes.” At what point do you know a track is truly finished?

I found that as a song progresses, decisions get smaller and smaller, until they become pretty arbitrary. So for example, if I’ve decided that the structure should be ABABCA, I have to write those sections. It’s a little arbitrary, but some of this is arbitrary. And then once those sections are written, I need to connect them, and once they’re connected there's some mixing to be done, etc.. Of course, every so often you’ll find yourself thinking, “this is really just not working at all,” and decide to back up a couple steps. That happens, and that’s okay. For newer material, I’ve gotten much better about having a clear idea of what I want to do from the beginning, whereas the songs on this album didn’t have that at all. I’m really looking forward to being able to get songs done in far more reasonable numbers of takes and times.

11. “Hope is Punk” is a bold and refreshing sentiment in a world so often defined by cynicism. How does hope factor into Nothing Is Easy, despite its grief-laden backstory?

Being optimistic is hard work. There’s a kind of dogged determination required to keep making things better, even in the face of a world determined to find new and exciting ways to sap that optimism.

A lot of the album was written during times of deep grief, moving forward while feeling ridiculous: How can one do the laundry when there are funerals to attend? How can one worry about getting some electronic gadget to work when there’s some new constitutional crisis going on?

I actually put that onto a sticker that I give away; I’m happy to send it to people who want it and will take care of the postage.

12. Now that Nothing Is Easy is complete and about to be released, what’s next for Impulse Nine—musically, emotionally, or personally?

There is another album right around the corner (before the winter), two more singles, and most likely an ambient album after that. It’s all mostly-written. But I went into this with the intent to do one album “right” with singles and promotion and so on, and then to give myself permission to walk away from the musician promotion cycle if I didn’t like it.

And … I don’t. I don’t like the algorithms, I don’t like the promotion, I don’t like that the vast majority of people scroll away from a video that I spent 4 hours working on within 2 seconds. I think it’s insane that I am expected to put in a time ratio of 14,400:1 in order to not be heard. So, no. I’m quitting after this unless a record label or promotions company or whatever decides they can help me sell enough records to pay themselves commission on it.

To be clear, I’m going to keep making music. I’m very excited about that. NOTHING IS EASY was an exercise in solo work, and I never want to do that again as a rule. Future work will be collaborative quite often. But as far as the promotion and all that? No way. I’ll occasionally post on whatever social media platforms that the psychotic billionaires who own them permit me to, but only when I feel like it. Anyone who actually likes the music would be advised to join my mailing list.

impulse nine – mostly-instrumental blend of post-rock, shoegaze, hard rock, alt rock, and whatever other genres fall into the mix.

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