If you clicked on this link, it's because you are interested in learning more about my solo music project Dude and the missing rugs. I started working on this project probably a decade or more ago, when I was living in Bremerton, Washington and going to open mic nights every week. I eventually changed the name of my solo project to Dude and the missing rugs and took a break from making music to go to college and graduate school.
After taking a long hiatus from music, when the pandemic hit I started looking for creative outlets. I was encouraged to get the stuff to do home recording, and I invested some bread in a Scarlett 2i2 interface, a copy of Logic Pro and a used M1 Macbook Pro, and started making music.
You can find it on all sorts of platforms, including iHeartRadio, Apple Music, and YouTube Music. Although the best place you can go to get my music would be bandcamp, a platform that gives me more dough per sale than anywhere else. Or, it would in the world where someone wanted to pay for my music.
If you want to follow on social media, you can find me on Youtube, or Tiktok.
I decided to make all this music instrumental. Writing lyrics and getting a recording of my voice was the part of making music that I liked the least, and so for this project I decided to just not do it. When I released the first few songs, I didn't know anything about engineering the sound. After spending months working on a secret project, I realized that I had no choice but to teach myself how to mix and master the music. Clearly I have a long way to go, but I think the quality has improved from my initial recordings. You can go back and listen to the older stuff from 2021 and decide for yourself.
You may have noticed that I don't have my music on Spotify. I agree with Neil Young and others who are critical of the platform provided by Spotify to people like Joe Rogan. Also, releasing on Spotify slows down the process for a number of reasons. First, you are encouraged to only release singles and not records. You can only submit one track to playlists, but if you release a four singles you have four chances to be added to lists. You also have to submit the song at least two weeks before release, but further ahead is better. If you manage to get on a playlist, you have a much better chance of growing on that platform and getting more streams. However, I do not like making music that way. I prefer to do concept albums designed around an idea or two.
For example, my last two records have included zero guitar. Everything before that point usually had three guitars and a bass. Because I wanted to force myself to be creative with a limited range, and being inspired by one of my favorite bands who also restricted their sound (shouts to The Magnetic Fields), I thought it would be a fun challenge to make an EP with no guitar. Then I thought it would be even more fun to restrict the beats per minute and make an entire record at 120 bpm. That record is now out on all the platforms I stream, including Apple music
Anyway, if you are interested in learning about my songwriting process, I suggest heading over to my YouTube channel where I've got a handful of videos that talk about music theory, some of my inspirations, and more. I took AP Music Theory in high school and watched some TikToks about it, and otherwise it's just been the result of twenty or so years of thinking about things and messing around.
One last note about the project. Like Harry Nilsson, I am not going to be doing any of this music live. I cannot play all the parts at the same time, and if I were to hire musicians to tour, they would be better than me and I wouldn't want to ask them to play the lines that I wrote poorly. That's a long way of saying that my vision for this project includes imperfections and mistakes. I really liked the Unplugged album that Nirvana recorded, and they insisted on leaving it as is, including leaving in all the mistakes. For me, it was the feedback, the times that Kurt wasn't able to hit some notes the second (or third) time - that's what really made the performance. It is my goal to bring that same type of energy to this project. Not that I am trying to do what they are doing, but that I want the music to be a pure expression of what happened at the time. My ability to play exactly as I do, imperfect as it is.