~ F L O R A L - T E M P O R A L ~

Oh, uh,
well, so,

the current date at time of writing is the 24th of February, 2025, and it's a Monday, and, minus a two day break for the weekend (which is just plain healthy work habits),
I've been writing masses and masses of text for this page for the whole past week, and actually for some of the previous week before that, doing all sorts of archival work,
digging up old diary entries and posts and such such, and, last Wednesday I'd just got up to the first Soundcloud compilation and realised
"hey, there's still stuff on that website that I haven't compiled and done a proper "release" of yet!".
So I did that.

I don't remember if it ever ever occurred to me to even do a compilation of these tracks before, god knows they're not recent tracks.
So yeah, the only reason this exists is because I was writing text for this page.

This one's slightly different and wasn't originally released in this form. It's a whole other story.

Okay so first off, when I talk about the musician who saved my life in 2006: she was just one of several musicians at that time who had their own websites and put their music up
for free download, totally unprofessionally. She started in the very early 2000s, and by I think 2007 there were a few other people in her vicinity, mostly women, who made similar music to her, also had their own websites, also posted stuff for free. I doubt that they knew it but it was a sort of golden age for independent online music, at least in terms of creation and accessibility, maybe not necessarily financially. There's ten million independent albums being posted online every day these days, but this was back when the internet was populated almost exclusively by some savvy businessfolk and many, many incredibly passionate nerds. There may have been a few posers and big vibe artists, advertisers of the self, but for the most part: this was the real stuff. The real stuff. And as for accessibility: I mean Bandcamp is good but you really can't beat direct mp3 downloads, especially ones with "please_don't_hotlink_without_permission" in the filenames. It's fair to say that I was exactly the right age, 15-18, to be so deeply affected by this that I still miss it to this day.
Part of me actually wishes I could live in that 2006-2009 historical sweet spot forever.

So, I cannot remember how I had the idea but I thought "what if I created a website for a fictional version of myself from another reality, where I was old enough in the 2000s to have been posting music online then, and was just like my real life heroes". This was the first version of the Floral Temporal website, then called "Gemstone Heart". I came up with a fictional self, Emily Heart (or Gemily Kokoro), and just went absolutely to town planning shit out. Specifically: downloading six calendars, 2002 to 2007, and figuring out when the school terms were (Emily Heart initially being 15 years old, because a lot of these musicians started their websites in their teens); looking up the release dates of games I had or would have cared about if I'd been slightly more into anime at the time (because that matters); looking up the air dates of the episodes of TV shows I watched; and looking at the UK's music charts over this whole time span and a little earlier and because I didn't pay attention to the charts myself, so this other self wouldn't have either, writing down only
the songs I remember and their chart dates. Oh and the dates of everything that was posted to Homestar Runner dot com as well.

The plan was to partially relive that entire 6 year time span in real time,
playing all the right video games, watching all the right TV shows, listening to all the right music,
and just, in my imagination, improvise an alternate reality teen self's day-to-day life,
as she writes songs for her secret, "I'm a trans girl actually" website.

I was an active part of this too. There was a blog, and her posts were to be in this nice dark pink, while, whenever I might sometimes need to pull back the curtain a little, mine would be in this purple. In the fiction of the thing, she had downloaded an extension for MSN Messenger that allowed her to contact other realities, and somehow it connected to my Discord, and, after accepting that we were alternate reality versions of each other (a conversation that I never worked out the details of), I had agreed to set up this reality's version of her website and host her music here. (This setup is quite similar to one I had for a since abandoned "70s prog" album to be released under the name "Valinor", where a version of myself from an alternate reality 1976 called me up, was very terse, and somehow sent .wav files through what must have been a rotary phone. I wasn't really enjoying the music I wrote for this project though, and the thing's shelved possibly forever. Still a fun little project idea for me to think about sometimes though, maybe I'll do it someday, idk.)

I couldn't get past the fakeness of it though. I liked some of the music I was coming up with but the whole thing just didn't feel right to me: if it was music that it was honest for me to write, why did I need to put it behind a character? And if it wasn't honest for me to write it, then I have no business writing it in the first place! So I canned the whole thing.
I ended up writing just one vocal song, Once There Were Words, and I didn't really like it, and, uh, then hbomberguy on YouTube released his 4 hour video about plagiarism,
and spoke at the end about why people plagiarise, and... while all the music was original, I was kind of doing the same thing: just trying to be someone else who already exists,
just trying to have what they have, be what they are.



Consulting my diary, it turns out the idea for Gemstone Heart came after I checked up on what all my 2000s era heroes are doing now and finding out, well, most significantly:
one is not very active at all anymore, posts maybe one thing a year if that; one is still cool but mostly just does short piano pieces; one is an anti-vaxxer (and has a whole host of other weird, blatantly anti-science and anti-reality beliefs). None of them are doing the very sweet and very very good things they were doing roughly 20 years ago, or any
modern day equivalent, all just fizzled out and in some cases became weird and bad. I remember thinking something like "if there's only one person in the world who can bring that type of music back, it's one of the original artists, but if none of them'll do it then it's me". There's a bunch of stuff I can't copy over from that entry, dated 18th September 2023, because it includes specific names and things, but here's what I can copy over:

"It’s funny, isn’t it. Literally none of my heroes from the 2000s are still doing anything outside their own little doodles. [name 1] was once a hero of DIY, internet music.
[name 2] the same, though more obscure I think. [name 3] used to make much better music than she does now. At least she still makes stuff at all though, y’know, of any size.
[name 2] occasionally posts little pieces, and they’re lovely and I’m not putting them down, and I don’t begrudge her or anyone their doodling, but oh my god the scene is not
what it was. Who’s even making music like that anymore? Ironically the one person who I was never actually really into back then, [name 4], seems to be the only one still
actually making songs, and even then, not in the way she used to. She used to make albums. She’s still good though.

Honestly I wonder if maybe that’s just a niche I could just get into, y’know, not necessarily fill, ‘cos it’d probably take several people to do that, but if I could just
put myself into there, just to keep the thing alive. All my heroes moved on and changed and became worse in some way. Honestly [name 1] worst of all,
she has some absolutely gorgeous music under her belt, and now she just posts conservative shite."

"the central figures of what I guess I’d historically/retroactively call “fae pop” are all practically gone.
Maybe this is something I need to do, if only because I don’t know if anyone else would ever do it."

Here's an excerpt (from this same entry) that I'm not proud of, but that illustrates where I was at the time and what led into Gemstone Heart:
"It is a damn shame that she has gone the way she’s gone, and it’s probably shite of me but I feel some ownership, as a fan, of the way things were. Maybe that’s how it is with
all artists: the fans own the way things were. Or at least, that’s how it feels to us. Maybe this is the same function as shite gamers when they think girls didn’t like games before 2008 or whatever: I think that the way things are now is wrong, and want things back the way they were, specifically in a fandom context. I have no actual ownership over anything but my own memories, but now I want to claim ownership over the version of reality that doesn’t exist anymore, if it ever did at all."

"I guess I’m also not doing what I used to do. Maybe we all move on. I just now wrote a lyric called “Eulogy For A Phoenix”, about all this, and, yeah, I guess we are all feathers, whose flames die and then get replaced, the phoenix itself being the concept. I mean otherwise we become tired versions of ourselves, like Yes.

So I wonder if it might be prescient to ask: how long would I even want to make faepop? Or maybe, how much faepop do I want to make?" (And then I go through the numbers of how much each 2000s era artist made.) "So I guess the average is about three or four [albums' worth], and sure enough, five albums is the normal amount before an artist
changes direction. Maybe I could get five albums out of faepop. Just to give it a limit. Three would be good though.

I guess I just want the dream to be alive. This is music that matters, more than some and no less than any. It shouldn’t be gone.

Searched “faepop” on youtube and found a playlist called “fae pop through the ages”, and it’s just normal pop,
and I mean really normal pop, there is nothing interesting here. This isn’t fae at all.

I think if I had to give a description to “faepop”, it’d be something like “pop music with a classical/soundtrack bent”. And when I say “soundtrack” I really mean things like
Howard Shore’s Lord Of The Rings soundtrack, maybe John Williams stuff, I don’t just mean any soundtrack, ‘cos literally any audio can function as a soundtrack.
Pop music with a classical bent. Maybe folky as well, though I guess folk pop is already a thing."

"The thing is, me doing faepop is completely contingent on me having literally any songs to write. And I don’t. I could maybe stretch aerie faerie poetry out of me for the
Valinor album, but even that feels fake to me. I have the whole plan of them changing their name to Valid Nora, but, I honestly don’t think I could get
more than one album out of it at all, and it’d be a “Yes fan album”, if you know what I mean.

I guess... the thing with the faepop artists, most of them, is that they went song by song. [name 2] never made an album, like, sort of literally. The only time she actually tried to make a proper album, rather than a compilation, it got canned, and now there’s no indication that she ever plans to finish it. So maybe I could do it like that: just have a website where I post odd songs and ends. [name 3] never made an album either. Honestly [name 1]’s the odd one out, playing somewhat by standard industry rules,
and even she had some free downloads on her site.

Oh and… I s’pose, over the years, the category of thing I finished most was those one song EPs. There were I think two of those that were cancelled as well, at least one.
Maybe just one actually. But yeah, I made seven of those. Maybe that’s the only way I can do songs, at least for now. One song at a time."

The next entry after that one is dated 22nd September and opens with "Previous entry transformed into a project titled “Gemstone Heart”", but that's all I say about it.
There're a few other entries that mention the project as well but all as little asides, I didn't really ever talk about it in there again.



The updates page on the Gemstone Heart website said "made first contact (or rather was made first contact with)" on the 18th of September 2023,
so I guess it was pretty soon after that diary entry that I came up with the whole thing.



There was a page titled "About Me & About This", which included a short bio and also this text:

"Over the past 15 years or so I've tried and tried to write cool and exciting music. I pretty much never managed to finish any album, and got almost no attention for what I did finish.
So maybe professional music's not for me. Finally in September of 2023 I was just about becoming ready to hang up my hat for good when, one morning, I woke up with an old song by a favourite obscure, 2000s era internet musician in my head. I went to check what she was up to these days and the answer was: almost nothing.
Also she's an anti-vaxxer now, or adjacent.

What about my other favourites from back then? They're: not technically inactive but nowhere near as active as they used to be,
and one of them has changed styles a few times over and isn't as good now.

I wrote quite a few pages in my diary about this. No one from the old days was still making the kind of beautiful, faerie-like (sometimes cyber-faerie-like) music I grew up on. I was a teenager for the majority of the 2000s, and I was never into chart music (for the most part), so my formative listening is video game soundtracks and stuff downloaded from the internet, often very midi sounding but still often vocal. Who's keeping that dream alive? Not my old favourites, that's for sure.

"Then I will", I thought. And I realised: most of them didn't make albums either, they released music one track at a time, for free, on websites they built themselves. And most of what I've made over the years has been short little EPs with only three tracks, and compilations of unrelated things. I've got quite a few finished or mostly-finished tracks that still haven't seen the light of day because they were written for albums I couldn't finish. Maybe the one-track-at-a-time model is what I'm suited to.

And uh, I think what happened next is: after a full day or two of 2000s nostalgia, this idea combined with another last ditch effort music idea of mine, where I get a phone call from a version of myself from an alternate 1976, and somehow through her rotary phone she sends me the .wav files of a big, grandiose, Yes soundalike album by her band.
I still haven't finished that album yet and will delete this last sentence when/if I do.

So, here's What This Is: this is a semi-improvisational music-and-general-2000s-nostalgia project where I play both myself as Webmaster and an alternate reality version of myself from 21 years ago, who's 4 years older than I was at the time. I've given her the name Emily Heart: I can't remember where "Emily" came from but it's just a nice girl name, and, "Heart" comes from deciding to identify myself a few years ago as "Kokoro" (Japanese for heart), as a sort of reference to a thing I don't feel I have the right to explain*.

It's to be understood that when I'm speaking, the text is this lovely purple, and when Emily's speaking it's this lovelier pink."

"*It relates in some way to my aforementioned old favourite artists from 2000s era internet,
and, I will never name them (unless unpredictable events transpire whereby I get permission).
They've sort of moved on, at least partially, and, look, I have to think about this kind of thing: what if, by some freak miracle,
my music gains some amount of popularity? And then those fans check out the artists I'm kind of homaging?

Imagine this: you're in your late 30s, maybe your 40s. You've carved out something of a consistent, comfortable life. Suddenly, you get a lot of attention from the fanbase of someone you've never heard of, because of stuff you made for fun when you were a teenager. I think some people would respond like "oh cool", but, y'know. I think some people wouldn't. I don't wanna take that risk, and, hey if you've been on the internet for as long as I have, you know that sometimes, well, fans are cool, but fanbases are so often rotten.
Or at least obsessive, and that can be its own kind of rotten."



There was a blog post I did on the website on the 22nd of October 2023 where I mostly talk about my doubts about the project, the fakeness of it all, and there's this paragraph:

"Of course, where I say "if it's anyone's job to create more, it's mine", the truth is anyone can make any music they want. It really is anyone's job to create more of the kind of music I want more of. But I'm gonna go one step further and be silly and possessive about it, unnecessarily so: if it was only one person's job to make more, (and none of the original artists were available,) then that person would be me. But no, of course anyone can do this. I just feel like it needs to exist and that I'm the right person to do it, and I guess I feel that so strongly that I think: if there's only one "right person for the job" in the whole world, it's me."

(and, matter of fact, this is still true.)



The website ended with a blog post on the 3rd of December 2023,
which starts with a big paragraph about staying up for 32 hours on my birthday
which had just recently happened, and then:

"So I spent a good portion of the past week in a strange and tired mental space, paying off sleep debt.
At no point did I feel like posting as Emily Heart, and it felt more like an obligation than like something I actually wanted to do at all.

In comes today, the 3rd of December, and the YouTuber hbomberguy uploads a new video, 4 hours long, about plagiarism. It's my whole afternoon. There's about 5 minutes near the end that's just his theory on the real reason why people plagiarise at all, which incorporates not just plagiarists but copycats, and, well... now I think I might have to redo this website.

At the start of this, in October, I had similar doubts and ended up saying "maybe you can use a mask to be honest in ways you can't without a mask". That didn't put the fear away,
I never stopped thinking about it: what the difference is between myself and the character Emily Heart, why I needed her. Since that October journal entry I've started feeling that (despite Once There Were Words being very much like something I'd come up with,) the songs she'd write are different to the songs I'd write: more fictional, metaphorical, poetic. But... if I wouldn't write those songs, how can I say it's honest when I do write them under a different name? And if I actually would write them, why do I need a fictional persona?

I'm rereading that October entry and, seeing, in reference to my 2000s era online heroes, "I think I just want to be nestled in that music, forever, rather than really continue it",
and "maybe this whole website is me mourning something that no longer exists, that I've been unable to move on from since it ended. I don't think that's ever gonna stop though,
I think I'll always want more"... I think what this website might actually be is me grasping at something and becoming a two-dimensional version of it.
Laying claim to a personhood that isn't mine, eschewing my own personhood. Like an irate gamer.

But here's a big obstacle: me personally, I feel like I've long run out of songs to write. I still have ideas sometimes but none that I actually want to put the effort in to do.
I can still compose okay, still come up with melodies I like and musical ideas that don't feel shallow to me, but songs are lost to me. In fact, in truth, the thought of committing words to paper, as it were, at all, feels... like beating a dead horse. Over the entire time I've posted songs to the internet (which is about 13 years at time of writing), one person has ever been enthusiastic enough about my work to listen to it more than once. It's certainly won me no attention, let alone a career. I'm just tired of trying,
spending all my time speaking when no one's listening.

I thought this project would be a way of sneaking songwriting back into me through some secret side door. Listen: I really don't like Once There Were Words. Not just the version - which I rushed to get out for the 19th of November, the 15th anniversary of my actual first song - I hate the song itself. Well, I dunno. "Hate" is a strong word. I feel about it the way that maybe Gentle Giant might feel about the album Giant For A Day, or maybe The Missing Piece: a partially honest but ultimately lacklustre swansong. A lot of the song describes what I feel; most specifically: "once there were words, now there is silence", and "once there was colour, now it's all dark, what once was a wildfire, no longer a spark".
I think I can still write, I just don't want to anymore. As I already said two and a half years ago in a song literally called Songs' End:
"whatever book or blood conspired to bear this beast has long been burned away now".

What about just writing songs as a hobby? No good. As I've outlined: it's psychological. I see myself has having failed, either for my own skill or for, I don't know,
the world not listening, or my inability to market myself, whatever it might be. For whatever reason, nobody else, not even friends, values my songs.
Maybe they're actually bad songs. They're certainly not good recordings, I've never recorded a good vocal take. It won't just be that though.
Almost no one's even heard them.

So... yeah. That's the end of this project. Maybe this feels premature, like, it's literally been two months and I've only done five tracks. But, look: I know it would get to me, the disconnect. I know that if I made Emily Heart songs, I wouldn't be able to listen to them without thinking "this is fake", "this is a performance and isn't honest". I've tried writing performative songs before, never finished any of them because it was all fake. I just want to be honest. And I think the honest thing to do right now is to not write any songs."



I think later that same month I heard Yoko Kanno's album Song To Fly for the first time, or maybe it was the Napple Tale soundtrack and then Song To Fly but for some reason
I think it was Song To Fly first, and I can't remember how I found it, I wish I could, but that album's so beautiful and it made me think "what if we had one last go? Just one more attempt at making an album, not for anyone else, just for me". I'm still working on that one. I also thought about writing music for video games and started trying to make a
"three disc" collection of tracks for free use in visual novels, having just recently got into them, and I wrote only a little music for that before I did one that I felt needed to
be turned into a song. And, being slightly re-energised, I came up with a few other song ideas and put together a tracklist for an EP half of which is stuff
I never got round to doing or finishing in earlier years.

But six months later, none of it was coming together.

I felt once again like I might end up dying without ever having a good life, and, in yet another moment of feeling quite possibly defeated forevermore, I picked up my keyboard and messed around with the Claire Siegely album track Even Then, to write a song called The Day I Die. In a diary entry from 7th June 2024 I say "Yesterday I wrote what I call the first good song I’ve written in six years, though it uses a lot of Even Then. It’s called The Day I Die and it’s about never getting to fucking escape this fucking house [among other things but they're personal]".

Finally, finally, that song made me feel like I could write songs again.
So I recorded it, released it on the personally significant 15th June anniversary,
and spent some weeks trying to figure out how to actually write songs.

This more or less brings us to present.

Oh, this?

This is a specific and focused bout of bitterness directed squarely at a certain pair of musicians who are worse writers than me, write like posers, express emotions like posers, everything they do fake, put on for show, like every single song is an advert for itself, none of the songs are just songs, it's all marketing, and it's all highly vibes-oriented. So it all seems to me at least. People who supposedly "put their trauma into their art", but have done it over and over and over, beating a dead horse, made a flipping career of it, whereas I tried to write actual songs about my trauma and got mere crickets. It turns out that what I should have done is just screamed vibe words into a microphone for 40 minutes a pop. That's where the money is.

I was (and am), of course, already well past writing personal songs. But it does still sting to see people get celebrated for much worse and much less honest versions of the type of thing you spent years and years doing for an audience of zero. You can safely file this one under "war against America", the artists in question are American, their style, approach, personalities, very American, in that "everything kinda tastes of marketing/propaganda" way. Nothing's just there, everything has to be a product, everything has to be a brand.

I never wrote about this release in my diary or posted about it anywhere else on the internet. I just uploaded it to Bandcamp and said nothing about it.
I made the price £937 and put in the description "the price is a joke, don't buy this".

I was trying to make an album called But.
And I hated it.



But had five tracks:

1. I Am Tired Of Trying To Fill The Void
2. One Of Them
3. Militareuniform
4. Suffer In Silence Like Me
5. Constant Songs Of Healing In A Constant State Of Panic

The first was a short instrumental and obviously made it onto the album I eventually made (with "I Am" shortened to "I'm"). The rest were vocal songs.

After writing a very weird but pretty rubbish song called Homage (which was partly inspired by one or two Cardiacs songs), I wrote Militareuniform (pronounced "military uniform" but also yeah containing "reuni" like "reunion"), a musically kind of weird song about how violence among siblings represents the culture of the household as laid down by the parents, and also about the personalities that are allowed, by the parents, to be in that household. This one's still quite good, I still like this one.

I reckon I wrote Militareuniform just because I wanted to, and then kind of built the rest of the album around it and around what I was feeling at the time.
But, once a fucking gain, the rest were songs I didn't actually want to do.

One Of Them was a 12 minute song about being glorified by my mother, and thus isolated from all the "normal people", and how if I'd just carried on as the person she tried to turn me into, I would have eventually gone homeless and died on the street. It was originally called When I Die, and described like "when I die on the street, with a big beard 'cos I haven't been able to shave, and all I own is the clothes on my back; when I die in those conditions, I'll know that I'm a special boy". And, well, almost all of this is stuff I already said on Back isn't it, with Touch. This song said that stuff a lot more clearly, and "one of them" refers to the fact that, fuck that, I am "one of them", I am a "normal person" like everyone else, I am among the people, rather than above. I'm not better than anyone. I guess I still kinda like that as a concept. I did nearly finish writing this song, all the music was there, just not the lyrics. I don't think I was really feeling it fully though, like, even now, I have mixed feelings about it. Parts of it are good but it veers off into other places that I don't feel
at all, and even some of the good stuff feels a bit put on to me, not entirely accurate to how I feel. I think this was a good song idea that got kind of warped.

Suffer In Silence Like Me, which was at one point called I Wish All My Hardships On You, is an even stronger case of the same. This was to be a song about jealousy: one of my ongoing points of tension, and this was very much more the case then than it is now, is seeing people who are supposedly "like me" but who clearly have it a lot better, and even though they might sometimes say they're having a bad time of it, hey, they're with friends, they have an income, they're on HRT for god's sake. They're regularly able to buy new clothes. All I wanted was to see some sign that they were actually suffering as much as I was, I wanted to see them in as much pain as me, not out of any desire to harm anyone but because what I was actually feeling was "if I'm not allowed to be okay, no one else should be": the need for community, corrupted. I actually still feel this a little but not very much, and I wrote a lot of words for this song but didn't like any of them, and I think the reason for that is that I didn't actually understand the subject at all, I didn't understand why I felt that way. Eventually the answer turned out to be: I just felt like I wasn't allowed, like it would have been unacceptable for me to have what I want, like it was one rule for them and another for me. But that was entirely internal, and that was given to me, and it was given to me. It was a personal thing and a consequence of the abuse I've suffered. But, yes, this was a real feeling that I had very strongly, and it would have been perfectly fine and maybe very cool to have written a song about it, but I didn't understand how to talk about it, so it ended up as just a pile of useless words and useless music. As it happens, I later took the same feelings into another song, one that's a lot more conscious of the full mechanics of the thing, but I haven't finished it yet. Way way back down this page, in the description of the aborted 2011 quadruple concept album The Huge Undertaking, I mentioned continually wanting to try again with that album's autobiographical concept - the way I worded it is "even though it failed, I tried to take its spirit into a few other albums afterwards", and I said I actually started a new one in February of 2022. That's what this other song about burning, righteous jealousy is on. I don't know if I'll ever finish that album though.

Finally, Constant Songs Of Healing In A Constant State Of Panic. This was an absolute fucking mess.
Towards the end of But's life I was calling this song "Tortured And Talking To Songs". If I remember correctly it was meant to be a full description of the state my life was in at the time, and the fact I kept writing personal songs to try to "heal myself" instead of actually do the research required to fix myself and then the work required to fix my situation. But - again: if I remember correctly - in trying to give a full description of the conditions I was living under, I felt a need to provide context for it all, and what I ended up with was
21 minutes of music, still not the full song, where most sections were exactly the type of song I was describing: songs about my feelings, songs about my past.
So much time and energy spent on writing all these songs, instead of on anything that would actually help.

Along with these tracks there were a few false starts, I really tried very hard to write this album I didn't actually want to write. There was a different final track planned, again about my mother, with the very direct title of Will I Ever Be Rid Of You. I wrote a little music but I think no lyrics for this. The opening track was going to be a short song called Melodies, I can't remember what that was meant to be about. There was at one point another different opening track, called Not Dead But, and it looks like the chorus was to be just the line "I'm not dead but I don't want to live this way, fuck this shit". There was a song I planned to write but didn't called I Don't Need Anything, no idea what that one was meant to be about. There was something called Rest Isn't Rest, presumably about not being able to relax in my mother's house. And there was something called Just Kill Me Already.

All in all, I think it's incredibly clear that I was really sick of the state I'd been in for a while. Looking at it in retrospect, there very much are shades of the Songs' End album in But, but I was still trying to write like I had been writing, and actually, if you scroll back down, you'll see that I didn't finish very many things at all between the 2018 Claire Siegely album and Songs' End: I was working the whole time, I just never finished any of it. In the diary entry quoted in Back's description I mention an album called At Sea, this was one of three albums I was trying to write roughly all at the same time, none of which panned out, all of which I actually hated. I think But may have been the first album project after that. There were other things between the Claire Siegely album and 2019's At Sea et al as well, I just don't remember them. I was trying the whole time, and, well I said in 2018 that
that album was supposed to maybe be my last music ever, and the following years really bore that out. I couldn't do it anymore.

I remember one day, I think in the March of 2021, just sort of saying to myself like "let's play with the idea of But being cancelled".
And pretty immediately I stopped playing with it and just did it.
There is a clear line you can draw between But and Songs' End, and that line,
which really had needed crossing for almost three years by that point,
is myself giving up on writing songs like I had been.

I wasn't sure when I made it if "Songs' End" referred to just personal songs or to all songs, at different times I thought different things. But it's this great release. It's a mostly instrumental album that nonetheless is, in my opinion, extremely clear about what it's saying, just by the track titles and by the tonal arc of the music. Originally it was only going to have one vocal song, the title song, which just says basically everything I've said on this page already but in only two verses and one chorus, but I guess I felt like also doing a song about what it was like, what it was like to constantly write personal songs and retread old ground over and over, and that's Autobiography And The Day-By-Day. If I remember correctly I came up with the title first and loved it so much I knew I had to do it. Also the middle section of Procession includes every single vocal song I had ever made, maybe instrumentals too, I can't remember, either stretched or squashed to fit into the space they're all in. It's an absolute cacophony, and it took a lot more RAM than most Reason files do. All those .wavs~

This album is the first time I ever made something truly album length that wasn't just a compilation, and I was pretty pleased with that fact. Aside from of course the intro which I already had, and the samples in Procession, and the whole middle section of Procession which was originally called "milg" because it reminded me of Peter Gabriel's
We Do What We're Told (Milgram's 37) (although I wrote the guitar solo for this album), and the musical reprises, and the instrumental section at the end of Autobiography,
oh and Aimless Colourwash which I'd had for a little while as well, I wrote the whole thing in March of 2021, took if I remember correctly the whole month of April off,
and then recorded the lot in May and June, aiming for a 15th June release date for the anniversary of the Claire Siegely album.



Bandcamp description was as follows:
"This album is free because it's all just personal stuff that has no relation to anything outside myself, and I'd feel pretty uncomfortable asking for money for something like that."

And the credits say:
"vocals, guitar, percussion, keyboard (there is only one bit of real keyboard),
lyrics, music, production,
and artwork
by
claire siegely

to better things."



Oh the artwork - the artwork is an eyeless girl who I'd been drawing occasionally for at least 10 years by that point. Not regularly but just occasionally. Kind of became a representation of myself. I first drew her long before I ever came up with the name Claire Siegely, but her circle head combined with the left fringe form a "CS".
I don't believe in fate but, you ever heard of monkeys and typewriters? Coincidences will happen sometimes, and they're pretty beautiful if you ask me. And you did.



Diary excerpt, 29th March 2021 (the only entry I wrote in March):
"All things cancelled. Whatever the album was called. But. I could not make it work, I did not feel like writing the songs I decided to write. I can’t remember when that happened but same day or next day, probably one of those, I started work on an album called Songs’ End. By now there are two vocal tracks on that album, I don’t even like those.
I haven’t written one of them yet. All the instrumentals are good I think. There’s one instrumental I haven’t written yet.

I will never write a personal song again unless I find out I feel like it. I have been exploiting myself for content for 10 years. Trying to write songs that I don’t feel like writing, because I’ve decided that those are the songs that I should write. Absolute fucking bullshit."



Tweets. From 30th March 2021:
"i am one track away from having a complete skeleton of an album,
and what's there crosses the 40 minute mark, making it officially "(non-punk) album length"."

"i don't even like the two vocal tracks on it but they're the only vocal tracks i have half the will to write about the subject."

"when i have the full skeleton i'm going to give myself a holiday."

"there is no deadline / "release date" but i want to have it posted online / "released" before the year's halfway point."

"in terms of time spent doing it - rather than time spent stressing about it - writing an album is at most half the work.
There's recording, production, mixing. Artwork, additional "package" stuff like liner notes."

"I started writing this album earlier this month, about 4 weeks ago.
So there's probably at least another month of work to do, maybe 2."

"and add to that a 2 week holiday."

And then added to the same thread, on the 4th of April 2021:
"update:
i am one outro away from having the full skeleton"

And then one hour later:
"i have the full skeleton.
i am on holiday as of tomorrow.
patrons will probably receive a zip file with WIPs and a .txt tomorrow. 12 mp3s that should = about 42 minutes maybe."

"i literally can't cancel this album now because - though there's a few arrangement things that need sorting out - the basic structure of it is 100% written. All the lyrics are written.

It's DONE.
I actually DID one finally."

(I guess I only took two weeks off, rather than the whole month. Things get simpler in retrospect don't they. It's like draw distance in video games.)



On the 20th of April I finally did make that WIP .zip, and I posted a short thread on Twitter essentially just saying "y'know what, everyone can have this,
the album will be free anyway", with a Dropbox link. At the bottom of this thread I say:
"(title does not mean these are my final songs ever.)"



On the 30th of May I did this thread on a private alt account:
"i'm gonna be stretching my legs and going "fuck yeah" for a while maybe but FUCK i'm looking forward to never having to write a song about myself ever again"

"i never actually did have to in the first place.
but that was the job i gave myself."

"i wrote most of the text for the "CD booklet" pdf tonight and, on the first page with text is:

"Sometimes giving up is the best thing you can do for yourself.

Maybe the thing you came crawling languid out of your teens wanting to do
isn't something that's worth doing."

"Isn't something you have any passion for.
Maybe it isn't even something you actually chose yourself.

You were young."

"Give up on your dreams
and the ones that replace them
might be your real ones.""

(There's a few tweets here where I say some personal stuff that shall remain private.)

"i s'pose, between 15 and 19, i was still writing about myself.
i was trying to write love songs for girls, about like, me being very emotional and romantic, "us" being fated to be together. It was all VERY pretentious."

"So i've been writing about myself in one way or another basically from the start.
I guess it's actually fucking weird that my first actual song wasn't about myself. It's just some shit about Angeal from FF7 Crisis Core.
God knows why that's what I picked for "first song"."

"i've never even thought about this 'til now, shit.
i've been writing lyrics about myself since i was 15, maybe even 14.
Don't think it will have been younger than 14. Definitely wouldn't've been younger than 13 I'm pretty sure."

"Literally half my life I've been doing this."

"And as far as I know, I've never enjoyed it.
There were a few times when i was creatively satisfied. Maybe half, or less, of the few songs I was able to actually finish."

"Like, I made a list last year, I've written over 100 autobiographical songs.
That's a fraction of the amount of song ideas I've had.
This is almost all I've been doing, almost all of the time.
And it's never made me happy, not when I was 15 and not at any other point"

"So when I say "I never have to do this again",
when I say "this album is the end of this. It's over.",
that's what this represents for me."

And then I followed up on my main account, reiterating the gist of that and adding:
"Almost all my time for the past 10+ years has been spent thinking about or working on autobiographical songs.
And even when I was at school and could only write lyrics in my spare time, those were autobiographical too.
Just for myself, personally, this is extremely an ending."



There's this thread from 6th June:
"y'know what's some fun little synchronicity for me?
This guitar solo i'm practising/finishing writing is partly a reprise of the one from a song I did in 2010 with the stupid title of "Bricks Of A Pipe Dream".
And, it's now 9 days from the release date and,"

"this is still yet to be written/recorded. I've left it super late.
And the Bricks solo in December 2010 was the same. I wanted to finish the "album" before the year's end and I still hadn't written it yet.
Eventually just, mostly improvising one, only two concrete parts in it"

"Before I deleted songs from that era from the internet entirely, I copied all the descriptions I gave them.
and uh
in Bricks's it says "Lyrics started on the 4th of March 2010".
5th of March this year is when I came up with the idea for Songs' End.
Wow, fuck."

""and apparently finished on the 15th of July 2010 (that's when the lyrics file says it was last modified)".
Well... 15th of June would've been cooler but I'll take it.
(that being this album's release date)"

""This was originally meant to have a full band sound, with four or five different instruments along with the vocals.
The deadline grew nearer, I couldn't be bothered to work on the song for a while,"

"and I eventually decided that it would be more appropriate to have it just piano and voice."
uh...
that's also uh,
not unlike Songs' End.
I thought it would probably have a big strings arrangement, maybe full (digital) orchestra, but couldn't write those parts."

"Then found it sounded better stripped down anyway. Piano and voice and guitar."

""The guitar solo hadn't been written, though, and when the time came for record now or record never, I didn't have much time to actually write one."
It takes one or two days for me to write a guitar solo now. I think I actually hadn't ever written a guitar solo back then."

""I only have one lead, though, so I couldn't use an effects pedal"
at one point I got a second lead, and then it broke years later. I bought another second lead this year.
The guitar on Songs' End will be relatively clean though."

"Actually more synchronicities than I realised. Huh."

"It's been a long 11 years. 11 years is a long time."



There's this tweet from the 14th of June:
"-record guitar solo
-mix song
-master album

need to do at least the first two today but preferably all three"

And then later on on the same day there's this thread:
"mastering mastering mastering let's gooooooo"

"........ooooooooooOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!! done! done it! uploading now!
hahahahahaha"

"23:57pm.
Just under the wire! hahahahahaha!!"

And I set it to be released the next day.



Then finally there's this thread from the 15th:
"My personal album about how bad writing songs about myself has been for me is out today, and it's free.
Admittedly there isn't a lot of melody on it. And the target audience was me alone.
Not gonna make another one like that. Had to get it out my system."

"The coolest tracks to listen to are probably Aimless Colourwash and The Act Of Cancelling Albums. Those are the ones that stand alone best probably."

"i have scheduled a "supposed to be professional" tweet for 12pm UK time on the @SiegeFeathers account and in truth that's all the "marketing" i'm going to do for this one.
same as why it's free. it's all just personal shit. It'd feel shit to try to profit from it in any way."

(the "professional" tweet in question just says the same stuff as the first one in this thread.)

"This album has one and only one thing to say about life, people, society, etc., and that's this:
you are not a product. Carve a line between yourself and your work.
And even then, there are clearer, more direct ways to say that. This album's just my personal experience of it."

"a few weeks ago I watched Anthony Fantano's interview with Porter Robinson,
and Robinson said something like, after making his album Worlds, he'd just sit trying to ~produce new music~ every day and he just hated everything that came out,"

"and that what he really needed was to get out of the studio and like, live life, stuff like that.
And that's really what it's been for me as well. I hate almost everything I've done for the past 10 years, and it's honestly got worse and worse."

"My favourite part of this album isn't any of the music or the lyrics, it's the song title "Autobiography And The Day-By-Day".
There was originally only going to be one vocal song on the album but I wanted to specifically write a song about what it's been like to live like this."

"I've been trying to write songs about myself for 10 years.
And even though I've technically become a better composer, and lyricist, and producer, singer, etc. etc.,
the earliest stuff is better because it was new then. That was stuff I hadn't said yet."

"But, except, even then though... there was a lot of forced stuff.
Fuck sake there's a song I will probably never record from 2011 called Beecage, which I remember having to try really hard to convince myself I liked.
Before finally letting myself admit it's shit."

"There's probably a lot to say about this.
Like, not only did I think that I could produce good and ~meaningful~ work without ever looking outside myself and living life,
but I thought I could produce good and ~meaningful~ work that was almost exclusively about myself."

"This is just a theory and I haven't tested it at all yet but
I wonder if a writer is not a ~creator~ but just an interpreter.
If that's what an artist actually is."

"Part of the conservative mindset is that rich people deserve to be rich because they're just better than poor people.
Or, more essentially, some people are naturally very very good at some things. Some people have "brilliant minds"."

"(I still haven't looked into "auteur theory" and I should.)"

"It's that sort of mindset that makes some people - even artists themselves - think that artists can just ~produce art~.
Like, in a vacuum.
It all just springs forth from the brilliant mind."

"It doesn't work like that.
Internal inspiration - if there ever is any - dries up SO fast."

(Um, the following part is a bit rude about a keyboard section from the band IQ's song Sacred Sound, and the guy who most likely wrote it.
I'm including this because it illustrates the point, but I want to first say here in the present: I'm right about this but I'm sorry if it comes off real mean.)

"Oh I'm gonna talk about the IQ song called Sacred Sound.
I like this song a lot, there's a lot I like about this song. But there's a keyboard solo before the last chorus that fucking SUCKS SHIT."

"Specifically it sucks shit in context.
So there's this middle section that's slower than the rest of the song, which ends on some cool church organ bit and some ambience, then there's a cool guitar solo.
Then an 80s as FUCK keyboard bit."

"Which, to be clear... it's not the 80sness that I hate.
It's that it wouldn't sound out of place in their 80s music. This would fit on their 1985 album The Wake (which I like a lot).
But this album came out in 2004."

"Sometimes the guitarist writes keyboard parts so it's definitely possible he wrote it,
but the keyboardist has been on record as saying he doesn't really listen to music for fun. That music is his job and he doesn't like to have it away from work as well."

"And so my point is this:
that keyboard part is miles behind the rest of the song, potentially because the guy had hardly had any new musical influences in 20 years.
I don't know that for a fact, it is a thing I can't say for sure is true,"

"but it lines up.
And it lines up with my own experience as well:
you work gets real fucking stale if you just produce work, and don't keep up with what's happening around you.
You need that outside influence, you need that input."

"And if you're writing words, you need to keep up with what's happening in the world. And you need friendships.
Otherwise nothing you have to say will ever be useful to anyone or have any weight."

"Anyway this thread's too long.
Autobiography And The Day-By-Day is a 7 minute picture of the past 10 years of my life. I'm ashamed that it lasted 10 years."



Well.
Need I say more.

This one, um, is a compilation of everything I posted to Soundcloud,
in the full three year span of time between 1st January 2017 and 31st December 2019.

Most likely I was running out of space on there, so I made this compilation to make space. On there.
[This turned out to be not the reason.]

There isn't anything else to say about it, that's all.



Oh the original commentary text file says:
"Why do the third Soundcloud compilation now? There's a space I need to fill on my Bandcamp page. There are four "columns" and
currently I have 27 things on there. If I upload something, that'll complete all of the columns, make them all the same length.
I've also got nothing else that'll be finished this year, and I don't want to miss a year out completely. I've done at least
one upload a year since 2014 and I think it'd be cool if that didn't stop."

(I don't know if you'd bother to count, but, of the things I put on Bandcamp that I've listed here, this one is itself only number 25.
The missing three things are: a few clips of things I was working on in early 2017, some basic vocal warmups which were bad,
and a few clips of things I was working on in early 2018. These do not, and cannot, count as "releases". So I haven't included them.)

Not really comfy telling you all the details about this one, it's a very personal subject,
but I'll trawl through what I wrote about it at the time and tell you what I can. Yeah we're doing it that way round this time.



Original Bandcamp description:
"i'm not totally comfortable explaining exactly what this is about, but i think some of the lyrics might look sort of questionable,
so it'd probably be best to give you some kind of cipher:

This is about neglect and addiction.

i have had this entire EP written since May this year, the vast majority of it on May 10th. It took me a long time to get around to recording vocals, finally on December 24th.

i usually try to get these done in one night, or at least in a short amount of time, but i timed every single work session and it adds up to about 25 hours and 39 minutes.
This is the most effort i've ever put into one of these, and actually the artwork is, well uh, so, this is the most i've worked on any of the art for anything i've uploaded.

This is my final thing under the name 'siegely', at least for a long while i think."



And under the credits on Bandcamp it said:
"wires and walls.
wrapped in metal."
and these are lyrics from songs I like, but rather than the meanings of those whole songs (one being about living an aimless life despite having fantasies of being a musician,
the other about someone putting you on a pedestal and having an image of you that's totally false), specifically it's this imagery that I'm referencing, it was a feeling I wanted
the music to have, I was picturing a sort of "anime sci-fi body horror" thing. Or at least I was at one point: I wrote the whole EP in May, and then in August I watched
Cowboy Bebop for the first time, if I remember correctly there's something like that in one of those episodes. So I don't exactly remember the order of events,
and I don't know if there's a way I can find out what they were, but yeah, at one point I had a picture in my head of "anime sci-fi body horror".



~All the tweets I could find about this EP~

This short thread from the 9th of May, 2019:
"i'm hoping in the fullness of time i'll come to actually like the song i started writing tonight :(
its rhythm is so fucking weird that it was hard to write a vocal melody for it. Could just be it really needs some fuck around on the production end"

"it's 4/4 but it gets to 16 beats by going 9+7 instead of 8+8, i've done my fucking best but it was hard, and equally as hard to write lyrics"

"wrt the production, it definitely doesn't "feel right" to me because it's too warm,
the mental image i want is like, "wires and walls", "wrapped in metal", and currently it's more like, idk, some kind of cyberpunk hearth"

For the record, I'm incredibly proud of how this song's vocal melody turned out, and of its lyric too.
But yes, I had "wires and walls" and "wrapped in metal" in my mind at the time I wrote it.
In the replies I tell someone "it'll hopefully be done and uploaded tomorrow", so, wow I must have had a really bad time with my voice that year.



The next Twitter thread I can find about this EP is from the release date, 29th December:
"been working on cover art for an EP since basically 6am and it's 11:30 now and well, there's not much left to do
but what is left to do will take ages, or at least feel like it's taking ages, boring repetitive work"

"this will be out today or tomorrow, hopefully today, i really want that 29th December sweet spot"

"the cover art is a photo that i've drawn over in Paint Dot Net and i was aiming for a sort of HR Giger vibe
but it actually looks like a flash cartoon from the early 2000s,
which i can live with tbh"

"finally finished, it has 43 layers, only a few of which are backups of other layers from before edits.
Wasn't actually able to open up the song to do one last minute change, 'cos, my computer doesn't have enough memory to have both my busiest image and my busiest song open"

"gonna listen through now, then finally upload this EP I've had written and almost completely mixed since May, fuck"

"important lesson for future music: record vocals before finishing the mix for the instrumental.
I'd filled the whole thing out already, there wasn't any space for the vocals so they're sort of... sellotaped onto the sides."

"okay i finally did it, i uploaded something to bandcamp in 2019, phew"

"god, it's finally done, i don't have to think about this EP anymore and can move on"

And then later the same day:
"i actually do have three sockets in my lower back, that's the weirdest thing.
When i took that picture to use in the Back artwork i was like "oh fuck, wow, i was literally already gonna do this but i guess they're actually there for real""

"i mean idk if i was gonna have three sockets there in my lower back specifically,
but "wires and walls"/"wrapped in metal" was a really big part of the vibe of the music and i knew i needed Matrix-like cables in the artwork"

(They're really more dimples than sockets per se, but yeah, they're there.)



I only ever mentioned this EP in my diary once, on the 31st of January 2020.
There's a big gap between 17th September 2019 and this entry, so this is the first one after the EP's release.
This paragraph comes after one where I basically say I wish I could just slowly work on my now-abandoned comic, Cool Team, while getting through a big mountain of podcasts:

"It’s hard though, like, I don’t think Cool Team’s ever gonna earn me a living, my one actual skill is music so I’m trying to put all my stock in that, but it’s so fucking hard to finish a single fucking project. I’m like two lines away from finishing writing At Sea, an entire album, and then I’ll have to record it and mix it and finish the artwork, but who knows if i’ll do any of that. I think streaming appeals to me ‘cos it’s so hands-off, or like, low-effort. I do as much promotion for streams, which take literally no work at all, as I do for things which take hours and hours and days and days of effort. I put more time into writing and recording and making the artwork for Back than I’ve ever put into any stream, and oh fuck way more effort, and no one fucking listened to it. I actually do more promotion for streams ‘cos I bump the tweet occasionally sometimes, say like “bump, still going!”, or like, “hey we’re at this bit of the game”, shit like that. I dunno if I’d do that now I suppose, but maybe I would. Maybe I feel like the more effort I put into something, the more let down I’ll be when people aren’t impressed. So if I do something but don’t put any work into it, it’s a lot easier for me to promote it."

Not incredibly relevant but that's all I've got for diary excerpts.
(As for the album At Sea, well that never came to fruition. This would have been released under the name SiegeFeathers and would have been a mix of instrumentals
and vocal songs, but I hated all but one of those vocal songs. I was once again trying to force something that wasn't working,
trying to write songs I didn't actually care about or like, express emotions I wasn't feeling.)



So let's talk about the artwork.
First and foremost, let's establish what it is clearly meant to sort of be: like a sort of cardboard box with plastic window, like what a plastic toy comes in.

What you see here on this page is not what it was, I have removed a key component: a nude photograph of my real life back. It was done artfully, and my lower back was covered up by a sort of mechanical chrysalis I drew, which is still present here. Absconding from the sides of this chrysalis, and also from the unseen ceiling of the inside of the "box", are some cables which were originally plugged into my - you guessed it - back. Both ends of the central cable were plugged into my back too. There's a load of text on the "cardboard",
most of which is still readable at the 500x500 resolution seen above but not the words under "3 of 4" which, at proper size, say "collect the whole set!".



Okay. Let's get into the full amount of what I can comfortably tell you.
You need affection, yeah? I mean maybe not right this second, but generally speaking: that's a part of your diet, you need people in your life who make you feel warm,
loved, appreciated. This EP is called Back because I was thinking of soft, friendly, physical comfort, like hugs, like someone putting their hand on your back to reassure you. Metaphorically I feel like I never had this growing up, and once again, uh, this refers specifically to my mother, who I feel very much had a use for me but left me cold. That might not be how it seemed, even to myself, as it happened, but conditional love cannot be warm. The closest thing I had to affection was a purpose. I was a cash cow, I was treated like an infant god who would for sure win great acclaim in adulthood. I don't know if you've ever been a god but: a god is an object. People use gods, people worship gods because they have a use for those gods. To be treated like a god is to be objectified, they big you up with such words and you feel like lifeless meat on their table. But anyway: I wasn't a
whole god yet, I was an infant god, I was an investment. I was like a collectable figurine - provided that figurine has been kept in its original packaging.

Hence the lyric:
"grow old in mint condition
might as well have just been born
for all my love, desperate affection
my shawl is clear and plastic"

As a result, in my adulthood, up to what was at the time "the present", I had no idea how to connect with anyone socially, I had no experience of that whatsoever.
Oh, additional context there: when a parent tells you you're better than the "normal kids", that feels good, it feels good to hear it. And it isolates you.

There's another very significant thing that connects to all this, but it's personal and I don't want to speak its name to you.
I remind you though, in the Bandcamp description I did say:
"This is about neglect and addiction."

I really wanted this EP to sound very very cold, and I think I succeeded. And I think this is the best Siegely EP by far, and Touch is still one of my favourites of all my songs, it does everything it needs to do and does it quickly, weirdly, with (in my opinion) punch, groove, and damn strong melodies. This is the most completely realised Siegely EP, miles ahead of all the others though I don't know if it's incredibly comprehensible without explanation. It might actually still be the best thing I've released so far at time of writing.

Decided to do a 10th anniversary release of my first song.
It's a slightly different, groovier arrangement to how I wrote it, I still kinda like it.

This is the first and only release of Wings Means Monsters's companion song, Wings Means Freedom. I wrote the words for this around the same time, probably a few days later if I'm guessing, though possibly the same day, I don't know. Could have been months later, I don't know if I have any record, nor do I feel like checking.
Maybe I'll change this text or add something if I find out.

Anyway, though I wrote the words around the same time, age either 17 or 18, I wasn't able to write any music for it at all. Well, that's kind of not true, I did write a single chord progression at some point, but I forgot about it so completely that when I wrote this music I didn't even know it existed. I later found it in 2019, in a recording from February 2010, when listening through all my old shit looking for stuff I could maybe use. I don't think that's when the chord progression's from though, I think I wrote it earlier, I don't know when though. (I have to listen through all those old recordings again actually, to look exhaustively for things to put on the archive compilations, which don't exist at time of writing
but maybe do at time of reading?? :D)

How about that artwork, eh? This being a song inspired by Final Fantasy VII Crisis Core, I wanted to draw a buster sword, or maybe a black feather on the ground, maybe it was in a puddle, I don't remember. Maybe it was a buster sword with black feathers falling from above, or maybe it was a sort of buster sword/black feather hybrid. Whatever it was, I think the reason I didn't draw it is that I underestimated how bad at drawing I was, and since this had to be out on the 19th for the anniversary I didn't get it done in time. I can't seem to find any tweets that mention what the artwork was supposed to be, and I wasn't keeping a diary at this time either (it ends after July 2018, and then I started a new one in March 2019). I remember going for a walk and seeing a small feather on the ground and taking a photo of it, I think I might have used that to draw the feather you see here. Whatever the case, this is not the artwork I wanted, but oh well. The vocals aren't that good either. I still like this single but, all in all, it was never going to be the perfect version of itself.



Original Bandcamp description has a lot to say:

"10 years ago today I finished writing my first ever song, Wings Means Monsters, which I had started and written most of the previous day,
if I remember correctly. I was 17, it was a week before my 18th birthday.

Lyrically it's nothing so personal, I don't think so anyway. It was inspired by the PSP game Crisis Core, which I'd either just finished or was very near the end of.

I have a few different recordings of this song from around 2010/2011, played on keyboard and much faster than this, as it was when I wrote it.
Those are bad recordings and you'll never have them. The "guitar solo" in this version is new also.

Obviously the artwork right now is a placeholbder. There is also a b-side which is absent, some related lyrics I wrote around the same time called Wings Means Freedom,
which for one reason or another I never wrote music for originally. It's recorded but not mixed. I couldn't finish these in time for the anniversary,
thought it would be better to at least upload the original song on the day.

b-side added 25/07/2019, good fucking heavens that took a long time hey didn't it.
Been sad and not excited and specifically not excited about this release. Still haven't finished the artwork,
sort of don't care about it, don't actually have any ideas for it."

Oh yes, yeah, I didn't finish Wings Means Freedom for the original release date. Had totally forgotten it took me that long to do it though, wow.
It's not mentioned in my second diary either, there's a big gap in there between 10th July and 2nd September 2019,
and I open the September entry with "yeah it's been a fucking hot minute".
So there's really no extra context I can give about what I was feeling, why the b-side took so long.
Dun't matter really though does it. Just a little anniversary single.

When I first made and released this, I called it my life's work.
And it's pure truth that this is the first important thing I've ever done.

Following on from the events and conditions described just below under "if i live", well, here's what I remember: after I think maybe two days of doing absolutely nothing at all besides lying in bed, I figured that I could at least eat something, take care of the body, if nothing else. I found some small comfort in a few things (this list courtesy of the thanks on the original Bandcamp page): the music of a friend of a friend who had died semi-recently, the VODs of another friend's old Undertale streams, some ASMR videos, and a tweet by the host of a podcast I like. For some reason I distinctly remember getting annoyed at a Polygon video talking about Nobuo Uematsu's piece One-Winged Angel, where they talked about how it was inspired by Stravinsky's Rite Of Spring and then played a part of Rite Of Spring that bears no resemblance to One-Winged Angel, instead of the part that very obviously does. I think I might have clicked on that video thinking "let's hear someone good at music talk about music".

I remember at one point beginning to question every single impulse I had, asking myself "is this how I actually feel or is this a learned response? Is this fake and put on and not what I actually feel at all?". I really interrogated the shit out of everything, every feeling I seemed to have, everything I seemed to want to do. Every impulse. A lot of it completely eroded away, and I lost all "character" but felt very good about myself, felt honest. This is where the aforementioned list of things I found comfort in came in: with a couple of them I was testing to see if they made me feel anything. In the case of the tweet by a podcast host, that just showed up on my timeline and made me laugh a bit and the laugh felt real.
All of these things did make me feel things, but it wasn't super pronounced, wasn't grandiose or anything silly, was just casual and nice. Very small and comfortable stuff,
feelings that weren't a big deal or anything but were there.

One morning I was sitting downstairs, the only other person in the house asleep upstairs, thinking to myself, and I wondered why I even started playing keyboard at all, and I couldn't remember. I couldn't come up with a single reason why I did that when I was younger. And I thought, hey, what if I made one last thing? One last collection of songs,
and then packed it all in. No more music, after one last, completely honest collection of songs.

So I did that.



A lot of the material is older.

The pretentious overture is an arrangement of a theme that originated in Suite Of Bronze Baz on the "maybe you shouldn't" EP, four years earlier.

Church was something I had been trying to write for a few years and which I already had all the music for,
as heard on the first Soundcloud compilation under the name "clumsy alchemy".
I made a few attempts at writing the lyrics over the years but didn't stick the landing at all 'til this version. And it was always going to be about my parents.
In 2017 when I made the first Soundcloud compilation, I said of Clumsy Alchemy "This was going to be the opening track on an album about alternate versions of myself, like:
one where I really am a cis man, one where I'm a cis woman, one where I'm trans but didn't ever explore that possibility (Charlie The Man)."
I never made that album, and the idea isn't interesting to me anymore, but I'd forgotten that this was always meant to be on something with Charlie The Man.

Dildos was from 2013.

Most of Rip-Off's music was stored on my keyboard's flash memory. I didn't remember writing it, had no idea when it was from, but it was extremely obvious to me that it was a
rip-off of Tori Amos's song Leather, so I followed suit by making the start of every section's lyrics near identical before going off in its own direction. The fact of it being a rip-off was of course very conceptually relevant to the album and the way I was feeling at the time.

Charlie The Man is a song I started writing in late 2012. It's about a parallel version of myself who never ever figures/finds out she's trans and has a much worse time than me and ends up taking her life at age 29. I think I've probably got a few recordings of earlier, incomplete versions, but I had the whole first 5 minutes very very early on, and also everything from the big solo all the way to the end as well. And also the section right before the solo, though, being still quite young when I started it, I originally planned for that section to depict a school reunion, where people were remembering me and wondering what ever happened, having not seen me since school, not knowing that I had died, all of them describing the false character I played and tried to be and felt forced to be at school and none of them describing anything real. I think that idea seemed less and less relevant,
and also more and more juvenile, as I got older. The only things I wrote for this song there in June 2018 were the Church reprise (I think. Certainly its lyrics),
all the instrumental sections directly afterwards, and the lyrics for the whole vocal section after that, pre-solo.

So for totally original tracks, we have: Therapy, which I wrote when I was at one point feeling like Church wasn't good and needed to be replaced (a decision I rescinded like a day or two afterwards); Reference, for which I was imagining and trying to write something like Tony Banks's instrumental piece The Waters Of Lethe, though I couldn't actually remember how that went at all and it ended up sounding almost nothing like it; Even Then, although... well the middle section uses a chord progression I already had,
one of my recurring motifs, but that's just two chords, the rest was all new; and _ (pronounced "underscore"), which, uh, yeah, is just some music I wrote.

That's how I was able to "write the album in a week". I already had most of it.

I wanted to release it before my mum and her husband got back, but it took me a few days to record Reference's flute part, I can't remember why. I'm not great at flute now,
so, maybe I had to practice it. The take I ended up using certainly isn't perfect, though the way it ends was a real real happy accident.
I didn't write that chromatic drop and subsequent ascent at all, I was struggling to find the right note!



Aside from the thanks mentioned earlier and the credits that just say I did everything on the album, the original Bandcamp description just says this:
"FUN FACT: sometime in 2013 or 2014, i was idly playing the last "leaving motif" bit from Charlie The Man, and my mum suggested that maybe i could play that at her wedding, which is funny 'cos that song's about an alternate reality where i never figure out i'm trans and end up taking my life at age 29."
(this refers to the solo that leads into the ending section)



When I linked the album on Twitter I posted this little thread:
"i made this, this is where i've been for the past week and half"
"this is not very good and it's my life's work and every single thing i do now is extra. This is The thing that 27 years of me existing was heading towards."
"i'm basically in some kind of "afterlife" now, now i've done this."

And then later bumped it for attention by adding:
"hey, i completed my life's work today, it's a 35 minute album of bad recordings of bad performances of songs about what's actually real and not pretend."
"i know i'm bad at selling things but i'm just being honest about the thing i've made, it's not top quality by any means,
it's just the thing i've been unknowingly living for and working towards for 27 years"
(It was originally 35 minutes: Church had a long 8 minute clip at the end that was of my christening, around easter time 1991, with all names censored.
This has been removed, for personal reasons that I'm not inclined to give here.)



Before I go into the diary, there's a post I did on the 9th of July 2018, on a short-lived blog I had called "a time garden" (which is now private).
The post isn't entirely about this album but quite a lot of it is. This retreads a bunch of stuff I've already said but here's the relevant parts in (almost) full:

"Since I made it, I’ve occasionally thought about doing a post about the claire siegely album, talking about each individual song.
I decided not to and I can’t remember why, and I’m not going to now, but I’m going to talk about some of the things surrounding it.

In early June my mum and her husband went on holiday, leaving just me and my brother in the house. They do this every year and I tend to get a lot done just for the huge lack of stress. I can’t even feel it consciously, but when my mum is away for long enough, I just get a lot more focused, can think a lot more clearly, don’t have to numb myself with
video games nearly as much, or at all. I started writing two pieces of music a day and posting them on Soundcloud, the Contained Melody Practice pieces.

That lasted two days, ‘til I saw my bald spot in the mirror and was completely taken down by depression. I spent maybe two days in bed, I didn’t even eat at first but decided I could at least take care of the body, even if I lived for nothing else. I can’t remember anything of the train of thought but I just started feeling like I was still pretending, like even now, all the opinions and feelings and emotions and impulses that I thought were mine actually belonged to the person I thought I wanted to be. I stopped listening to music because I didn’t like it anymore, I stopped watching almost everything because I didn’t like it anymore. There’d be thoughts like “this thing that I’ve liked for 10 years or more, that could totally belong to that fake persona too, maybe I don’t even like it”. I questioned every opinion and feeling, everything, ’til they were all gone. Took a lot of strain with them,
it was the most free I’d ever felt.

One day, I was downstairs on my own just thinking out loud about all this and I just thought “I don’t actually even know why I started playing keyboard in the first place”.
Again, I don’t remember the train of thought, but the thread that started led me upstairs, I wanted to play my keyboard again, I can’t remember why.
Maybe it was just to see how it made me feel, I don’t know.

I wrote Even Then. The title just means, even back then, when I was a kid, maybe I was driven only by the desperate need for validation and attention,
maybe I only started playing keyboard to impress people, maybe it was never for myself. I didn’t decide what to call the album ‘til I was nearly done writing it,
I thought just “claire siegely” would fit ‘cos it’s literally about my own destruction at the hands of my parents, and how fake I am.

I was feeling like it might be the last music I ever make. I was calling it my life’s work, and I still do, nothing else I ever do will be as important I think.

I woke up in the morning, wrote for a few hours, then watched things for a bit just to chill out, then went to sleep in early afternoon, sleeping for a lot longer than you’re supposed to. The most focused I’ve ever been. I refused to listen to any music at all, except for one album by a friend of a friend, who died a few years ago. The only things I watched were ASMR videos and a friend’s old Undertale streams. I paid attention to Twitter occasionally and a comedian I follow did a really good joke that I couldn’t help but laugh at.
This was kind of proof that, even when there’s no pressure to be that thing that I’m not, when I’m relaxed and divorced, I do still have feelings and opinions.
I am a person without it. Some things do make me laugh, some girls are cute.

The album is in chronological order, but Even Then is my ending. As I said in the description, Charlie The Man is about an alternate version of myself who never realised she was trans, and ended up taking her life at age 29. I started writing that song in 2012. Dildos is from early 2013 and is about the oppressive atmosphere my dad created, and I really did lie and tell him I don’t know what dildos are once, at maybe around age 15 or 16. He said “good”. Pretentious Overture is obviously (if you’ve heard it) the ending of Bronze Baz from the “maybe you shouldn’t” EP from 2014, arranged a little differently. I’ve had that arrangement for a few years. Even Then actually ends exactly the same as Bronze Baz too but it was completely accidental, same key and all. And _ (pronounced “underscore” if you wanna pronounce it) was sort of “discovered” through improvisation, to me it sort of feels like a zoom-out, like the end of Charlie The Man is my alternate self taking her life, and then _ is a bird’s eye view of her corpse, slowly zooming out, end scene.

Invisible as it is, the artwork includes a bunch of old school photographs and a screenshot of my christening. [Church is] about my parents’ wedding by the way, not my christening, but they both happened at the same church I’m pretty sure. I watched old baby videos trying to regain a sense of what those old times felt like, and the christening was too good an opportunity to pass up. I wish I could credit the vicar. I still wouldn’t if I knew his name, incase it’d somehow give away my hometown, but I wish I could.

And Reference was a rip-off of The Waters Of Lethe by Tony Banks but I hadn’t listened to that song for a long time and couldn’t remember how it went. Rip-Off was a thing I found on my keyboard’s flash memory when looking for other things I could maybe use for songs, it sounds exactly like Leather by Tori Amos so I went all in and referenced
that song’s lyrics at the start of every verse too, very fitting for someone who has no original ideas and only aspires to be exactly like other people.

And Therapy was written to replace Church as the second track, ‘cos I didn’t like the lyrics I’d written for Church. It turned out I did like those lyrics after all and I just hated everything in the afternoon, and I was just working on Church too late in the day. And Therapy happened to go pretty well after Church. “Jack” is my brother, he’s the
identified patient of the family if anyone is. I remember him and my parents coming home from a session once and my dad just laying into him and my mum,
talking about how they “ganged up on him”. I think even the best psychiatrist couldn’t have helped my brother, and couldn’t now. What he needs is to
recognise the ways our parents have fucked him up, both our parents, and to stop being afraid of their judgment. Easier said than done of course,
but, that’s what he needs, and until that happens, no therapist could ever help him.

So there, I guess I did talk about all the songs."

(There are a few similar/identical phrases in there to what I'd already written for this page. I had not read the blog post beforehand, and probably haven't since I wrote it. I think this is probably an autism thing, for instance it's almost certain that in the moment I decided to eat food again I thought the exact phrase "take care of the body" and it stuck with me.)

(Also if anything in this blog post contradicts what I've written, trust the blog post first, it was written only a month after the events in question.)



Okay let's dip into the diary.
This follows on directly from the excerpt given in If I Live's description (dated "19th and 20th" June 2018. Most likely the 19th I think):

"Somehow started having feelings about having no identity, did a post on a subreddit about it, started questioning every thought, opinion, emotion, impulse, absolutely everything. Was talking to myself like a cunt one day when I thought basically “i don’t know why the fuck I even started playing keyboard that time”, why I ever fucking started, why I ever fucking took it up to my room and wrongly learned to play Happy Birthday. Stopped everything and went upstairs to play it, can’t remember exactly why, maybe to see if it felt good, to question those feelings, I don’t know. Eventually became clear I had to do some songs, I don’t remember this whole process really, eventually it became clear I had to write a couple new songs, finish some old ones, record them all and upload them that week. I think it was Wednesday or Thursday that I decided that. Everything was written very quickly. I stopped paying any attention to Twitter in this time too, the last tweets on my account were stuff about like, “not just my family but this world has made me tantalus so much”, just feeling like giving up. Listened to some classical music at some point, watched a couple interviews with Nobuo Uematsu. Anyway that was all before I started playing keyboard again, that was when I was lying in bed. At some point I decided to carry on eating food, as like, “let’s take care of the body”, I think, something like that.

When I had started writing, I decided I couldn’t listen to anything other than [musician friend of a friend]. I wanted to listen to Fiona Apple to see if I like her music but I didn’t let myself. I wanted to listen to A Curious Feeling too. Reference is based on what I remembered of the vibe of Waters Of Lethe. I’m not really qualified to talk about everything because I’m not the girl I was then, as usual everything regressed when Mum and [her husband] came back. I was still watching [friend]’s old Undertale streams that week,
and that was good. Undyne started appealing to me a little, as a role model, kind of. I can’t exactly imagine that now, not really. All I know is that it was real then,
it felt a lot more real than anything does now. I think that was the real me."

"I’m still kind of trying to act the same, act like I did then, or, trying to feel what I felt then, but it isn’t working. [brother] is suppressing too, but Mum and [her husband] are so suppressing I actually don’t know who I am, all I can “feel” are the things I think I “should” feel. Yeah not even just stuff they’d see, everything.
When they’re around I cannot feel anything about anything."

"One thing I can say is that I wasn’t sure if Church was going to make it onto the album so I wrote Therapy one morning to replace it. I had realised at some point that I hated everything I was doing when I was doing it in the afternoon, but liked it in the morning, so I only worked in the morning. I slept in the afternoon a lot too, waking up around 4 or 6am, sleeping for a long time. Sometimes not having any tea [as in dinner]. Nothing else was important. Sometimes I was overworked and had to chill out, that was either ASMR or [friend]’s Undertale streams. It became pretty easy to live like this, it became easy very quickly, it wasn’t a schedule but it was very smooth and fluid: I’d wake up, have breakfast, work until I was bored, chill out with ASMR or Undertale, then work again, then sleep. I think there were two or three or maybe four days like this. Yeah I decided to look at Church again in the morning, having written most of the lyrics in the afternoon and hating them, and I found I actually pretty much liked them, didn’t have to change much. Nothing else worked after the intro, it had to be Church, and Therapy worked really well after Church too. After writing Therapy I watched [videos from when me and my siblings were children, which my dad put on a DVD at one point and I name that DVD here, but you can't have that name], hoping it’d help me write Church somehow, having nothing connected to their wedding but just, somehow hoping those old vibes would give me something to work with. I think it did remind me of what things were like back then, maybe not completely. The world was so different and so much more insular. Being alive felt different after watching it, I felt more like myself in a way, things felt like they did back then. Maybe it’s an autistic thing, I don’t know. I think that feeling might be what I’m supposed to be feeling all the time, that that’s the feeling of being nothing but yourself, not living a lie, something
like that. I don’t know. I mean maybe it’s an autistic thing that I have a distinct feeling for that, that I can feel consciously and recognise. I was going to use
[brother]’s christening for the end of the song but it ended up being mine, I guess I just felt like... fuck, I don’t know. I never rewatched [brother]’s
and maybe if I did I would’ve picked his instead. Maybe that would’ve linked the two songs better.

Anyway that’s probably all I’m really qualified to say about it conceptually. I wasn’t able to finish recording it until last Friday, my computer needed to be fixed, wouldn’t boot up, and I needed to rehearse the flute part. Everything else was recorded when Mum and [her husband] were away, but I couldn’t record Reference ‘til that Friday. Fuck how I wanted to finish it in that week. The artwork didn’t end up how I wanted it to but it’s not so bad I think. Somewhere in the writing process I was thinking about what to even call the album (and I hadn’t decided to even call it an album yet, that happened after uploading it), not wanting to actually make any decisions incase that’d make it hard to write the songs. Somehow decided it’d be good to just call it “claire siegely”, and that it kind of is like “the creation of” in a way, like, what fucking things led me to this point.

I don’t know if anyone’s listened to it. Someone I don’t really know called Georgia said she listened to a couple songs and they made her teary eyed,
that it was beautiful or sad or something, so that was nice to hear.

That took a lot longer to talk about than I expected, I kind of hope that does it justice, I feel like there’s nothing I could really do to describe exactly where I was at at that time.
I wish I could go back there. I was so focused on this one goal, nothing else was important to me, not my friends, not the world, nothing."

"I have interests and they weren’t there the week I felt nothing. That week was very good for me and I want it all the time. I was frowning not ‘cos I was sad but ‘cos I didn’t feel happy, I try frowning now and my face still does this thing of “yeah but we can at least pretend we’re feeling something”, something like that, and, no, I don’t want it.
I don’t want to pretend to feel something. If I feel nothing, I want to actually feel nothing."

I'd forgotten about that. Yeah, in the week when this was all happening, I felt the corners of my mouth relax, and it was the first time I'd ever felt that happen. And honestly even right now here in February 2025 as I type this, they're tense, as if they need to be prepared for something. The corners of my mouth just relaxed and felt normal for that week.
I didn't even know they hadn't been feeling normal 'til then.

To this day I still think of June 2018 as this brief snapshot of, well, of what it feels like to just be basically healthy.
This brief snapshot of what my real, unadulterated and unfiltered self is probably like, which I did not have the privilege of ever being allowed to see before.
For just one single week I was a version of myself that lived without tyranny, without any pressure, without any fear.
Without any need to pretend, without any need to fake, without any need to hide, without any need to wear a false personhood.
Without any need to contort myself into strange, sickening, acceptable shapes.
I still talk about it sometimes, I still think about it, I still reference it in my diary.
Other good things have happened since but not even any single moment has ever been better.

Maybe that sounds grandiose and pretentious. It's definitely some real big talk, and I can't say I'm really comfortable describing it like this myself.
But it is accurate. You wouldn't know, you don't live in my mum's house.

In June 2018 my mum and her husband went on holiday abroad for two weeks, chance it might have started in late May, I don't remember. I made a lot of music in the first week, individual little tracks that went on Soundcloud, and then I tried to write a vocal song and absolutely crashed. Part of the reason for this crash was that this was the longest I'd ever gone, maybe ever in my life, without seeing my mum, and I think I didn't know how to feel at all. When you've lived 27 years with your defences up, what do you even feel
when you're, even just for a short time, able to drop them completely? This was nearly 7 years ago now and I don't remember all the specifics of what it felt like anymore,
but I remember failing to write a short song called Just A Glimpse, crashing really badly, and then doing absolutely nothing but lying in bed for maybe two days.

I guess I'll do the rest of the story in the next thing's description, but that's the context for this track.
I don't remember exactly when in the full sequence of events it was that I made this, it might have been after I was already feeling a little better, I don't know.
I think it's possible that "if I live" refers specifically to "if I ever manage to get out of this house and into a real life of my own choosing".



Original bandcamp description is just:
"no vocals.
thanks to andy and meryl"
and I won't tell you which Andy or which Meryl but the reason for the gratitude is that both of them recommended VST plugins.
In Andy's case it was the Tapeworm, Mellotron VST, and in Meryl's case it was a very cool synth sound. This track consists only of these two VSTs.



Diary excerpt from "19th and 20th" June, 2018:
"Two weeks ago Mum and [her husband] went on holiday to some fucking place, I don’t care. That week I started doing “Contained Melody Practice”, and then stopped when I saw my bald spot and was destroyed, I lied in bed for a long time thinking about maybe just not eating, listening to [musician]. I made some music in LMMS called “if i live” and made it “my first single”, the artwork is some edited pieces of a picture of my face at the time, the state I was in, bearded and unwashed and NOT FEELING GREAT and all that fuck, over an edited screenshot of a [musician] video where he’s playing [song] live somewhere"

Huh. Had totally forgotten it was my bald spot caused the crash.
It's got worse since then but I'm at (relative) peace with it.
We can't all transition at 23, even in cases where that actually is the age we were
when we went to our doctor in the first place and should have been prescribed HRT then.

What happened next is in the description of the next item.



Oh here's a tweet I just found from the 1st of June 2018:
"wild prediction:
i will finally finish the EP i've been "working on" for almost a year and a half, Paper Sky, next week.

Largely due to my mum and her husband being away and the house being a much healthier place for me to be"

So I guess it was all in June that this all happened.
And I'm guessing I was doing so much melody practice because I wanted to gear up to finish Paper Sky.
Didn't happen. But a much better thing happened instead.

A tribute to the artist who saved my life in 2006, but not the one I wanted to make.

There's some extra context for this that I don't remember, a friend on Twitter said something to me in DMs and it inspired me. I'll look it up in a bit. Crystal Girl was a tribute to her, rather than to the aforementioned artist, and it was originally just called Crystals before I changed the name about an hour and a half after uploading.

In a tweet from the time, I say:
"i never liked it being called "crystals" but was too exhausted from work to change it when i uploaded it.

other two's working titles were "hikari" and "transferral" respectively"



Original bandcamp description says:
"ready to try to take my place in eternal baton pass, eternal gardening"

"all things made by Claire Siegely in 12 hours and 10 minutes, across 3 days (really not a personal best unfortunately, sorry.
The first two tracks were finished in the first two of those hours though)"

And there's also an added bit in brackets that says:
"(made available again temporarily, on 26th September 2023, for reasons)"
I did this as foreshadowing for the Gemstone Heart website. More on that further up this page.



Okay so here's the skinny.

That conversation in DMs meant so much to me that I copied it into a notepad document and saved it. I'm not going to copy and paste it over here
since it's a conversation with someone else, and she hasn't consented to that, but I can at least tell you the gist of it.

I asked her what her reasons to live were, because I had reasons to not die but felt no actual reasons to live. (If I remember correctly we had a friendship where this was not an incredibly weird thing to ask, both passionate neurodivergent artists curious about life and stuff.) She had several answers and one of them was: to put beauty into the world as a way of paying back, or paying forward, the beauty that the world had given her. That appealed to me, and made me think of the artist who saved my life in 2006 and how maybe I could pay that forward. There was a little more back and forth, and, it turned out that she had an artist who saved her too, and we talked about being obsessed with these people. And then she said, essentially: people like us want to find what made the people we're obsessed with so wonderful, so we can emulate it, because we feel we don't have it. But the truth is that we do have that thing, whatever it is, and (if I'm interpreting her words right) that having that thing is what draws us to those people in the first place. And she said that everyone has that kind of depth to them, and that, since figuring that out, she's tried to see everyone the same way she sees the artist who saved her life.



According to my diary (entry dated the 17th of March 2018), I was in a real depression for maybe a couple weeks, having realised I had no reasons to live.

On the 6th of March I tweeted a thread that started:
"i figured out today that i kinda don't really have a lot of reason to live,
just leaning towards living 'cos i won't be able to get it back if i lose it.

there're people i love but i wish there were things i was excited about"

The whole thread's kind of long and isn't very interesting but basically it seems like the real problem was that I felt hopeless, like there was no chance of anything getting better,
and I was unsatisfied with my work and with the fact I wasn't making good enough music to get paid for the work. But yeah, big depression. This was all swept away by the aforementioned DM conversation, which happened on the 14th. And in the middle of this conversation I found out that the artist who saved my life had posted a new song,
the first one in 8 or 9 years. It felt like fate, like some magical connection. And there was a verse in it that wasn't about any of this but, if read that way, made complete sense.
Just pure poetic coincidence. But I like those, sometimes I entertain the idea there's something happening cosmically when they happen, even though that wouldn't be realistic.



Diary excerpts (from that same 17th March entry):
"So I knew, after that, this is what I need to do. If [artist] can spread her love so far, mean so much to me, save my life, then maybe I can do that
by doing the same thing as her, even though I can’t help but be different to her. My magic is different to hers.
So this all got me out of bed.
And I set to work on a new quick project, a new Siegely EP. It took three days and a little over 12 hours of active work (it’s hard to calculate stray thoughts, and
especially hard to calculate things happening in the subconscious), and it’s in some ways the best Siegely one and in some ways a god damn failure,
mainly because of my fucking terrible vocals. But it was a rush job and, I guess that’s, fucking, that.
I absolutely didn’t achieve what I wanted to achieve with it, it ended up being “the not quite what I was going for because I can’t actually do that” EP, the song one on it is called This Isn’t The Song ‘cos I actually wanted to write a much happier song, ended up writing a song about not being able to write happy songs. It being my first proper song in a very long time now (a few months), I had no steam built up and there’s a bunch I don’t like about it. But there are one or two things I do like a lot and, mainly the second part of the “keyboard solo”, where the sparklies come in. I feel like I’m gonna reuse that somewhere else and turn it into a motif of some kind."

"A lot of my songs have been painful, and, bad. I learned late last year, or earlier this year? That you’re supposed to actually enjoy music, so I decided to actually make songs I like. And now all I’m feeling is, I want to give people the love that [artist] gave me. The description of the kokoro EP is just “ready to take my place in eternal baton pass,
eternal gardening”. [artist] gave me this, maybe I can give other people it, and they can give more people it, and so on and so on until the whole world is in love.
Maybe someone gave [artist] it, maybe it wasn’t music for her and that’s just how her heart gives love.

This is my reason to live."

(This is, however, readers, no longer my reason to live. Or at least it's not so grandiose. I want people to have a fun time and to be really excited about music, and feel a great big connection, but my reason to live is more personal than that, and it's to do with my personal life and I don't want to put it in writing here. It is very much the case that sometimes, these days, when I get really really into songwriting, I feel probably similar to how Brian Wilson felt when he was writing Smile in 1966/1967, when apparently he told someone he was someday gonna write music people will pray to (if I remember correctly. Was a while ago I was reading about all that). So it's still a really big deal to me, but my reason to live is something much more on a smaller and personal scale now. In fact I don't think this big "giving other people the love that I was given" thing lasted very long.
But hey: got me out of bed. And that is necessary, that is valuable, I'm not making a joke here.)

I could not finish a Claire Siegely EP called Fly The Paper Sky, Time After Time, 'til You Forget Life And Labyrinth.
I could not finish a dreampop EP called Wildcard, to be released under the name Stretchsqueaks.
I could not finish a sort of weird, aggressive, industrial/outsider/idk EP called Belpus, to be released under the name part one pariah(s).
So I put the songs I had finished here, on this little "record label" compilation, and promised to finish these EPs next year.
(I did not finish these EPs the next year, or ever.)

Let's talk about these.

Piss Smell In The Kitchen is as it sounds. This one wasn't meant for any of the aforementioned EPs, it's original to this. The kitchen in our house smelled of piss,
and had done for days, and no one had ever mentioned it or seemed to notice it at all. Eventually they acknowledged it, but only after I brought it up.
So this is just a silly little song about that, nothing more to it. (I do not know why the kitchen smelled of piss.)

Hand and New House. Wildcard and Belpus. These EPs were two sides of the same coin, and I'm still not really comfortable talking about the subject in detail and maybe never will be but it pertains to sexuality. "Belpus" was a name I came up with for a demon, basically a representation of the feeling of temptation, each one of us maybe has one. I don't use this name for it anymore, it was silly, but it was probably helpful at the time to sort of solidify it in this way, give that subconscious force a name. I wrote almost all of the music for the Wildcard EP but almost no lyrics, and the only lyric I was satisfied with was the one for Hand. I wrote even less for Belpus, though there's a finished song in there that I never released, and another song that I finished the first part of, that I still kinda like. New House is garbage though, I really didn't like it at the time and it hasn't grown on me much since.

As for the outfits: Stretchsqueaks was an attempt to make cute and soft music, dreampop, though the only other plan I ever had with it was a second EP, the sequel to Wildcard and Belpus, which was called Dimension and was meant to be about reaching out and connecting with people. I wrote a few bits of music for that, one of which was a complete song's worth, but no lyrics. "part one pariah(s)" was a name I'd come up with a while earlier, I don't remember when. Belpus was honestly an odd choice for the thing: I wanted to do very aggressive political music with it. The name refers to icons of leftism who become more placid and ineffectual and maybe capitalist over time, as their attempts to change the
status quo become more and more successful and they find themselves in an increasingly comfortable life. It was a theory of mine that this happened regularly, and I'd certainly seen a little evidence that it did and does. I don't really think about it anymore though. I put an S in brackets at the end because I think I imagined that maybe someday it wouldn't be
a solo project. But yeah I was sort of sarcastically saying "if you think I'm/we're doing great leftist music now, just you wait until we get popular, 'cos if we do, it'll all turn to shit", not really believing that it'd happen to me but sort of anticipating that it might.

Dance Icarus was for Paper Sky, and I was really satisfied with it when I wrote it, and I still do like it a lot, but it is just an A B A B structure, very simple stuff.



The EP, Fly The Paper Sky, Time After Time, 'til You Forget Life And Labyrinth, was entirely inspired by the nothingness, fake personality, and total lack of any motion but
pretend motion I saw in my brother. I actually wrote three out of its five intended songs, and a couple more besides, but Dance Icarus is the only one I recorded.
The original track order was thus:

1. Knees
2. Dance Icarus
3. Monologue In Space Out There/Junk Motion
4. Life And Labyrinth
5. GTFO

Knees started out as an attempt at writing something that sounded like Peter Gabriel's We Do What We're Told (Milgram's 37). On the 30th of December 2016 I tweeted "i now exclusively do music that sounds like Peter Gabriel's We Do What We're Told (Milgram's 37)", and, I can't remember if I started this track on the same day but it was around that time. It ended up with far more lyrics though, and it's called Knees because at the time I really felt like my emotions were in my knees, like I was stifling my emotions away and where they'd ended up was my knees. I still think there's a strong connection between knees and emotions, just in general. For one thing, if you need any evidence, that's famously where you get weak whenever someone's really charming. But, yes, this is a song about hiding emotions away, your secrets are in your knees.

Dance Icarus and GTFO are both about a metaphor I'd come up with a few years earlier using Greek mythology, check this out: Tantalus playing with a paper Icarus. You see, Tantalus famously is not allowed to be nourished, he reaches for water and it drains away, he reaches for fruit and the branches raise up too high. He is tortured by things constantly seeming to be within reach, and then shrinking away. But... he knows this. Whether he feels it's a suitable punishment or not is not relevant, my point is he knows what's going on, he knows exactly by whose hand these things evade him. Wouldn't you get resentful? Even if it was suitable, after a few years, wouldn't you start to hate the gods? Now imagine this: same exact situation, but the gods have tricked Tantalus into believing he is Icarus. What Icarus's situation famously is is that he is trying to escape the labyrinth by waxen wings, but he must not fly too close to the sun nor too close to the sea, as the sun would melt the wax and the water would soak the feathers. It is Icarus's own fault that he fails, he did not do it right. But Tantalus isn't Icarus, in this scenario he's just been made to play the part. He does not fall into the sea and drown, he has infinite chances to "get it right", infinite chances to figure out how to fly perfectly between the sun and the sea, so he thinks. But in reality he's reaching and reaching and, no matter what he does, the drinking water drains away, the fruit recedes, because for god's sake he's not Icarus, it's not his fault at all, he's Tantalus. This is what living with abusers is like, you're constantly trying to figure out
the way to "get it right", and it never is right. They will never appreciate you, you will never get the love you want. But they very much do want to keep you on the hook.

Monologue In Space Out There/Junk Motion is far less sympathetic, and honestly probably would have been incongruous with the rest of the EP. I think the first part,
"Monologue In Space Out There", just refers to getting really sick of hearing my brother talk to himself. Silly garbage, shouldn't have attempted to write a song about it. I think it was mostly gonna be instrumental though, I can't honestly remember any of the music I wrote for either part of this track but I seem to remember the first half maybe being pretty ambient. "Junk Motion" however was not silly garbage, though it's super specific and I don't know if it would have been a worthwhile song to have made in retrospect. The phrase "junk motion" refers to, just, filling up your tasklist with totally unimportant shit, treating it all as equal, and I did this too but only when I was young, I remember around age 18 thinking "I got a bit further in Final Fantasy X today, so that's something, wish I'd written some music though but oh well", something like that. Like, in a very literal sense
you are doing things, but I ask you what things? It is technically motion but it's just pure junk, in the way. You need a sense of priorities for god's sake.
See what I mean about this song being so specific that I don't think it would have been worthwhile?

Life And Labyrinth, now this song was going to be long, like, I think I wanted it to be about 15 minutes. I wrote a looooot of music for this, the vast majority of which I ended up cutting and replacing and shoving off to the side. The whole song was about the way that being so strongly influenced and smothered by abusive people can completely change how you express, how you see yourself, what you feel, everything. The labyrinth in question is the mind, and I had this metaphor of: every time you have a thought or a feeling, it has to go through this great big maze, passing by every checkpoint set up by those abusive people, going through all sorts of filters, until finally it comes out of you in some completely warped form that does not represent what you actually originally thought or felt at all. But if you sort yourself out, a process that of course takes years, you can get rid of all of that shit and just have perfectly clean, fluid pathways in your brain, where if there are any filters there at all they're ones that you set up yourself on your own terms. No longer a great maze, and your thoughts and feelings are no longer exhausted, nor shit, by the time they actually leave your mouth. It's as true now as it was then, honestly a timeless concept.
This would not have been a good song about it.

Looking at an old text file, I had planned for this song to have seven sections, which are as follows:

i) Reflected Eagles' Voices
ii) Who Are You To You? (prise)
iii) Your Name Is
iv) Part Of A Secret Letter From Alecto
v) Pandora's Knees
vi) Labyrinth
vii) Who Are You To You (reprise)

And my notes have a question mark on the first Who Are You To You but not the second, so, I think that is correct. I don't know though.

Reflected Eagles' Voices was like two seconds long, it was just me saying "this is this, that is that", and I'm 100% certain that that comes from my brother constantly making very obvious comparisons between things, however the title suggests that I thought that behaviour was directly influenced by abusive family members. I used "eagles" to describe them sometimes back then, not an incredibly clever metaphor, referring to "eagle eyed", people who always caught every single fuckup you made. You couldn't so much as accidentally say something slightly weirdly, just a little vocal malfunction as you're saying a word, without them noticing and whipping you into shape for all your worth. It was somehow a very casually strict life, as contradictory as that sounds. And so we learned to anticipate their every critique, metaphorically curling and contorting our speech and movements into grotesque non-human shapes to avoid ridicule. I have recordings where I talk in a way so reflective of what I was trying to avoid that I do not sound like a person.
It still makes me irrationally angry whenever I listen to old recordings where I do that, or if I ever happen to sound like it now.

The only other sections I wrote any words for are the first Who Are You To You and Your Name Is, though Who Are You To You has like a million commas in and I don't know if it's comprehensible. It was still a fairly good lyric for me at the time, but, yeah. It's supposed to be asking like "do you really believe that this grotesque contorted thing is you?",
but, for example, one line is "do you, solid, still, assume, like all this time, you're every hair". The music was pretty good though.

Your Name Is was backstory, "your life up to this point", "the you you've been told you are", and how much of a lie that obviously was.

The meanings of most of the rest are obvious given everything I've already said, but, as for Part Of A Secret Letter From Alecto: I saw myself as Alecto, the member of the Eumenides responsible for punishing moral crimes - but wait, it's not as it sounds. I felt that this is the purpose I had been given by my parents, against the world, and honestly I'm still sure that this is true, that I was intended to go out into the world and correct it. Both of my parents are conservative in different ways, and I learned very well what is and is not right, just by being in that household. The indulgences of society, how pathetic and animal "normal people" are, how base sexuality is. All a load of authoritarian tosh of course. I was intended to go out into the world and clean it up, correct it in much the same way that every conservative parent feels their children must be corrected. Well anyway, this is why the letter was secret: "you need to get the fuck out of this life and find a new one, but it could be bad for both you and me if they know I'm telling you this".
I never actually wrote any words for this part of the song though, I think I already hated the song by this point.

I tried so hard to do this song, so hard to force something that just wasn't working.

Of course eventually I gave up on the EP. I held on to it waaay longer than I should have though, like, well over a year, maybe a year and a half. I even made several attempts to replace the middle track, Monologue/Junk, which really wasn't working. I wrote two whole other songs for this purpose, one being a recommendation to let yourself actually feel anger, even if you never show it outwardly, called Unkilled Anger, and another one that, uh, I don't remember all the details about anymore but that I think was kind of a
"they're controlling you" song, called One Bed. Neither of them are good.

I don't remember what prompted me to finally give up on it. Might have been June 2018, but that's just a guess, I don't actually remember.
The last diary entry where I mention it at all is halfway through May 2018, where I say:

"This past week or two I’ve been trying over and over to write Junk Motion, like I’m possessed, unyieldingly gripped by some need to record this, I don’t know why. I need to finish Paper Sky, an impulse much like clawing my way out of an early grave. I wrote two bad songs for Junk Motion’s position (Unkilled Anger and One Bed), and tried to rearrange the original version from the Monologue In Space Out There/Junk Motion version. Also tried a couple things for the Secret Letter section of Life And Labyrinth. Found myself failing, the arms wailing against stone, every single time. Compared it to Sisyphus, ‘cos of course I would. Came up with an idea for the Eclipse EP [the cancelled SiegeFeathers one "Eclipse This, Fucker"] called Sisyphus Throwing Stones, was thinking: if I can’t, if I just fucking can’t write Paper Sky or any other important songs in my current state, I could at least do instrumental bullshit, like Sisyphus angrily and bitterly throwing stones to the top of the hill. Wrote a cool little bit of wah wah guitar but the two lines of lyric I wrote weren’t great, melody could never feel right, gave up on it."



...and Echo Trying was a sort of attempt at empathising with my mother's younger self, not at all her current self but whatever version of her there was before whatever led her down the path she ended up going down did so. I don't believe anyone in the world is born evil, I think that you're born without any malice in you and your only motivations are to survive and to connect. Nobody is naturally a bad person, nobody in the world, and this song was my attempt at going "this person who has done so much damage to me was once an innocent person, being misled". It's also the last ever Existential Pout song, at least right now, and I have no intentions of ever doing anything else under that name, so yeah it most likely always will be. My acoustic guitar broke at some point after this as well, so, I don't even have the means to do Existential Pout at the moment.

The title of this release: I originally wanted to call this "alecto kills at christmas", and that was meant to be a reference to myself coming out as trans to my whole family,
there on Christmas day. It didn't happen though, and it's good that it didn't.



Original bandcamp description says:

"This here is a compilation featuring three tracks from EPs I meant to finish this year but couldn't, and two other songs."
(and then it lists them: Wildcard, Belpus, and Paper Sky.)

"I've been working on the first two for about three months and the third one for literally all year, Dance Icarus itself being written on the 5th of January (2017).
All three will definitely(!!!) be finished next year I'm sure.

So this is sort of an apology for not finishing them this year, including a couple other songs I wrote on a whim (those usually go on Scloud).
And also a promise to finish them next year. And "Floral Temporal" is my made up record label.

...shoot it just passed midnight. Oh well. 28 is a nice number, I don't mind having uploaded something on the 28th instead of the 27th. (It's still the 27th in my heart though)"



Diary entry from 27th December 2017 has this to say:
"I managed to finish the compilation, called it “alecto did not kill at christmas after all”. I already hate it, the production and performance actually leaves a lot to desire. I will probably change the mixes of both Hand and New House. We already knew this’d be a totally different version of Dance Icarus so, yeah. It seems like I “learn by doing” in the sense that I don’t learn a fucking thing until I call something “finished”, and then instantly find a million things I hate about the “finished” thing. Still, i’m really glad I managed to finish this at least, and the artwork turned out pretty good for me, five things all merged into one space: a photo of our Christmas tree, a photo of me in the Christmas jumper, a drawing of a hand that turned out a lot fucking better than I was expecting it to, a drawing of Icarus flying above the ocean, and last year’s photo of myself wearing a Santa hat. All merged into one space, opacity altered so they’re all visible to varying degrees, and with a slight vignette filter put on to make it maybe feel a little more special, or something. I thought it looked good. Oh yeah and, this is the first time i’ve used the name “Floral Temporal” on bandcamp. I want to only properly change the page to that when I finally do my album, which’ll be next year or the year after, most likely the latter. But hopefully there’ll be some “Floral Temporal Theatre” shit before then."

I guess I was thinking of changing the bandcamp page's name to Floral Temporal. Weird. Never happened.
And I have no idea what "Floral Temporal Theatre" was. Zero memory of that. Looking around, that entry is the first mention of it,
and there are two subsequent mentions but neither of them actually say what it was.

I don't remember how recently it started but I became unable to stop thinking about and being scared of death,
and not just my death but the death of everything, the fact that someday all of this will just be dust floating in space.

(I use "someday this will all just be dust floating in space" as a reason to not worry about insignificant things now, so, ups and downs.
I use "I won't be thinking about this on my deathbed" too.)

I couldn't stop thinking about it. All of this is pointless.
The one and only thing that this all "adds up to" is nothingness, just bits and pieces floating in space, in a universe with no life left. Total emptiness.
Well... that's how it feels if you think things need to add up to something. Obviously they don't. But, yeah, this hit me in a really big way back then.

History is a track that depicts the final party, enjoyed by all the rich people who burned the world and everyone on it and saved themselves, proud, naive, and certain that they could avoid the inevitable, until it was hellfire at their door. Isn't it hotter than it used to be? Where's the electrician, the AC isn't working anymore. I imagined some device, whatever we're using to play mp3s in the future, floating in space with some battery life left, playing this last ever pop hit into the void, the last remains of humanity to an audience of no one. We're still young, still sexy, and we're gonna very poetically party hard until the end comes. Shame there was nothing we could have done differently.
I've always wanted to actually write the song as well. Still haven't yet, maybe someday.



Bandcamp description was just:
"don't listen to this. i only uploaded it 'cos i felt like i had to."

I remember not being comfortable talking about it at all,
and I think also especially not wanting to scare anyone,
not wanting anyone to get as scared about it as I was.



The first and only mention of this EP in my diary is in an entry from the 4th of January 2018, which is a long entry where I talk about fear of death.

Here's the relevant paragraph, though it's kind of mostly not about the EP and is about something else:

"I think my fear of humanity’s eventual end comes from this fear of death, directly, and after making the dead universe EP in December, like, half an hour later, I wrote lyrics for a song called Sentient Animal Heart, about how, if I just look with my eyes, I see my house, I guess there are ways to “see time” but you can’t see the concept itself. If I embody my physical self I won’t have thoughts about the universe and death. But I guess I never really tried actually doing that much ‘cos, nothing ever stopped the thoughts, at night. Every night. Those never actually stopped. And I think maybe I was naive. One of the lines is “Gilgamesh knew how to love” and I just, when faced with the knowledge that there is
no such thing as eternal, I do not turn to my loved ones and love them more deeply than ever before, I hide away. I run away."

(If I try to sleep without listening to some talking, my thoughts, without fail, turn to my own death. This still happens to this day.
Also I have no memory of Sentient Animal Heart. I doubt I wrote any music for it. I dunno if those lyrics are any good.)

In late July of 2017 I came off of HRT, and it wrecked me.

The truth is, I didn't need to at all. The facts are thus: I had read that a very unlikely but possible side-effect of HRT is jaundice, and one day I was looking in the mirror and noticed a very slight yellow patch on one of my eyeballs. My eyes didn't look in the best of health in general either. Unrelatedly, by which I mean extremely relatedly, this was a point in time where I was sleeping next to a laptop every night, the laptop being on my bed right next to my face, my eyes about as close to its glowing screen as they could be. It's very very obvious in retrospect that this was not good for my eyes and was almost certainly the reason I might have seen signs my eyeballs weren't healthy. I made a mistake.

Another fact though is that I was probably always gonna have to come off HRT eventually. I couldn't afford it, I was getting maybe £5 a month from Patreon and was making GoFundMe pages every three months. Not sustainable. It's honestly surprising that that lasted as long as it did (and very lovely that people kept contributing). I wish I could have stayed on, and I wish I hadn't come off for such a silly and obviously wrong reason, but it was inevitably gonna happen eventually. I've been back on once or twice since but not for long. I still don't earn enough to afford it, at time of writing, but hey, at least my work's kinda good now, maybe it'll happen soon.

Like I said, I was wrecked though. This all happened in late July, and the song here, Half, seems to be the first song I wrote afterwards that I was remotely happy with,
about three and a half months later. And I was trying the whole time. There's no substitute for basic physical and mental health, lemme tell you.
(I specify "that I was remotely happy with" because there may have been three or four songs I didn't like, written for EPs I later cancelled.)



Original bandcamp description is just:
"i do not know why the artwork is like that, i asked my brain what the artwork should be and that's what it said so i said okay"

It also says in the credits that this was done in collectively probably roughly 7 hours, but not all in one go, "because i am weak, as stated in the song one on this".



The only mention of this EP in my diary is on the 19th of November, where I say:
"I just a few days ago made a siegely EP across a few days, which is fucking bad, and it’s literally about how I can’t fucking do anything off HRT,
I’m incapable, I’m not quite the girl I was, just can’t fucking do stuff anymore."

The reason this one came so soon after the previous one is that there were reports, which turned out to be false, that Soundcloud might be closing down in like a month or two.
So I cleared the whole deck, put it all on Bandcamp.

"Sonic 3 Title Screen in the style of Awake And Nervous by IQ" was originally uploaded under that name but when I put it on Bandcamp I called it
"Sonic 3 Title Screen in the style of" because I was afraid there was a chance someone looking for Awake And Nervous by IQ might stumble upon it
and find all my other garbage music.

Nothing more to say about this one, that's all the info. There aren't any missing tracks here.

Not a lot to say here, just a compilation of music I posted to Soundcloud in the timeframe stated.
I was running out of space on there so I made this compilation and then cleared all these tracks out.

There are a few things missing. The reason I made my Soundcloud account in the first place is to audition for some dickhead's Pokémon concept album, and in classic Siegely fashion I didn't just ask if I could be on the album but flipping wrote a thing, lyrics for Ecruteak City's theme, pertaining to Bill and his work on the PCs. The aforementioned dickhead loved it, saying they didn't have anything for Ecruteak and hadn't included Bill at all in their plans. They asked me to rewrite the last couple lines and rerecord the vocal using an orchestral version from the TV show, and I did that. The album never got finished though. And then they brought me on as a co-writer for a machinima series they were making with Ocarina Of Time, before very soon afterwards dropping that entirely to make rap albums with some new friends. This is the ex-friend mentioned in the first
Existential Pout EP's description, the one who said I had a "$20 microphone". Anyway I bring this up because this audition track, just titled Bill, is not included here. And neither is a 16 second long song I wrote called Brevity either. There was an 8 minute piano jam I did, and there were also two covers, one of the original Pokémon TV show theme and one of Science Fiction / Double Feature from Rocky Horror, the latter requested by this ex-friend because if I remember correctly they thought I kinda sounded like Richard O'Brien. Not a Rocky Horror fan myself, I don't know if I did sound like Richard O'Brien or not. There's also a 2013 recording of a 2011 song of mine called Unsharing, but that song is better served with other songs of the time, and it's not a good version anyway. And in 2015 I uploaded something called "Short thing I haven't finished".

So there's a bunch of things missing that I've rerecorded for this upload [lie. I haven't rerecorded or uploaded it yet. Bear, with.],
and I've actually recorded a vocal version of Improper Lodgings too finally [also a lie right now], a song that I wasn't really happy with.

Oh, the reason all of these songs are missing is that my vocals on them are, well y'know, old vocals. I think Not Experimental's still there because I still liked how it sounded despite the voice I was using at the time. The piano jam has occasional bits of voice throughout as well, me going "agh" and stuff as I get stuck or play something that sounds bad.

Oh in addition to all of this missing music, I also didn't include any of the speech uploads I did. I was practising my speaking voice for a while by recording myself reading the Wikipedia page for prog rock, and then some bad fanfiction I'd found, and uploading them to Soundcloud. There are six of these recordings. I continue to have no intention of sharing them again, nor will I rerecord them.

Here is a short EP about my mother.
In the Shame EP description I included a diary excerpt that mentioned a habit of finding but a few jigsaw pieces of a person and then filling in the rest of the image myself, and then feeling intensely uncomfortable and scared every time that person says or does something inconsistent with the image. This is something my mother did and does too. The titular "resistance" refers to her resistance to new information, desperate to keep us the way she believes we are, putting a bubble around us and pressing her hands against it,
resisting against every push we make from the inside. But I'm just quoting the lyrics at this point.

Per the original bandcamp description, this was made in "just under 8 hours", and at this point in time I was having a break from writing in my diary, so it's not mentioned in there.

Artwork's garbage but hey, I'm not a visual artist. And I was very much working under (self-imposed) time constraints.

I'm still very very proud of the chorus of Pictures Aren't.



Tweets:

(this first thread from the same date but about an hour before I started making the EP:)
"I'm kind of having a crisis..."
"My mum and her husband are on holiday elsewhere and, suddenly I feel like I can breathe a bit more, and..."
"I don't want to do things I wanted to do before. I don't want to make music, I don't... really know what I want to do, in my life."
"It just feels like... like I don't actually really kinda know who or what I am when I'm not fighting them and everything they stand for"
"(the false, comfortable world, where we all pretend everyone's okay and no one's lying to themselves, and no one's destroying themselves)."
"They're gonna be back in a week and I'll probably feel like making the EP [Paper Sky] again then, but, eventually I'm gonna be away from them for good,"
"and I don't know what the hell I'm gonna do then. I don't know what I'll feel, or what I'll want."
What's interesting to me about this thread is that this very strongly mirrors the feelings I had in June 2018, which sent me into a big depression
and subsequently resulted in the Claire Siegely album. I didn't remember at all that this already happened at least once before that.

"i read a blog post and now i can feel something and want to make another siegely EP"
(No mention of which blog post or whose. There were one or two or three abuse survivor blogs I followed at the time, might have been one of those, but yeah, I didn't post specifics.)

"oh fuck I keep listening to Pictures Aren't and being surprised the monologue turned out so well,"
"monologues usually turn out shit, that's why I stopped doing them ~5 years ago, I was just embarrassing myself"
"but this one's, like,
I didn't know I could do that with my voice.
I doubt I'll do it often, but, it's so nice to know I have that."

"Oh and, the monologue was originally gonna be a shouty melody, but I couldn't figure out how to make it good."

More just fun music :D
Also this was another one that was meant to be done in 2016 but I wasn't able to finish it, I can't remember why anymore.

Ice-Tech Kingdom was briefly called Ice-Tech Landscape and was directly inspired by the overworld themes from Spyro 2,
which are a hell of a lot more ambient but are just pure sparkly goodness. Also I always thought the (fake) guitar bit in this one sounded a bit Moon Safari (the band).

Robot Angel, as mentioned further down on this page, is the second and unfortunately final part of a series of tracks I was trying to do on these SiegeFeathers releases, telling a story about a robot angel. I never actually properly wrote the story though, is the thing. There were other roadblocks, I didn't finish any other SiegeFeathers releases for one thing, but yeah I didn't really know what to do with this, I didn't know how to write a story back then. I had some idea that I didn't really actually like, that maybe some factory was producing these robot angels and one of them had become sentient and was trying to enter Heaven, and that it was a metaphor for being trans and trying to be considered a woman. Bad metaphor though, we just are women. But yeah a totally artificial and mechanical angel trying to find a place within Heaven, that was an idea I had but didn't like. So yeah I really had no idea where to actually go with this series. Fun music though, this and Licorice Wings, I still like them a lot.

Standby? Just some fun music. More complete here than the version on Cityicediamond.

Nice i' Cool was written on a real keyboard.

Witches' Wishes is also just some fun music but also, fact: there's a fade-out/silence in there that at one point I thought about filling with an incantation of some kind.
I didn't do that though, don't remember why. I s'pose I don't know what kind of incantation would be appropriate, there's no real direction here besides "here's some fun music".

Soak. The title "Soak The Feelings Into Your Heart Yeah" was a silly idea I came up with once. In the early hours of the 29th of May, 2013, I tweeted "If there isn't a song called Soak The Feelings Into Your Heart Yeah by 2016, I promise I will have a go at writing it". I returned to that tweet around 3 years later and added "ohhhh, okay then, I'll try", and then on the 20th of August added "(writing this now!! <3)", and then finished it in the early hours of the next day. So we have an exact date on this one I guess. It's ended up one of my favourite songs of mine, I figured out a different arrangement on guitar at one point and I still play that to myself occasionally. It's just a sweet and positive little song about surviving a bad situation and reconnecting with your feelings.

Softness, was inspired by a friend I fancied and who I think fancied me. We fell out a few years afterwards though, not in a big way but in that gradual, just slowly talk to each other less and less and then not at all way. I was intending to do a sequel to this track, about someone else, called "Softness, Sweetness,", but I never did. And coincidentally
I don't really ever talk to that person either anymore, same situation, just gradually grew less interested in talking to each other. It happens.

I always imagined If We Can Go There was like, Sonic The Hedgehog running through a forest at the end of an adventure, some Robotnik base far behind him set to blow up.



Oh the artwork! I wanted the artwork to be this massive work of pixelart brilliance, I think. This great vast kingdom, the ice-tech kingdom, with its titular princess (myself)
glowing there in the centre of it all. I wasn't a pixelartist though, and if I remember correctly I gave up not long after starting, very unsatisfied with what I was making.

Oh and "ice-tech" comes from a sort of synaesthesia, it's how I felt my music sounded, all electronic but also cold and beautiful.



Oh the original bandcamp description! This has a few more details:
"Started in maybe May 2016 or earlier, I made a big push to finish this in December, not so much for the element as to just plain get it done, get things done in general."

"The only great amount of composition I hadn't done by the end of 2016 was the end of If We Can Go There, I'd only done the first 1m44s.
I don't feel like what I've added really does it justice... though the ending was planned from pretty early on."

"Yeah so anyway the whole theme and general aim with this was to make happy, positive-sounding music, 'cos I don't do that very often.
Obviously there's still a bit of intense in Robot Angel, but, that had to be there, 's a story innit."

"I almost gave up on this whole thing, this Ice-Tech Princess EP, but figured it was basically nearly done anyway, and I wanted something to upload,
and it bridges compositional gaps between Moon/City and the next thing, which I've nearly finished and should be up next month :D"
(I believe this refers to an EP called "Fly The Paper Sky, Time After Time, 'til You Forget Life And Labyrinth",
which in truth I probably only managed to write half of before getting stuck and eventually giving up on it.)



This is the last SiegeFeathers release.
I came up with a few more over the years but didn't finish them, and even just these two that I did finish were meant to be part of a series of five. The other three in that series were called "Eclipse This, Fucker", "Clockwork Cloak", and "Year Of The Blue Circle" (the "blue circle" referring both to Sonic The Hedgehog and to oestrogen pills). I don't think I finished even any single tracks from these, though I want it on record that one of the tracks I wanted to do for Clockwork Cloak was called "Cleauckweaurk Cleauk". Oh and another was inspired by a dream and was called "Alan Cumming's Gliding Tortoise". Oh and apparently, (all this information thanks to a text file from 2019,) "milg" was gonna be on Clockwork Cloak too! That's what ended up becoming Procession, from the Song's End album. News to me! It's a good thing I write this stuff down.

Open and shut case here. I wanted to do a tribute to the Zelda Oracle games but didn't manage to finish it.

The earliest I mentioned it in my diary is 22nd August 2016, where I say it's supposed to be out in "early October". I'm pretty sure I meant it to be on the anniversary of the games' release date, and according to Wikipedia the EU release date was the 5th of October 2001, so, that's a clean 15 years too. Later on, on the 24th of September, I complain about it
as part of a list of projects that have deadlines, in a bigger paragraph where I talk about constantly coming up with and starting new projects. Couldn't be me ;)
It also says in that entry that I was thinking of calling this "Sage Of Feathers". I made the right decision sticking with Oracle.

This one's just music, there's no life story stuff here.



Original bandcamp description confirms it was intended to be on the 15th anniversary of the EU release date. Also says:
"This was supposed to be the length of the original games' full soundtracks, much too big a task for me it turned out."

"I had estimated there should be around 30 tracks, including 8 dungeon themes and themes for various places and events. And one or two character themes"

"The tracklist here is almost the same order as these tracks would've been in, I switched Tree and Cave around 'cos the pacing works better this way,
there would've been at least two tracks between Bloop Rinse and Tree (title theme and first town)."
(uh, for clarity, that's: the title theme and first town would have been between Bloop Rinse and Tree,
not that Bloop Rinse and Tree are the title theme and first town theme.)

"Bloop Rinse is the sort of "intro cutscene" parallel, and its mirror, the end credits, would've been called "(and repeat)".
Tree was probably going to be called something else, obviously the parallel for the Maku Tree, I have one note that says "(fevv tree??)" but it probably wouldn't've been that.
and Skyletons is obviously the equivalent of the cool pirate skeletons, I love those friends."

"oh yeah and this such large project was originally gonna be released under the "SiegeFeathers" name, but I don't feel like it should be now. Just don't feel like it, buddy :)"



As for the bonus tracks,
I wanted to make my own 3D Zeldalike game. Actually I wanted to make a trilogy, a 3D Zeldalike with a female protagonist, the latest iteration of or maybe reincarnation of the world's hero, per a famous legend, though no one thought she was that hero because the hero of legend was male. It would later turn out that the hero of legend was a trans woman who wasn't able to come out. But anyway. The first of these games was just going to be very similar to Ocarina Of Time, going around the land and doing things for various civilisations, eventually saving them all from some tyrant. At the end a wish would have been made to make all living things equal. Then in the second game we'd see the result of that wish: yes sentient communities are sweeter than ever, but violent wildlife and such would be roaming around more, I remember having the phrase "up from the lakes, down from the mountains" in my head, or something like that. Why nature's predators would leave their habitats in favour of towns and cities is beyond me now, I don't think I actually thought that one through. And then in the third game the villain would have been the personification of capitalism.

It was all very sweet, naive stuff, imagined by an excited young writer with no experience. And also no experience in game development:
none of these games ever had any hope of being made, and I never even actually started them. I just wrote these four pieces of music.

A couple people listened to this one and told me they liked it.

I don't remember the impetus behind this EP for sure but I made it a few weeks after writing 99% of a track called Horizontal Experiments Dump, which itself came after a short period of lying in my bed feeling totally defeated, which was a result of listening to Licorice Wings et al in that playlist with other people's songs and finding out how almost mono my mixes had been. Horizontal Experiments Dump is a file I started in order to practice hard left/right panning and see what sounds good, but there's a song portion at the end inspired directly by that bedridden period, wherein I did not feel any want for anything anymore. I was just a body, just a living body, with no cause for any motion whatsoever. "What you want is what you are." So I think there's a chance that this EP follows on from that somewhat.

This is about wanting, figuring out what you want, what you want, rather than what you'd been taught to want, or what was expected of you.
I think I was struggling with this a lot and never really came to an answer. (I have one now of course.)

I reckon "after effortdome" just refers to having crossed through the gauntlet of growing up in whatever household you grew up in, and come out the other side.
Your life is not immediate moment to immediate moment anymore, not just surviving day by day, and you finally have the luxury of thinking about
what you actually want to do and how you feel about things.



It seems like I never wrote about this one in my diary but I posted about it a little on Twitter:

"one of my more interesting choruses..."

"what do you want is probably my favourite song i've ever written actually"

"tonight I made an EP in 6 hours, it's called <3
and is about not having any skills or really any idea what I want to do, and at age 26 no less
I was aiming for 4 hours but mixing still takes longer than you imagine when you've got p much everything else done
oh yeah and, the vocal mix isn't perfect, of course. I'm still learning. But just having that mixer now honestly does make a big difference."
(I had just found out how to access the mixer in Reason.)

"it might sound like i forgot to do a recurring motif, but no, there's one in there, though the notes are done differently the second time
comparing the two, actually, i think it's probably hard to hear that they're the same notes... eh, there is one, it's okay
(i reeallly like recurring motifs)"

"What Do You Want sounds a lot more electronic than everything else I've done, and it's made me realise that that's totally a thing I can do
I can make music that sounds like that, that's pretty exciting to me
So, I was already heading that way with Fly The Paper Sky (other EP I'm working on), but I might lean into it even harder afterwards
(I'd lean into it on Sky but most of the music's already written and put together and I don't feel like rearranging or reinstrumenting it)
and there're a couple other WIPs from last year that sound like that too, so, definitely an avenue I'm going down, but, consciously now"



Original bandcamp page description was:
"what's in your heart
post-nothing
post-ohhowproudofyousheis"
and also specifies that the EP was made in 5 hours and 50 minutes rather than a round 6 hours.

Not a whole lot to say here. I think I just wanted to write some instrumental music, so I did.

Phone Through Time enjoys the highly enviable position of being the first song I ever released that was just fun. Everything before this was about some serious thing.
I did write a few other fun things but mostly in the super early days, and I didn't really attempt proper recordings of them. I had a looooot of shit to figure out and
subsequently get out my system. It was nice to do something sweet and insignificant like this though.

Licorice Wings was named after and inspired by a character model from a terrible Kickstarter game that was doomed to not meet its goal, which some funny people on YouTube did a video making fun of. I was really proud of it at the time, and I still think it's really good but I could at the very least do a much better mix now. Not long after finishing this EP I put Licorice Wings and some other recent tracks in a playlist with some other people's songs and was blown away by how much I wasn't panning things anywhere near enough,
my music practically sounded mono by comparison.
Oh yeah and Licorice Wings was also supposed to be the first part of a series of tracks, one on each SiegeFeathers release, alternating instrumental and vocal, telling the story of a robot angel. There's a melody in here that I originally wrote independently of any other music, which, I dunno, maybe I put in this track just because I felt like it, or maybe I'd already decided it'd reoccur throughout the series, I don't remember. The only other track I ever completed was the one on Ice-Tech Princess, called Robot Angel.

And escape chute is the first music I wrote after starting HRT the first time, so that'll presumably be a late January 2016 track.

Original bandcamp page says:
"another thing that was supposed to be done about halfway through 2016. Nearly all this was written by late July I think, maybe August,
and starting as early as February (except escape chute which was January and was the first thing of music I made after starting HRT <3)."

Also originally this was gonna be under the name Claire Siegely. I guess it made sense to me to split the two distinct things. I still do that kind of thing of course ;)

"And "paradigm" is a nonsense word that no one actually knows what it means and if you think you do you don't really."



Oh the diary does have some stuff on this that I'd forgotten. From 3rd April 2016:
"This one's a mostly instrumental EP and I came up with the idea while listening to some old electronic music on a YouTube channel with also a load of video game music on"

"Not a lot to say about it prob'ly 'cos it's mostly instrumental, the vocal track is Phone Through Time which I started a while ago but I can't remember why, can't remember what gave me the idea for that. Maybe I made the music and just came up with that as the basis for the lyrics, or came up with the title from listening to the music and thought yeah I could probably write lyrics for that idea, or it might be fun. Those are theories. I'm glad I found a place for Phone Through Time, I figured it'd fit 'cos phones are technology and it's a very electronic music kind of thing and yeah I thought that'd fit with the vague city theme"

"Other thing to say is, the last track escape chute is the first piece of music I wrote after starting HRT, and it's not perfectly arranged but I want to preserve it how it was when I made it, I can't remember if I thought I'd clean it up later when I made it but, yeah, I'm gonna preserve it as the first thing I made after starting HRT, no changes since. I still like it a lot."

Despite having sorta 6 sorta 7 releases between them (Cityicediamond barely counts),
this is the next Claire Siegely release after "maybe you shouldn't" in 2014.

This still matters. I needed to write about my inability to connect with anyone.

As previously stated, this started life as a single from an EP called Remedy. What Remedy was about was capitalism among and within ostensibly leftist trans people,
at least partially. Looking at the intended tracklist, it seems like it would have veered away from that in the middle to talk about my social anxiety.

Per my diary, the tracklist was as follows:
1. Aspirations
2. Talking
3. The Moon On Earth
4. Washing Away (working title)
5. Flags

Aspirations was partially about the friend I fell out with in December 2014, still very much on my mind since several personalities in the queer indie dev scene had the same exact blend of ostensible leftism with blatant capitalism, ultimately more interested in being at the top of some hierarchy than in actually being a community member, y'know, gotta be an artist, gotta matter, gotta get paid, at least in social capital, have the most social capital. I was ranting constantly about this on Twitter throughout 2015 and 2016, probably wasn't the most pleasant time for anyone to know me, and I'm still grateful to the people who stuck with me through it. I haven't really changed my opinion though, I just know more about it. It's America, y'know? They get confused when things aren't propaganda. But anyway. I wrote all the backing music for this song but wasn't able to write any lyrics, and I still think that's a shame 'cos it was one of the best things I'd ever written at the time. Oh - the titular aspirations were, I think, ones of being a big deal artist, big name in the community.

I don't remember if I even had a concept for what Washing Away was to be about. It was a bit of music I wrote but didn't finish after listening to something from the Sonic CD soundtrack, it was a soundalike that I kindaliked, and then I reused its melody in Talking and thought "hey then if I finished Washing Away and put it on this EP, it'd be a reprise".
So I guess I was thinking it'd be conceptually linked to Talking, but I have no idea how.

And uh, I think Flags was like a "success story" sequel to Aspirations, like, here's what this type of person actually goes and does when they get what they want: they wave the flags of rebellion all the way to the bank, and then turn placid, maybe centrist. It was inspired by a few people but primarily one specific trans artist who had recently got in hot water within the community (and who of course I won't name, that'd be garbage of me, and they might be better now). I wanted this song to be maybe 10 or 15 minutes, I think I only had the first 5 minutes of music though, and didn't have much in the way of lyrics. Oh and I think I was actually referring to the people as flags, they become flags and get waved around by acceptable centrist capitalist society like "look, we've got a trans person on our side, we've got representation for you", something like that.

I can't remember why Remedy fell apart - oh, the titular "remedy" I think was capitalism, it was a silly and childish sarcastic way of saying "drink this and yeah your life will turn around and end up great, don't worry about the rest of us". I can't remember why the EP fell apart but I think I just wasn't able to write the songs, couldn't figure out the lyrics.



Looking at my diary... oh god there's a lot, I wrote a lot about this EP, at least in the one entry I'm looking at, 3rd April 2016, where I list and talk about the four things I was
working on at that time (Lois, Moon, Remedy, and City). Some of it mentions specific people, so I can't include all of it, and I'll see if I can cut it down for you:

"this is an EP about compromising to fit in, sorta. Loosely, I guess. I s'pose it sorta sets up the idea that I can't because of my autism, or my inability to connect with people
which I'm pretty sure is partly because of my autism. I s'pose it fits that Moon is about Trans Pride 'cos the first and last tracks are about trans artists"

"I came up with the idea for Remedy one night when I was angry about not having uploaded music in ages, or something like that. I tasked myself with finishing an EP in like a week or something, and I just couldn't do it. I wasn't able to do it. I wrote Talking and just... I can't remember, tbh, this was February I think. Yeah, 10th of February, I made the artwork that same night, after writing the Talking lyrics. I prob'ly got the theme from the [trans sketch comedian] thing, that's still relevant to the whole thing."

I remember that guy. In the early of that year, 2016, one of the bigger name UK trans people I followed on Twitter started complaining about this one trans guy's sketch comedy,
and this was a guy who'd been on a TV show and was involved with a YouTube channel and media company, not just some random dipshit. I don't remember the details but he was doing some transmisogynist garbage and, if I remember correctly, after receiving complaints he just continued doing it anyway and felt no guilt. That's what I'm talking about here: someone who had ambitions and didn't let basic respect for others get in his way. Thankfully he also wasn't actually funny, it never went anywhere.
He might be a decent guy now, I don't know, this was nearly 10 years ago.

"It starts with a song about my younger self and about [ex-friend] and in fact about any and every young artist who thinks or hopes they're gonna change the world, save the world, and more specifically save their community, this is an album about trans people in particular you see. The song Aspirations is about the young pretentious piece of shit artist and how they try to force emotional weight and meaning into their work, and also how they'll either regret it in the future or keep trying, and how they might possibly be picked up by the media/mainstream society and essentially become a flag for oppressive friends to wave and say “we care about you”."

(I guess "oppressive friends" refers to aforementioned acceptable centrist capitalist society. Odd way to say it though.)

"I was lucky enough to be absolute shit, and also scared of really trying to put myself out there and be heard, and unsatisfied with all my writing (and if I had tried to “make it big”
I probably would've hit a lot of roadblocks for pure being unrelatable as well). People who have the luxury of self-assurance, confirmation, all that, not to mention an interest in making stuff there's a lot more precedent for in mainstream society, they have a lot more potential for being picked up by The Industry, and I think everyone should learn different forms of respect before ever trying to do stuff in public (though that might be a “conveniently I'm at the top of this hierarchy I just made” thing). If [trans musician] had made prog rock instead, would any of us have ever heard of her? Yes, we would've, some of us, but she wouldn't have got her own TV show, she wouldn't've been interviewed a whole bunch and especially not on TV, I reckon she wouldn't've become friends with [famous trans writer] or [much less famous trans journalist]"

"So um, the last song on the EP started about [aforementioned comedian] and is now about [aforementioned musician] too, it seems like it's gonna be a big story arc song, from a mission statement that echoes Aspirations (called Aspirations 2, at least right now) and ending in completely letting down anyone who isn't also doing okay, anyone who isn't in a pretty safe home, doesn't have a pretty safe life, or has a lot of friends who don't. Also hopefully with the implication that that's not the end, that they could at some point
redeem themselves, 'cos no one's “tainted forever”."

"The “remedy” in the title and the artwork, and the artwork has such potion that's flowing out and flooding the place, and a mouth that's going to drink from the flask, possibly not even realising that it's actually gonna drown everyone soon. The “remedy” is that compromise, I did a tweet a while ago that goes “If you want to both stand for equality and
play the capitalist game of winning, at some point you will have to compromise one of them”, the remedy is essentially the trust in the industry, and the professionals who
position themselves as rebels, and the becoming the same."

There's a bunch more but it's mostly slagging off specific people.

Same diary entry also says:
"oh I also want to mention, before I came up with the Moon On Earth idea, I tried to write a song called An Open Letter To My Music Tech Teacher to have as track 3, the EP was gonna be more directly about my autism and that song was gonna be that basically, 'cos I can't do the normal student thing, couldn't then and probably can't now, it's not something my brain can do, and she made me feel like it was 100% my fault. I am not the average student, I was not, and she made me feel like it was 100% my fault for not being something I could never and can never be. It was an angry song. The lyrics were kinda shit though and the melody was kinda shit and I wasn't satisfied with it, what I had of the first verse."

A later entry, the 30th of April 2016, says:
"Remedy is put back to someday and is hopefully an album, wanna see if i've got more to write on that subject.
I guess I realised at some point that the Moon On Earth concept wasn't a great fit with the Remedy concept itself."

...and, aside from including it in a list of things I might do the next year, in an entry in September, I never mentioned it again.
What I remember is that, after Brexit and especially after the US election of that year, none of it felt important anymore. I was trying to write songs about imperfect leftists
and suddenly the world had lurched further right than any of us were ready for, it felt like completely the wrong time to be doing songs like that.

The Moon On Earth though, that was personal, and wasn't anywhere near as directly political. And anyway, I'd written all the songs already.



It's at this juncture that I'll tell you what on earth the phrase "the moon on earth" actually means: a person with no atmosphere.
That's how I felt in social situations, like everyone else had an atmosphere but not me, everyone else was a planet with breathable air and I was just a rock.
People would encounter me and expect me to know what to do, and if online I ever told them I don't know what to do, they'd react like "you'll pick it up", or
"yeah I struggle too sometimes", none of them understanding that I literally don't know what to do, there is something missing here, something missing in me, maybe.

It seems like I came up with the phrase on the 9th of March 2016 but I can't understand the diary entry, I was on another level when I wrote it, constant references to things I don't remember anymore, following a logic that made sense to me at the time but at no point writing down the foundations of all of those thoughts, it's like good jazz.

From the 16th of March 2016:
"So, I was writing this song, Moon On Earth, and I started it a few days ago but got stuck, today I went in here to look at the Trans Pride entry and following ones for research and got this big sense that everything was really clear after that, while it was happening it was awful and I wanted it to end but what it gave me was some kinda complete awareness of the wall between me and everyone else, like I was pressed right up against it, something I really can't say I have right now and haven't had probably since the first week or few weeks or maybe a little more after that day. I dunno what it's like for other scared people but in the lyrics I wrote “you can't divine cement from glue”, it always seems like for other people it's like they have to wade themselves through glue to get to people, to connect with people. For me, I can get right up to it, I can press my ear right up to the wall
but it's a wall, I can't get through."

And from the April 3rd entry:
"The Moon song started as about generally never feeling okay or welcome in social situations and ended up being about Trans Pride in particular"

And from that April 30th entry:
"The Moon On Earth is now an EP and the song itself is completely scrapped 'cos it was “ohhh no one will ever be able to connect to me
so hey people don't even try (but still pay attention to me and like my music I guess)” crap and I hate it."

I don't remember the lyric though, so I can't remember specifically what line or lines I'm referring to there.

Anyway, there's not a lot more to say about this one. It's part of a big continuum of me trying to figure out how to connect with people in that basic social way that some people apparently find very easy. Per the original bandcamp page I had the whole thing written by some point in August but, per both that and my memory, then didn't manage to record vocals until December, "eventually getting it done by caring less. Sometimes you gotta do it like that or it won't get done at all".



The songs:

We Should Do This Again was inspired by watching Whisper Of The Heart over Skype with someone about a year earlier - that's a year earlier than when I wrote the song - and specifically the fact that, at that time, I never initiated any conversations or made plans with anyone. I might have come across very uninterested I s'pose. We had a really nice time watching Whisper Of The Heart but we never watched anything together again. "I guess things always have to start, but what if no one wants me, what if no one wants me."

Talking is just a short song about feeling bad for other people for having to put up with me.
I felt like I made every situation awkward, and honestly I still think I was right, I think I did.

Wish I Could Share is about the same thing as To Wristbands but says it slightly differently and a little better, and is musically a lot better. I seem to remember when I made this thinking I'd finally made something as beautiful as I've been wanting. I guess it's the first thing that really properly captures the sparkliness I'd always wanted my music to have sometimes. I definitely had been trying to write sparkly songs and sparkly music but I guess I didn't finish anything like that 'til this track, and I was pretty satisfied with the melody those sparkles were doing here too. I think what the difference is is that, though with pretty severe qualifications, this one's about joy. I can't remember anymore but maybe it never really felt appropriate to put sparkliness into the sad and/or intense songs I'd been writing.

And of Outing: someone I was friends with on Twitter described feeling exactly the same type of social anxiety as me, and it felt legit to me, not like a very social person "having social anxiety" but like another Moon On Earth, just like me; but she was in that coastal US tech world, and often found herself in bars and such such. That's where Outing comes from, or, well, that's some of where the Shame EP's For Wallflowers comes from, which got reshaped and turned into the much better Outing. Oh actually Wallflowers/Outing also comes from outings of my own, and I think in particular one pub quiz I was at with my sister and her friends where I sat there and said almost nothing. That feeling of being there, going out thinking "I'm going to have a nice time with some friends", and then saying almost zero words to anyone all night. I'd had a few of those by this point.

I think I felt like this EP was the first time I really wrote and released actually good material, like the whole thing is good material, even if the versions weren't good.
I still feel this way. This is the first good one.

This one was a compromise.
I was really sick with how long these two mostly instrumental EPs were taking, I think solely because I had to record vocals but was never either ready or able to,
and I just wanted to get some music out [this memory of my motivations has turned out to be completely false]. I don't know if anyone ever actually listened to this.

Oh the original bandcamp page has the description:
"couple tracks from unfinished near-instrumental EP 'City', couple tracks from unfinished near-instrumental EP 'Ice', incase I lose my drive for good"
so maybe I was really fucked off with music, or maybe really fucked off with these EPs specificially, and just wanted to make sure at least these four tracks saw the light of day.

I never wrote about it in my diary, and I didn't package it with a text file, so that bandcamp description is all the context we've got.
Contemporary diary entries are all just about me and my friends' sadness and anger surrounding the US election, which had just happened.
It's possible that that's where I'm coming from when I say "incase I lose my drive for good"? There's no way of knowing though.
I just don't even mention Cityicediamond at all in those entries.

Oh wait hang on, I've just searched for it on Twitter. Here we go:
"done this sorta compilation EP 'cos my drive to make music has completely gone and I dunno if it'll come back"
"These are four things that were either finished or pretty much finished. If my drive doesn't come back I'll probably do another one of these"
I guess it came back.
Still not sure why it went away though. Ah well.
One of the lesser things we have no earthly record of. Dun't matter.

I cannot remember what made me think to do this but this is a short EP about unfairly getting more attention and praise from my parents than one of my siblings.

I am autistic. I am one of several siblings and there's only one of us who isn't neurodivergent, or at least doesn't seem to be, certainly has a much easier time connecting with neurotypicals. I have held for a long time and will hold until my dying day, and beyond if possible, that I am a dumb piece of shit, not intellectual at all. I just talk the way I do.
I am not a "gifted kid" and never was, not even with music. But I and almost all my other siblings "had something", so it was made clear to us.

I don't think it happens so much anymore, if at all, but even in relatively recent years my mum would describe each of us in terms of our super special abilities, and then say that my sister's lovely. She has less to say about her, less to boast about. The vocal song on this, Brilliant, doesn't really go into it but for most of my life I've hated the whole entire concept of pride, of being proud, and especially of other people being proud of you, of me, and a large part of that comes from just how much it has always felt like my parents took credit for my accomplishments. And I'll remind you, I don't really actually have any accomplishments, certainly didn't in my childhood. I was a dumb piece of shit and didn't understand almost anything in front of me for the first maybe 15 years of my life, I was quite good at video games and, of music, could sort of half play a melody and chords at the same time if I really practised, and I didn't really practise. So with them, and especially my mum, taking credit for my "accomplishments", well, it all felt like lies, like excuses to pat themselves on the back, and it felt like I was being used. The actions of desperate people who see their children as objects and tools. They did not care how I felt about anything I did.
The only thing that mattered was what it could mean for them.

But this creates a dynamic within the sibling relationship too. I was better, so I was taught. I was better than "normal people". So what of the one of us who was normal?
How did she feel? I still haven't asked her, and I might never, and for unrelated reasons I can't trust that she'd tell me the truth if I did. But that's what this song's about.

This is also the first and so far only time I've rapped, and I'm not happy with it. I don't know how many more raps I have in me, but if I have one more it's a better one than this.

Oh, and, this being a "siegely" EP, I tried to get it done super super quick,
and that duration ended up being about 7 and a half hours.
Did the whole EP from scratch in 7 and a half hours.


I never really wrote about Effortdome in my diary. The name comes up only once, in a paragraph where I'm talking about wanting to actually sell music someday,
maybe get hired to make soundtracks, and, while I like this EP, I don't think there's any chance of any of its material opening any doors for me.

I wanted to make an EP about feelings and things I was ashamed of.

If I remember correctly, I wrote Strange And Complicated Bullshit one side of New Year's Day 2016, can't remember which [edit: this is false, as stated further down].
There was once again a very pretty trans girl who I was jealous of, this time a friend of some friends, and she was younger and prettier than me and I felt sharp and bitter about it but didn't think that that was fair, she was just living her life, being normal. In truth, it's not actually complicated at all: it hurts to see someone else take for granted something that everyone should be able to take for granted, but that you're not able to. And maybe she didn't even take it for granted, it's not like that's something you can necessarily tell from someone's social media posts. Oh and I wrote the song on guitar.

Conversation is just a tiny short song about not knowing how to have a social conversation. Y'know, people have told me, and I've seen people say this on social media too, that they have social anxiety too, and I always feel like they have no idea how much they don't. I want you to imagine this, right, with very specific numbers, let's be scientific about this: imagine that you literally, and I mean literally talk to zero people on a regular basis. And then you see people talk about having social anxiety, but they're always talking to people, and not just function stuff too, not just buying lemonade or asking someone working at a train station if they're at the right platform. You see people casually talk with friends, and then talk about having social anxiety. Sometimes I think of what I have (though it's not as bad now as it was then) as "true social anxiety", because apparently a distinction needs to be made. I've got the numbers to back it up, sure I had friends then but I didn't ever talk to them, we just saw each other on social media occasionally. Uh, anyway.

Wallflowers/Wristbands was meant to be a much much bigger song, might even be my first attempt at writing my first 20 minute song.
Starting in 2014 and growing and growing from then without end (so it seemed for maybe two or three years), there was this group of people on Twitter who came to be known, though I think without their approval, as the "queer indie dev scene", and I loved them for two seconds. I didn't know it at the time but this was the next big era of the war between myself and America, the American personality, though I wasn't technically in this battle. I watched this one from the sidelines, wishing I had a way I could get involved, but I wasn't a game dev myself and I didn't live in Seattle or San Francisco or Portland or any of those places they all seemed to be from or near to. I saw someone get ejected from the group, I wish I could remember the reason, but I knew her, and she was honest and felt very betrayed. I saw an artist excitedly contribute to a pretty big indie game, only to get ignored by the developer and have their part of the game cut down to a sliver of what it was meant to be. Eventually the whole scene imploded because they couldn't stop accusing each other of being abusive, and I read some of those accusations and a handful seemed very credible to me. Everyone involved was in their 20s I think, possible some were slightly older, but it was teen behaviour. Supposedly a few of them did some genuinely oppressive stuff (none of which I was there for, so, cannot verify), but the personalities were what you'd find in some highschool drama. Popularity contest stuff. I think on some level everyone wanted to be the new hotness, and got jealous when a newer hotness came on the scene, especially if that newer hotness could do things that they couldn't. Honestly the majority of them (and this is just personal opinion) weren't even very good at making games, and I mean no disrespect to Twine here, the Twine stuff was pretty cool (look it up if you're unfamiliar), they were more like influencers who occasionally did stuff. Almost all of them made one single wave and then rode it for all it was worth, more excited by the relative fame than by, y'know, the work.

So what this song is and was to be about, is and was these personalities conflicting not just with each other but with honest people who're actually interested in both
being normal friends and doing good work. I can't remember what the actual whole song's title was going to be but these are just two parts.

Wallflowers is about social anxiety, wanting to be part of the in-group, and then being smothered by the in-group once you're there, drained of substance
and then spat out, your purpose to them fulfilled. And you go totally uncredited, the only time they ever actually speak your name is when they're spreading shit about you.

Wristbands however was more about anxieties I have around sharing art I like that's very personal to me. I think it's the first song (if it can be called that) that I wrote about the artist who quite literally changed and saved my life in 2006. I felt that if I told people about her music, they'd like it and share it around and then it wouldn't be mine anymore, even though it's not mine in the first place. Similar thing happened at school with one of the internet's big flash cartoons of the 2000s, I'm the one who put it into the local cultural consciousness yet I got no credit. And I was the first kid to bring in Pokémon cards. None of this stuff matters, it's silly stuff. (And nowadays the reason I don't name that artist is because she's not very active at all anymore and not trying to make a career of it, and I am, so I anticipate someday having a fanbase at least large enough for me to earn a living, and I wouldn't want her, a perfectly normal private citizen, to be flooded with unwanted attention.) I think what the connection here is is that if this artist's work fell into the laps of those people, and they liked it, they'd parade it around and there'd be a big hollar and hoot about all this stuff and it'd have the "cool crowd" seal of approval, and they'd get to define the conversation around it, what definitively is good and what definitively isn't, and why, and what it all means, like how Terra in Final Fantasy 6 is actually an analogue for being trans and we all related to her (this is a real thread I saw back then). Whichever songs people gravitated towards most would then have subcultural meanings attached, and I'd have to feel like
part of the "out group" if I disagreed, even though I'd have been the person who introduced the damn songs to that subculture. And I think this is why this fits the "shame" theme:
I have no right to claim any of that stuff as my own, but there's this weird sense of ownership that a fan can have over things that they did not make.
I felt the same way when Yes's Roundabout became a meme.

And finally Crossing No Man's Land was about that aforementioned "true social anxiety", and about how, being on Twitter, I got to see tons of trans nerds meeting up, being friends, sometimes becoming girlfriends, carving out normal lives, all those people who claimed to have social anxiety. Not me though. It felt near impossible for me. This song was my first and to date only foray into drone music, though I don't know if it's a good example of drone music, if it really fits that category at all. If I remember correctly I sped it up to sing the vocal parts and then slowed it back down once they were in.

The bonus track Attractiveness was a complete song I wrote but didn't record because I thought one line in the lyric came off a bit too self-important. I can't remember the words anymore (I'll have them somewhere probably) but I think it's broadly about, just, having a limited scope of who I find physically attractive, and then at the end saying "and I owe it to everyone to change this about myself", but, yeah, I felt that "I owe it to everyone" came off a bit like saying "and of course people would love it if I found them attractive", which, yes, not ideal. I didn't mean it that way but that's how it sounds.

And "9 riff" was a later part of the Wallflowers/Wristbands song, but I didn't manage to write any lyrics for it, or give it a proper title even.
I think the reason I wasn't able to finish this EP was just this song, since I did finish all the others.


I'll consult my diary in a sec, but first: I originally packaged this with a commentary text file, let's see if that has anything worth adding in.

Okay so first off, apparently Strange And Complicated Bullshit was written on the 11th of November 2015. So I was way off.

Oh huh, the Wallflowers/Wristbands song was supposed to be called "My Resentment". Weird. I'd totally forgotten that. What a garbage title, hahaha.
"Whole thing was gonna be called My Resentment and was supposed to be about various problems I have with communities. My inability to talk, the way some people value happiness over honesty, a whole bunch of stuff like that, including my paranoia about sharing things that are precious to me with people who, I feel, would like them
but would talk about them as if they know everything, The Definition Club, which of course I can give to but can never be a member of."
"Lyrics on the second, speeding up part of Wallflowers were influenced by several people I've seen get completely thrown under the bus in a community I probably shouldn't
name I s'pose. Used and never spoken of, they're there but they almost or completely might as well not be. For various reasons, those people weren't the perfect image of approachable and cool (or, couldn't sweep things under the rug, if you ask me, which I s'pose you didn't), so they weren't allowed the attention despite doing just as much work,
or just as valuable work, as everyone else."

And on Crossing No Man's Land:
"I wrote this after someone completely unintentionally triggered a big fear of mine. It's all good, and they're lovely, but, I found out
I take it really hard when a person I like turns out to not be exactly how I thought they were."
Huh. I didn't remember this being inspired by that. This is a problem I don't suffer from anymore,
and this instance is the one that got me to properly think about it and stop doing it.
"See what I used to do was, I'd like someone, be friends with them, and I'd have a few pieces of, like, the infinitely big "jigsaw" of who they are, and then I'd fill in the rest myself, just paint my own picture of who they are around those few pieces. So, when a new piece turned up, it kinda shattered my own sense of reality, and safety, and I felt very unsafe, because they're supposed to be "someone I can rely on"."
"that's something I think should be talked about more in art and everything else the world over. We are not "characters" in each others' "stories"."

Apparently 9 riff was meant to come directly after Wristbands but I gave up on the song before I wrote the connective tissue.

Oh there were a couple more songs I wanted to do as well.
Honestly with My Resentment at at least 20 minutes, maybe 25, and No Man's Land at 7, this probably would have been album length, or near.


As for my diary... well uh, apparently a lot of these tracks were going to be on The Moon On Earth! Back when that was going to be a single from an EP called "Remedy".
More on that later I guess. Yeah all of these tracks minus Resentment were going to be b-sides for a Moon On Earth single,
including Attractiveness (which was just called Attractive at the time apparently).

It turns out that in early 2016, I challenged myself to get four things finished:
Lois The Compilation, The Moon On Earth single, the Remedy EP, and the mostly instrumental City EP.
So... partial success! I list and describe all of them in an entry from the 3rd of April of that year, and of the single I say:
"mainly I decided to do this 'cos I really like it on just acoustic guitar and voice, so I needed somewhere to put that, and it'd be weird to make it another EP of its own considering it's on Remedy. Eventually though I decided to put some more b sides on it, songs I still really like from the scrapped “stuff I'm ashamed of” EP. I really really like these songs and they're finished and it'd be a shame to not record them and put them somewhere. And a single deserves a good b side or two. Or four. Or five, 'cos, I also wrote a few words about that “interlopers on my fandom” phenomenon that I've been and continue to be on both sides of."
(And then there's a whole paragraph of stuff I'll probably copy over in the Moon On Earth description because it pertains to the track called Wish I Could Share,
which is kind of a better attempt at saying what I was saying with Wristbands.)

The tracklist I had for this single is:
1. The Moon On Earth
2. The Moon On Earth acoustic version
3. Strange And Complicated Bullshit
4. Attractive
5. Conversation
6. Wish I Could Share
7. Crossing No Man's Land

(and of the latter I say "This song's about how hard it is for me to actually get to know people and how doing that, learning about them and stuff, actually kinda hurts me sometimes, especially in cases like this [aforementioned big fear triggering] where I was pretty sure she was different to how she actually is. It's really hard to find out someone you really like and want to connect with is less like you than you thought. It's better to learn that than not, but, yeah, it always seems like everyone has close friends who they can connect well with except for me, even the people with social anxiety.")

Later, on the 30th of April, I said:
"decided to do a Shame EP Remains thing 'cos I thought those songs really aren't good enough for Moon but I still want to record and upload them."
and, having cancelled the Remedy EP but split the Shame tracks from Moon On Earth, there were still four things, all of which did get finished in some form. Partial success.

April's a long way away from August though. It took me a really long time to get around to recording the vocals, and that's true for both Moon and City as well.
I had it all written by like halfway through the year or something.

Anyway so that's that one.

This one's just a compilation of stuff I wrote in 2015.
It was originally released with a .txt file of track-by-track commentary, and that's now in the .pdf in the download [which does not exist yet, bear with].

If I remember correctly, I just had all this stuff lying around, tracks I'd finished for planned albums and EPs I'd given up on. Maybe even just EPs, I don't remember.

There's not really any context here, nothing much to say, it's mostly just fun instrumental stuff,
however I'd like to just say that Bad Songs was about the fact that I kept writing bad songs and knew it.
It was supposed to include a vocal of "I write bad songs" near the end but I didn't end up doing that.

Oh I've just found in my diary - apparently I was at one time thinking about maybe opening this with a vocal song called Bed, or It's Okay To Stay In Bed. Both names are in my diary, I think the official title is just Bed. I don't remember why I didn't do this.

The sound of maybe some other people's Summers but definitely mine, and I mean every Summer.

This was all written on the 4th of July, minus the first three chords of Summers which were written on the 2nd,
and the guitar solo on Pathetic Sad Song which was written on the 5th.

I don't remember any of the surrounding context of this release so let's get through the songs, and I'll consult my diary afterwards:

Summers is about what Summer holidays are like when you're a friendless shut-in with an abusive family. It's just a description of that.

How To Save Yourself is, uh, probably my first and probably not only song about influencers, though I don't remember if they were called that then. Specifically influencers with airs of leftism. I made the lyrics quite broad so as to be applicable to many people and situations but there's one person who really inspired it, and I will not name them (that'd be damn scummy of me, and they're ultimately a force for good I guess). They had recently released a book and were talking it up a whole lot, and most likely I saw this spread around a little on Twitter. The whole thing felt garbage to me, because the whole premise of the book was teaching people how to be themselves, and I thought "that's very presumptuous of you to think you can teach people that". And I saw this person with more clothes than I've ever had, a better camera than I've ever had, and I just couldn't escape the juxtaposition. Here I am, a poor person who could never hope to be as free as this person's money has made them, and they're trying to be a kind of community leader to chumps like me. I won't be the only trans person in the world with as little money as I have, and in fact I have it easier than some. That juxtaposition is still very present to this day, there are several people "on the left" who just feel capitalist as hell to me, like they'll say as much as they need to to get people on side, they'll take their politics far enough that it'll liberate them, and then just try to sell products to the rest of us. Wear beautiful dresses to big media events and stuff. Where's my beautiful dress?

Better Mouth, when I wrote it, was about someone I went to school with who had recently come out as trans on Facebook (this is back when I still had an account there. Never again). I sent her a message to congratulate her and she didn't respond. I was pretty upset about that, but soon figured that maybe it's for the best. If we'd got to talking about trans stuff, there's a decent chance I would have been depressing, and no one deserves that right after they've nervously crossed that threshold and are now buzzing with the anxiety and excitement of finally living a life outside the confines of a false identity that was forced upon them. And she was gorgeous, even then, and I had been on HRT for 5 months and didn't look as good. And she had and seemingly continues to have a vibrant social life, unlike myself. So I was jealous, and I felt snubbed, but ultimately I thought
"well, she's just living her life as an honest person, and she just happens to have the face she has".
So here's some extra, present day style context: fast forward a few years and she's making waves on Trans Twitter, my domain (at the time), with cheap relatable posts, milquetoast left wing politics, and that gorgeous upper middle class face, while for years I had been posting actual leftist stuff, like, doing my own analysis of things and making actual attempts at saying things no one had ever said before, all to almost no reception whatsoever. But the people of Twitter wanted slogans and influencers, "die cis scum" and the like. Maybe I should have joined a forum, I dunno. Anyway she's one of the aforementioned influencers now, though marginally better than the one who that song was about. Marginally.

Pathetic Sad Song is about a bunch of regrets, and mostly about so much time having passed. I still didn't know how to do make-up (and still don't at time of writing), and I still didn't hang out with friends in the Summer time. And I wished I could go back in time and do everything the way I was supposed to, and maybe if my life had been better I could have written songs about nice things instead. Pretty simple material, put very plainly, as it should be. Also I had just recently started listening to Noe Venable, and I always thought my vocals at the very end of this song sounded like her.


From the diary (two days later, first entry after doing this EP):

"On the 4th I wrote some songs. I was thinking about Lesbian Subplot I think ["Lesbian Subplot" was a bandname I'd come up with], there was this guitar chord bit I'd written a couple days before, and there's this band called Girlpool who have a song called Before The World Was Big, and I was thinking about how I literally can't write songs about having a nice Summer with my friends, I guess that's my perception of American post-punk. I don't get those good memories, 'cos all the memories that sound good by name are actually bad, going to the beach with my family, hanging out with my friends, and so on. The latter of which is bad because of me, my own mistakes, bad shit I did, maybe it would've been bad anyway 'cos they actually were kinda shitheads, especially [name], but it's what I did next that ruins those memories [I feel slightly differently about this now]. And maybe if I weren't that kind of person I never would've tried to be their friend as well, maybe... maybe if I'd've had a kinda decent childhood and home life I would've been friends with other people, especially maybe girls. ...didn't think this much about it when I wrote the songs though, s'pose I just covered the beginnings of all, all the definite stuff, not so much the speculation.

In the early afternoon I wanted to go to sleep but I'd already written three songs and I had this 9/4 riff that I liked, and the recurring theme had already become definite and apparent from the first three, and I wanted to try to mirror the first Existential Pout EP by writing most of that song now and finishing it the day after. Ended up writing all of it then,
except I s'pose the “guitar solo” which I wrote right before recording it, the day after, yesterday.

I had a basic idea for the artwork and drew it in maybe a minute or less on my lined A4 pad, as usual, then took a picture and drew a bunch over it in paint.net for a while, maybe an hour or something, listening to Before The World Was Big on repeat. And plus I very faintly put a picture of myself on there, one i'd taken that morning, you can just about see a line where my hair is on the left, maybe vaguely see my right eye."


Oh I also described the individual songs as well, huh. Did in my diary what I've done here, lol. Here's those:

"Summers
song about various Summers I've had I guess, what it's been like. Being in a car with them. S'pose i've been trying to put that in a song for years I think, it's been in this diary a bunch I think, and for a while. [Diary entry number] 501 apparently, apparently exactly two years and one month ago, exactly that much time between that and writing the song.
...oh wow I say in that entry I want to get more clothes. Well... shit. Still fuckin' haven't, and it's still bad, I still want that more than maybe anything, especially now when i'm thinking about good normal things I never got to have.

How To Save Yourself
this one's about [name], vine star, author, big smiler, owner of a good camera, self-love preacher, and so on and so on. As well as them I was also thinking about [friend I fell out with in 2014] a bit, and after a while, maybe during or maybe after writing it, I also saw parallels with [name] from [independent media group/youtube channel],
saying “so I moved out” as if that's a thing just anyone could do. “That's what you need”.
The so called “liberation”, all the “smile and be happy, and love yourself” talked about like it's easy, and like it's all you need, 'cos it's pretty much the only thing those people didn't already have. People who can take those good things for granted and have PAINFULLY OBVIOUSLY NEVER KNOWN ANY DIFFERENT. And, it's not even that they shouldn't, it's that we all should be able to, but these are people who don't see people like me. Or, do, but talk over them, 'cos they love and they have love and they don't know.
Oh, [another name], she's probably one of them too.

Better Mouth
this one's about [name]. I was thinking about cave mouths, she's had a better coming out than me it seems most like, and as much as I'd absolutely love to spread my love and all the positivity I can muster for her new and much clearer breathing, i'd probably only drag her down, especially as early as this, I don't wanna talk to her probably excited and anxious self and say like “you're so fricking gorgeous and oh my gosh big congratulations and I wish I was that gorgeous and I wish I had friends and knew how to do friendship and I wish I knew how to do makeup and i'm always too scared to learn 'cos I grew up living with domestic violence and learned that i'm pathetic and can't do anything right and never will and I might as well just give up on every single thing and i'm never gonna be happy really and that that's how it should be and it's hard to break out of that, but, yeah, I'm super super happy for you oh my gosh! <3”. That's why I don't want to talk to her, I want her to be happy and have a nice time, and I don't know if she is but it seems like a whole lot of her friends are good and are being nice, and i'd definitely bring everything down.

Pathetic Sad Song
this has got to be the best song I've ever finished and uploaded, probably the best song I've ever written, might always be actually.
This song's about not having ever had a nice part of my life, s'pose kinda the culmination of the EP's themes, I can't take any good thing for granted the way normal people can, and more than anything else I wish I could do my whole life again but without domestic violence, and without the lessons I learned, and without being an abusive friend, just do everything I should've been able to do, everything everyone else gets to do. And I also sorta wish I could ever see other people wishing the same, instead of all these beauty queens with their rich distant dads talking about self-love and acting like fucking saviours. They get all the publicity, all the attention.
But... most of all I just want to be able to have a nice life, want to be able to do all those nice things, normal things that everyone else can take for granted. Maybe i'm autistic but I could've at least... had that. I could've at least had the opportunity, I don't think autism is a barrier to that, as much as it's apparently often thought about like that.
I'm crying now. This is all I want to think about. It's sunny outside and I wish I could hang around in the park with my friends, talking about fucking I dunno, video games maybe, cool stuff we like that isn't painful and doesn't, sorta, groundbreakingly matter, but, in a good way. Wearing nice clothes or cool clothes and maybe getting some pick and mix from Woolworths. I dunno, are these the things that normal people do? Normal teenagers? It's sorta what I remember from ruined memories. I bet there's loads and loads more stuff I can't even imagine."


"[friend on Twitter] said the EP is “REALLLY good!!!!!!!”, I kinda thought he might like it, at least Pathetic Sad Song, I kinda thought it sounded a bit like his kinda thing, like Algernon Cadwallader or Oh My God Elephant, that kinda thing. That was where I was coming from as well, American post-punk songs i'll never be able to write."

I had not learned the term "midwest emo" then, which I think is really what I meant. Also, along with those bands, this friend was real into the (original) Americ an Football album, which very much is an emo, "teen summer memories" album, and I might have been thinking about that too when I made this.

Not a lot to say about this one, but it's heavy. I made this in about 6 hours, all the same night,
minus two chords in Film which come from a 2013 song that unfortunately forces me to put the word Dildos on this page because it's called that.
(I later recorded Dildos on the 2018 album just called claire siegely.)

I had a fire lit in me. Me and my brother and my mum had just watched the first episode of the TV show Jessica Jones, and there was a depiction of a panic attack that triggered/unlocked a feeling of absolute normalised danger, a feeling I had lived under for my entire childhood and some of my early adulthood, and which honestly was still there in the background right then, in what was at the time the present. I turned my eyes slightly from the screen and looked at the front door of our house and I felt this film come over me, and I knew in that moment that it was already there, it had already been there the whole time. And I needed to write about it, that same night.

And I believe "headache game" refers to a time when my siblings had great fun being deliberately loud, loudly explaining to each other that they have to be quiet because I have a headache. Sounds like piss, small, like nothing, mundane, unimportant, could happen to anyone, but this real life event is a perfect example of the casually tyrannical way they treated me. It was fun for someone, but not me, and I never consented to it. You're online, have you ever had a stranger on social media (or wherever) talk to you in an
overfamiliar way, and pretend to be upset and angry at you as a joke? And then seem to feel hurt when you take them seriously, as if they're entitled to treat you that way, and you just "don't get it"? These were family members but it's much the same. And it was like this from day one, when they were strangers to me.
Anyway so I probably wrote this track just to make sure they weren't let off the hook. Everyone in the house contributed to the way I felt.
Sometimes you get situations like this where an actual genuine tyrant is still used as a scapegoat.

From my diary, about a week later (I'd stopped writing in it for about a month, unrelatedly):
"We watched two episodes that night and it made me panic. I related to the panic in the show it fucking shook me and I looked at the door while watching and
this film came over me, this layer of film, and I fucking knew it was always there"

"This film came over me and I knew it was always there and, then and there I had to make some music that night, I knew I had to, I couldn't think about anything else, in a few hours, maybe 8 if I remember correctly, I made an EP called emergency, credited it to “siegely”, only one song with vocals and lyrics on there but it does what it does."
(*the original bandcamp page said "about 6 hours maybe" and I'm inclined to believe that one, it being written literally moments after I finished the thing)

This one always reminds me of something some dickhead said about my microphone.

I had just recently, in December 2014, had a really bad falling out with someone, myself just freshly age 24 and them some years younger. It was the start of a still extremely vibrant grudge against a whole personality type, and one of the great battles waged between myself and the soul of (white) American culture (who fired the first shot, might I add).

Anyway we spent a few months afterwards, the early of 2015, subtweeting each other on Twitter all the time. I had them blocked and I think they had me blocked too but, both of us stupid petty children, we kept circumventing that to read each other's tweets. One of the big things I subtweeted them about was excessive use of samples on their debut album, and also the fact that none of the samples were credited at all. Part of their response to this was "well I credited my producer", which, uh, I mean, if literally idk maybe 80% of your album is other people's work, they probably ought to at least get some credit, if not maybe y'know some money.

But anyway, when I uploaded this in the April, they commented on it, and, while I can't remember the whole of what they said (and those posts are no longer online), what stuck out to me then so much that it's stayed with me for ten years, and will stay with me forever, is the accusation that I have a "$20 microphone". Motherfucker this is a Sennheiser, this is a Sennheiser e845 S, a model that currently goes for £75 (which at time of writing is about $95) and I'm still using it to this day. Oh another thing they said is that they accused me of faking the "sound" I'm using here, going for a sort of stripped down, lo-fi, cheap sound. Whereas the truth is that I wrote and recorded this EP in a single day, because I felt like it.
(Well I started writing The Shithead the previous day, but still.) It wasn't meant to be anything bigger than that. And anyway, we ain't all rich kids, dickhead.

Subject matter on this release spans from, well... the dream I'd had last night, feeling like I'm nothing, tiredness with the songs I'd been trying to write (some of which I reckon will have been the songs I was trying to write about this person I'd fallen out with), and my dad's crippling mixture of unceasing loneliness and entitlement.

Oh and the cover was meant to be a sort of semi-dark pink.
To my eyes when I made it, which were looking at a laptop screen whose colours had at some point or over time shifted slightly without me noticing, it was a sort of semi-dark pink.


Further context from diary:

-from the 17th April 2015 (after relating a short conversation between myself and my girlfriend at the time (which is its own kettle of fish)):
"Except I can't see what she sees in me 'cos I'm boring and don't exist really and none of us do, everything people do is boring, I started feeling this today, nothing's real, emotions aren't real, maybe I need to shave, or maybe it was my trip down someone else's sick memory lane. That could be it. I went to [website] and typed his [meaning my dad’s] name in, look at everything I could of those books 'cos I was writing a song about him that was going to reference his poetry. I've got a verse and a half but I guess it's not too unbelievable that I stopped existing after I did that. I was already pretty out of it today, and that was because I need to shower and shave.

Oh I s'pose I felt it when that conversation happened and that was before I went to [website] I think. Shit maybe not, I dunno. I can't remember. Everything's bland right now, especially me. One thing it did tell me though is that it might be a bad idea to just write songs about myself 'cos it's probably boring. Reading all his poem titles I mean, they're all disgusting trash and i'd be embarrassed to have titles like those. Some of them are like “sort of cooool phrase [looks like adult trying to act young]” but most of them are just fuckin like “My Dearest [insert name here]” and it's not always her [referring to my mum] and some of them don't have names in but they're all disgusting trash and I don't write to satisfy a desperate bitter hunger that never ends but I don't want to sound like that, it's disgusting, it's fake, and most of all it's abusive and obviously passive aggressive and desperate and i'm not like that, I won't turn out like that will I? Maybe when i'm both clean and oestrogen-rich i'll be able to have emotions and feel them without feeling like i've had to build a robot or like a factory around them just to keep it all alive. I feel so fake and robotic sometimes like I follow a strict structure and i'm not really human like everyone else, i'm just playing a part, i'm not really anything, not really."

-and from the 18th:
"wrote three songs today and finished The Shithead from yesterday. Released them as an EP called Last Night's Dream, Nothing, And A Thing I Learned From My Dad.
The thing mentioned is what I say in Existential Grout, “a catalogue of stretched-out tears belaboured one by one”, that's what he does, that's what I've tried to do in the past"

"I did the EP under the name Existential Pout because I still feel like everything I do is fake and contrived and I'm not actually capable of having an original thought or idea."

.

And it's at this point that I'm beginning to realise that each one of these might end up with a description far longer than some would deem necessary/reasonable.
I am who I am <3

Ah, the sound of no one else's Summer but mine.

Two friends of mine on Twitter at the time were, and maybe they still are, friends with two guys who'd just recently split from their third bandmember and formed a duo, and they, maybe 5 years younger than myself, had just released their first album. Far from perfect but a damn good first album (after two or three in their previous incarnation), way way better than anything I had ever done, and I was jealous, but the good type of jealousy, y'know? The type of jealousy where you don't hate the other person/people,
and it spurs you on, makes you competitive in a fun way.

A week after this album was released, though I don't remember if maybe I actually heard it after the event/ordeal I'm about to describe: I went to Trans Pride Brighton,
Saturday July 26th (then called "Trans* Pride Brighton" because, at that time, we all thought having an asterisk was a good way of making sure non-binary people are included. Personally I think "trans" just means not being the gender you were assigned at birth, which then inherently includes all non-binary people, at least in the western world.
But people say "trans and non-binary" these days (as of early 2025, time of writing), so, who knows. Language trundles on. All the words in the world are made up anyway).

I don't think about it very much at all anymore but this outing lives in infamy within me. It's probably the longest diary entry I ever wrote. It has six sections, which I named, and also a prelude and interlude. It's nine and a half pages long. But I'll truncate it for you (slightly) here:


Prelude
I had a funny dream about someone I'd been flirting with on Twitter, where they were very cute and funny.


i. Trains Are Cool / Unexpected Changes And Packed Trains Are Not Cool
I was tempted to chicken out but I got on the train anyway. At one stop I had to change trains unexpectedly, and if I remember correctly I had to practically run to where the other train was because it was earlier than the change I was expecting to make. It was a really packed train, and two cis gay guys quietly made fun of me to themselves.


ii. I Am Actually SHIT At Maps Part 1: Actually Walking In The Complete Opposite Direction In Brighton
I arrived already late for the pre-march meetup, but I couldn't even find where it was supposed to be anyway, and I ended up walking in completely the opposite direction. Eventually I figured this out and course-corrected but it made me too late for the march too. They were already almost an hour into the "festival in a park" portion of the thing by the time I got there.


iii. Hahaha, Oh Yeah, Remember How SCARY Eye Contact Is? / Oh Wait Is This What Sunburn Feels Like?
I got into the park and saw someone I was friends with on Twitter but couldn't say hello because she was talking to people and had normal face movements, and I was extremely anxious about my own at the time. And I had terrible dysphoria and thought I "didn't look like a woman" and would look out of place. And I also hated my personality and thought she'd find me annoying. And yeah, in my diary I also wrote "the thought of even making eye contact with her was one of the scariest things that happened in the whole day".

So I just sat down and ate my packed lunch. Something sweet that happened was that someone in a wheelchair laid a cushion on the grass in front of me and sat on that and disassembled their wheelchair, and told me they were doing it so it wasn't in my way. They were nice. Not long after that, some weirdo wearing a purple cape bumped into me and looked down and apologised. This was one of the organisers. It was around this point that I felt the tops of my hands and arms burning.

The next thing I say in my diary is "I remember looking around and thinking: most of these people look young and rich, at least rich compared to me. They all have stuff going on, they all have clothes they bought and aren't afraid to wear. Some of them have obviously not been on HRT that long, and some of them obviously started HRT after their faces aged a little further than I'd personally be comfortable with [for myself that is], but they all have lives and exist.

And I'm young and if I started HRT I wouldn't exactly be unattractive (though offline I do have a weird face and weird facial expressions).
I remember thinking about tweeting 'I don't know what I was expecting...' when I got home, because I guess I thought this would be my first time really being with like My People, but it was just another crowd I didn't belong in. I'm Claire Siegely, I'm not these people, with their existing and their being real people."

The person with the wheelchair, after reassembling their wheelchair to leave, turned round and shook my hand and said that it was nice to meet me, which was, again, very sweet. We hadn't actually talked at all, but still.

At the end of the event, the organisers gave some people awards apparently (I don't remember this but it's in my diary), and thanked a bunch of people.
One of them did a little speech about how much of an inspiration Sylvia Rivera is to him and mispronounced her name as "Riviera".


Interlude
With the event ending at about 6pm and my train home arriving at about 10pm, apparently I had intended to "sit on the beach and write lyrics for three hours", but it was full of people and I didn't want to go down and be among them (honestly this probably saved me from even worse sunburn than I got, so, this one's alright ultimately). I decided to just wait in the station instead but had trouble finding it. My water bottle had run out so I bought some lemonade at the station and was able to make eye contact with the person selling it. In my diary I say "there's a structure there, it's their job to say things I know how to reply to, and to reply to things I know how to say". I sat on the ground outside the station and ate my dinner, which I'd also brought with me and which was some sandwiches (which the lunch earlier was also), listening to a song about feeling invisible. From the diary: "my existence is there at Trans Pride but it's not in tune with everyone else's, it's not the same kind of existence, like I'm a ghost with a physical body and they're all living people".


iv. I Am Actually Great At Navigating Station Platforms
I decided to take an earlier train. A Japanese man and an American woman who were together in some capacity got on after me, and verified with me that it was going to
Gatwick Airport (which was where I was to change trains). The Japanese man asked "and it's the third stop?" and held three fingers up - the pinky, ring, and middle, with their backs towards me. Hahaha in my diary I wrote "you know the gesture. Chances are you remember" and I do. I do remember. The two of them were very cute and friendly and I still sometimes wonder what their story was or is. Another guy, sat the other side of me from the American woman, verified with me that the train would stop at Bedford, and the American woman joked that I could work for the train system.

At Gatwick Airport I had trouble finding the next platform I had to wait at, so I asked a guy working there if he knew, and he confidently said something like "this one. Blue and red First Great Southern train, at 21:03", and I thanked him. In retrospect he sounds like a big nerd who loves his job, I hope he's still alive and having a great time of it these days, we need more like him. I say in my diary again "I can talk to people working at train stations, there's a structure there, it's their job to say things I know how to reply to, and reply to things I know how to say". A train arrived and I walked over to it and went to ask this guy "is thi-" "this is your one". I smiled and said "thank you".


v. I Am Actually SHIT At Maps Part 2: Walking Down Small Paths In The Dark
This section is all about the next station I had to change at. Per the directions I'd printed out, I was to do this one on foot. Here is the first paragraph verbatim:

"I walked out the exit. Good, okay. I followed a guy down into some path between some trees and then under a bridge, out to a road near a roundabout, okay. I saw him go up some stairs onto a bridge and off into the distance, and I looked at the map I printed out and thought, nah, this way's probably where I have to go. It was dark and getting darker, and I ended up walking along a fucking dirt path next to a dual carriageway. Some parts were surrounded by trees. I heard crickets at one point. My lemonade had run out a while ago so I had no drink again and I was thirsty as fuck. The path just would not end so I decided, no, I'd go and ask for directions at the station."

But there wasn't anyone there, at the station. I went to try the bridge that that guy had gone up. Someone rode past on a bike. I got to the end of that path and the first turn to the right was not what my map said it should be, so I turned back and went along a different dirt path, this time on the other side of the dual carriageway.

It had become almost pitch black but for a few little bits of light through the trees. The first right turn on this path was a dead end, so I carried on on this path. Then there were some lights on the side of the path, and I started running, with both hope and fear, but there were just more lights, the path didn't end. So I turned back again.

I had been talking to myself for a while at this point. On my way back I said, loud enough that anyone nearby might hear me:
"can anyone hear me? Am I anywhere near _______ station?". No reply.
Here my diary says "I kept saying I'm such a shithead, saying I hate maps, saying I'm never doing this again, I should have gone with [the people I knew from Twitter],
maybe I shouldn't've come at all, I should've just called a taxi at the station. Walking on that path on my own in the dark at night, this is after 10pm now,
I've never been more scared of never getting back home in my life".

"I said to myself as I was getting closer to the bridge again: 'I just need to get back home', trying to make myself stronger.
I climbed the stairs and walked back along the bridge, completely defeated by everything I'd been through."


vi. Giving Up (And Calling A Taxi)
That. I went back to the station and called a taxi using one of the station's free taxi phones (that's: the phone call was free. The taxi cost £12), trying not to sound scared on the call.

"I hope I never forget what it felt like just sitting down on the floor at ____ station, seeing the bugs run away from my feet and apologising for disturbing them, listening to [aforementioned song about feeling invisible] on repeat again, getting the last drops out of my lemonade bottle. Staring at the black and crimson diamond chequerboard pattern on the floor. Just feeling like... I don't even know how to put it into words really. I guess feeling like I've given up. And like that's been long overdue.

And thinking about it now, seeing how the world around me worked that day, it really is overdue, it really is about time I gave up and admitted I'm basically useless on my own,
in nearly every way. I'm an alright musician and composer [I wasn't, but give my past self this], I can talk to people selling me things and ask people who work at places
questions relevant to their work, and I can match the numbers on a screen with the numbers on signs, and on my watch, but after that I'm completely useless.
And if I had gone with [my Twitter friends], I would've still found it hard to talk to them. They would've turned up in the car and made eye contact with my weird face
and I would've felt out of place instantly. There's no place I do belong, at least not with this face, not with these facial expressions, not with this voice,
not with the way I currently carry myself."

The taxi driver took me to the station I had been trying to walk to. At that station, a train headed for my hometown was arriving in just a few minutes, and that fact was some small reprieve because the train I'd meant to get went somewhere else and I would have had to get a coach afterwards. A young guy with a Doctor Who bag turned up and chatted with the cleaner girl on the train.

"I laughed to myself when walking back home, thinking about tweeting 'Only fuckin Siegely, hahaha'. I'm so shit. When I laughed a dog started barking so I didn't get to go all out, but still. Of fucking course that's what would happen if I went to Trans Pride. Why did I think it'd be different?"


I tweeted all about it when I got home, and one of the things I said was "Kinda feel like this was my 'please switch to disc 3' moment. I went to my first Trans Pride and I was rubbish at it, but I'm also going to a doctor next Friday, so, things are definitely sorta slightly happening". I remember, after a day or two literally just recovering from the sunburn and rubbing sunblock on my arms regularly because apparently that does help when you're already sunburnt too, specifically trying to write and record and upload this little EP before my doctor's appointment that Friday, where I would tell him I'm trans and ask about treatment. (10.5 years later, all the NHS has done for me is made me pay for
train tickets to London. In December 2019. So about 5 and a half years after I originally went to them in the first place! Thanks for that.)
I remember having silly ideas and just doing them, energised by the inspiration from that one album by friends of friends, not really giving a fuck if anything was technically
well written, just working nonstop for three or four days, coming up with really wild weird shit whenever I had to leave the PC and just doing them when I got back.
I've maybe never worked this way since and sometimes I remember and think that's a shame.

I did a lot of posts on Twitter the next day about everything I was feeling, feeling like I don't exist,
like: "Dunno when I'll get back to more regular SiegeFeathers tweets but right now I feel like I don't exist.
Like, I feel like I might not be trans but I also feel like if I'm not trans then I don't exist",
and "Wow I actually don't even know what's real about me anymore".

And amongst them is this set that goes:
"Guess I'm working on a pretentious melodramatic piece of shit EP just to get through these emotions and turn them into a product I can sell rather than y'know just being satisfied with having got through them. Because what good are emotions if you can't use them to make things people will congratulate you for? Right? That's how this works? Dunno if you remember me mentioning a song from 2012 a couple weeks ago or something, where like I wrote it 'cos I was burned out with trying to make what I'd been writing work. This EP is basically a parallel of that it sorta looks like. Every time I feel something that's an actual emotion I instantly think 'use it to make a song!' rather than, like, enjoy the emotion, or find the cause and fix it if it's a negative one. Because I guess I want a product to sell, because that's what makes people likeable, if they do that. And for some people songwriting is how they get through bad feelings so it 'probably works that way for me too, and with every bad feeling'."

.

Near every single part of the above text is vital to understanding where I was coming from with this EP. It's all there: the total disillusionment from my sense of self, and the feeling that I'm not really a person at all. The feeling of absolute defeat, being humbled so thoroughly by basic reality; the resentment towards myself for always automatically internally pressuring myself to try to turn everything into a song; the resentment towards my family for crushing me into two dimensions (which is not literally written there but, it's where the problem comes from isn't it). All the bitterness. The black and crimson chequerboard on the cover (here rendered as squares rather than diamonds but still).
Also the way I read the poem at the end of Suite Of Bronze Baz is directly inspired by one of the poets who spoke at Trans Pride Brighton, a woman named Alice,
she had a way of making everything sound like it mattered.

I, um, didn't realise this description would end up much much longer than the Huge Undertaking one. But it was necessary in order to properly explain these three tracks, which together are only 12 minutes and 53 seconds long. They're not incredibly well written at all but this was a watershed moment for me, not just the full experience of the day but the writing and recording of the EP too, I'd never finished anything on a computer before. It looks like barely anything, but... this one's significant.

I'd actually completely forgotten I ever uploaded this! I rediscovered that fact while verifying the dates of the other things in this section of the list. Completely and utterly forgot! Even now I don't have the memory of doing it. Seems like I wasn't especially fussed about it: before closing that YouTube channel, I copied all its videos' details into a Word document, and the description I gave to this song when I uploaded it is "Had this one for a while before recording it. Mostly just didn't feel like it. Only reason I did it now is because I need to make space on my keyboard's flash memory". So maybe that's why I don't remember? 'cos I wasn't especially bothered about it and didn't really care? I dunno.
Anyway, this is the last of the pre-transition, uploaded-to-YouTube-for-some-reason things.

Of note (to me at least) is the fact that, despite there being no metadata or any note that I can find (instantly at least) that hints to any connection between this song and the unfinished album I'm about to mention, the artwork I uploaded it with is the (I think work-in-progress) artwork for an unfinished album called Underneath The Mirror, which was I think the first of the post-Huge-Undertaking, big autobiography albums I tried to make. It's possible that Keep Digging was intended to be the opening track for this album, I don't know. Like I said, aside from the usage of this artwork for the YouTube upload, there's not really anything that indicates any connection. It's possible it may have just been some strange cryptic way of saying "look, I'm working on this other album, with this type of imagery". I do not know. Well. Anyway.

This one's a bit of nothing. BUT, it IS something I recorded and posted to YouTube. So it's gotta be here.
I don't think I can give you the original version of this in any form, it being so completely centred around voice.
But I'll totally rerecord it for you at some point, dawg, no worries <3

Now here's the real stuff.
(And I'm gonna warn you, this gets kinda personal a little bit.)

Starting in I think November 2010, I was sleeping in a shed at the end of the garden, having moved all of my instruments and recording equipment up there. This way I could work nonstop, at whatever hours I happened to be awake, and also finally have some fucking privacy, of both the visual and the sonic kinds. There were spiders in there. Later, in the Summer, a wasp or two may have bothered me. At one point there was a slug sliding its way along the wood ceiling and I had no idea how to deal with it. Some space for my thoughts. I recorded The Cherry Tree there, and, after that, with the space to feel but marginally less guilty and beholden to certain participants, I decided to write my autobiography.

The full project was supposed to be, with Prologue and Epilogue either side, four acts long: Outside, Less Outside, Inside, and Outside Again.

Outside was to be about school, college, and the totally external social world, interacting with others;
Less Outside was to be about home, my experiences of living with who I've had to live with;
Inside was to be about my internal thoughts and feelings, I think this one probably would have been the most steeped in metaphor and imagery of the lot;
and Outside Again was, I think, supposed to be about people's reactions to Inside, and the substance would have depended on what those were.
My old notes are really vague on this fourth act, I don't really 100% know what it was meant to be. Maybe I didn't really know at the time either.

Also, regarding the artwork: each act was to add one strip to the image, thus finishing with four strips. Each one of these, as implied by the Act I artwork, was to include a number of very specific personal references to the area of my life that the act was about, memories and metaphors and the like. As with the music, I never made more than just the Act I artwork, and, at this point, I don't get all of its references anymore (though I think I still get most).

Anyway the whole point of the project was both to express my honest feelings finally, without any joke or "now I have to play this character to make sure people like me" getting in the way, and to come out as trans. Oh and when I say that: I don't know if my 2011 self would agree with this but pretty much the only people in my life at the time were family members. I had a few online friends but no one I talked to a lot, and no one I was very connected with, and, crucially, I still very much cared about my family and wanted them to be part of my life. I still very much cared about the opinions of, and wanted to protect the feelings of, people who had (and have) never once extended the same courtesy to me.
So it was doomed from the start.

Unable to really fully express myself (not just for the sake of my family but also because it was the first time since childhood that I'd really tried to let myself do that, so, I wasn't wholly comfortable with it, and I didn't know myself anywhere near well enough to really know how) - or at least I think that might have been the reason - the project completely fell apart. It's honestly kind of a miracle I managed to get even one of the acts done, considering, because after that point, even though I was coming up with song ideas, I mostly wasn't able to finish them, and I hated most of them, and, in the end, I was making tracklists just full of covers. I can't remember the exact reason but eventually I just pulled the plug. By that point it was little more than a covers album, of songs that "more or less say what I want to say".

And even just speaking of Act I itself, there's really only three vocal songs on there, and one is just Wings Means Monsters again. That was a song I wrote about Final Fantasy 7 Crisis Core, but I tried to turn it into something really personal and meaningful. Not by adding anything or changing anything, you understand, but just by trying really hard to believe it. The other two are Saying Nothing and One Long Drive, both very short songs, basically an intro and an outro. The covers are really the only full size songs on the damn thing. This Outside is a poetry recital, and, uh... and uh, Collide is actually not even music at all, that's a comic. Very avant-garde approach to a tracklist, and I actually like that a lot, I dunno if I'd ever come up with something like that now. But it's not a good comic, it's some highly metaphorical, barely comprehensible garbage, imbued with so much meaning that you could probably talk about it on some podcast, after a short segment about plastic bags.

None, the, flipping, less.
I am, somehow, still quite sentimental about The Huge Undertaking, and the idea of expressing my feelings about my entire life so far in autobiographical concept album form. Maybe not a quadruple concept album, but still. This was my first attempt at doing something really big, something that really mattered, and even though it failed, I tried to take its spirit into a few other albums afterwards. Which also failed and never got finished. I'm even still kind of working on one now in the present day, on rare occasions when the mood strikes me, which I started in February of 2022 (though it didn't start as deliberately a Huge Undertaking descendent).

It's also fair to say that while I didn't finish very much, this was a very prolific period for me in the writing of bits and pieces, little sections and motifs. From the outside, this whole thing must look like an absolute garbage fire, and I can't really say that that assessment would be wrong, but none of what I do today would exist without this failed quadruple concept album. I have this idea in my head, when looking at other people's work, that probably every good first album came after many many songs that weren't good enough. Whether or not that's true for everyone it's definitely true for some, and I think it might be more true for me than for most.

Over all these years, I've made many one-off, "this doesn't count as my first album though!" albums, but, if you were to take a hard line approach and say every one of them counts as part of an "album sequence", then this one here, The Cherry Tree, would be the real first album. Clocking in at 30 minutes and 18 seconds, and with only three vocal tracks, and the only instruments on display being piano, voice, and one single guitar solo played acoustically on an electric guitar, it's probably a pretty weird album, but hey, I was an outsider artist. That's legit, and I'm actively choosing to wear it, and if you heard this material (which you might, eventually, though without the original vocals), you'd agree. I was a passable piano player and not a passable singer, and as a writer and composer I was trying very hard but did not really have a clue what I was doing. (I still kinda don't, I've just got a lot of experience now and have also actually put the time in to learn a handful of things.)

The distribution of this material was maybe kinda strange. I was not using Bandcamp at the time, though I think it did exist. Instead, I uploaded these to YouTube, each one uploaded probably the moment I finished it. I reckon I will have linked them on Twitter, but there were maybe two people following me at that time, so, basically no one heard this stuff. It's not great stuff to be honest, made even less good by bad production values and horrible, absolute beginner level vocals. Nonetheless, I made the damn thing, and it is an album.

Also this album cover is the closest you'll ever get to a pre-transition photo.

I do not remember why I did this but in 2010, armed with what was at the time a brand new laptop, I recorded some garbage, possibly straight into the laptop's mic, I don't remember. This included various short instrumental things I'd written, two pieces of music for a podcast that was never to be (The Pretentious Fortnightly Intermission, which was to be myself, as some character of some kind, expounding on the artistic virtues, meanings, and qualities of various things. I remember the only episode idea I had was "talk about plastic bags for a while"), my first song (Wings Means Monsters), and for some reason an instrumental version of a more recent song of mine (Icarus Wiser).
The whole lot lasts 11 minutes and 38 seconds.

While this collection was never released, the fact I exported mp3s of all of these tracks, numbered them, and gave them metadata, dictates to me that it should be counted in this list.