Lost in Sleep is the moment in the dream when the night ceases to have a linear progression, and the dawn starts getting further away. Past and present mix, becoming indistinguishable - and one forgets that waking up at the end is a certainty.
Production notes:
I recorded and mixed this myself in Reaper. I used several different electric guitars through a mic'd up Blackstar HT-5R amp. (Although in a few instances I used the DI out) The guitar effects are all from a Boss GT-6. The bass is a P-bass through the DI out of a Behringer Ultrabass BX2000h amp. The vocals, accoustic guitar and upright piano were recorded with a Sampson C03 condenser mic. The synths are done with a slightly dodgy Alesis Micron. The drums are programmed with an Alesis SR-18 drum machine.
This album was a long time in production, and the tracks have deep roots. Midnight and Back to Yesterday began in the murky days of the pandemic, going through many different iterations over the following four years. Both channel various anxieties into a mix of softer melodic sections that grow into heavier, driving rock numbers, and I didn't know what to do with them at first so they remained perpetually on the back burner. Eventually I sensed the rough shape of what I wanted from Lost in Sleep, and then I began to look for other components.
In line with the themes of the project, I looked into the past- I had a number of songs that had a solid foundation but were underserved by my musical ability at the time of initial production. Having an inkling of what I needed, two songs stood out as the obvious candidates.
The Storm Outside is about a decade old and A World Beyond is even older, and both were heavily retooled from the ground up for this project.
A World Beyond was a much earlier, jammy interation of the soft/heavy variation I enjoy, but with a more meandering structure. Perfect for the journey into a dream! The Storm Outside is by far the shortest and most accoustic song on the album, I knew I wanted to use it as it provided a) a change of pace from the songs so far, and b) the turning point, thematically, of the album - illustrating a moment of clarity and apprehension in a strange place - and the realisation of being lost!
With four songs I had a fairly clear picture of the overall structure I wanted, but it was incomplete. I tried various ideas but nothing seemed to really work, so the project went on the back burner again and I gave my energy of the moment to the songs that happened incidentally. And then, a discovery happened like a mosquito in amber - the final major piece of the puzzle turned up unexpectedly!
Morning Calling is a ressurection of one of the first songs I ever wrote in 2008, and uploaded to myspace. It lay forgotten and presumed lost, until it's fossilised remains were discovered on a hard drive in 2024. Despite the crude state of the original, I knew it was right for filling the last big gap in Lost in Sleep - the ending. It was heavily recontstructed using the original as a blueprint. It still bears some resemblance to it's original form, but has undergone a significant evolution while still keeping the vibe of the old one.
Nearly complete, but not quite, the album sat while I tweaked the mix for several months, trying to figure out what final touch it still needed. I eventually realised that I wanted a space where the structure breaks down, like when a fever dream starts to lose cohesion - both as a spacer between the two last songs and as an extra bit of variety in the overall sonic texture of the album. Thus I abused a guitar and then set to work chopping up and warping the output to make the ambient drone track Void, and voila! Lost in Sleep was done. All but the album cover. I spent quite a few nights taking silly pictures of myself posing with a sheep's skull Hamlet style in a variety of overly dramatic light. Nothing quite did it for me until I protographed several of the images on my PC monitor through a chunk of opalite held up to the lens of my phone, then composited them together, played around with the composition and colour and threw in a pic of the moon I'd taken a few years earlier til I got something I liked. Then the framing - I wanted the art to reflect the tone of the album- dark bits, but with flowery language and quite a lot of nature metaphors. Ergo, gothic text for the title, and art-noveau inspired wiggly bits for the border.
Lost in Sleep was fun to make, and I'm glad I took my time with it.