Sleep Through the Quiet Lust: Conceptualizing the Album

This is the first in a series of posts where I will discuss the making of my 4th album. Here are links to the rest of the posts, where I discuss the process of writing and making each song:

The Making of "Cabin"

The Making of "I'm Always Watching You 3"

The Making of "Flower"

The Making of "Bodies Fall Apart"

The Making of "Poor Face"

The Making of "But When I Know Who I Am"

The Making of "I'll Be at That Point"

The Making of “Airpush Down the Stairs”

The Making of “Sleep Through the Quiet Lust”

The Making of “Theme to Being Stuck in a Dream”

The Making of “Only a Hunter”

The Making of “Hinman Park”

The Making of “June 18th”

The Making of "Gazing"

The album Sleep Through the Quiet Lust is the sequel to my first album from 2019, Requirements For Sleep. I hesitated to make music and release it because I was extremely unconfident in my abilities, but I got motivated to teach myself guitar and write songs. I had a lot of song ideas from my dreams, so I decided my first album would be a compilation of dream songs. Requirements For Sleep was an ambitious album idea that I ended up recording in only 2 weeks at age 17, with only one month of experience playing guitar. Some were imaginary songs by my favorite artists that I dreamed about them singing, like “Ekans” being a dreamt-up Sondre Lerche song, “Smart” being a dreamt-up Kate Bush song, and “Trumpet Hollow School” being an imaginary Talking Heads song. I was quite embarrassed to release something that felt so unfinished and unrealized, but some very sweet comments from my friends encouraged me to keep going. 

I still had dozens of dream songs ideas, so as early as one month after the release of Requirements For Sleep, I just knew I had to make a sequel. I started to keep a dream journal in late 2019 where I wrote about every single night’s dream in as much detail as possible. I had important, emotionally significant events from my dreams that I needed to write songs about, so this time, the lyrics of the album would be inspired by the narrative events of the dreams. 

In August 2019, I wrote my first song for the dream album, “We’ve Set Up Your Yahoo Account Now”. This was about a dream in which I discovered my Yahoo email had been created without my knowledge in the year 1980, and had received an ancient email with a very creepy image. This song ended up being way too trivial and silly for the album, so it was quickly scrapped. I never finished any demo of it. 

While writing the album, more dream song ideas popped up from day to day. Overall, during the album writing process, I had a backlog of about 70 short song ideas from my dreams that I’d recorded sleepily on my voice memos. I ended up writing my favorite 18 songs from that list, and then narrowed it down to 14.