New Music: Princess Barbara

I've been trying and failing for so long to commit myself to releasing some solo songs – but today's the day!

It's a small release – a 2 sided-single – but I'm really excited about it :]

While Princess Barbara used to be a collaboration between Pat Coyle and I, it's currently moving forward as a solo project and I'm proud for this to be the first step in that journey.

Much of the instrumentation and song writing for this project used to be heavily based around patches created in Crystal SoftSynth. I used to sit for hours tweaking sounds in that VST or more often rolling the dice on the breed feature:

Patch breeding enables you to create new patches which are combinations of existing patches [...] Select a father patch and a mother patch. Optionally select an amount of mutation, which will introduce a degree of randomness which is not directly derived from either the father or mother. Then press the "Breed" button to create a new patch. (Caution: you can sometimes get unpleasant sounds, so be ready to press Breed again [...]).
- Crystal user guide

But I've gotten really into hardware synthesizers lately so this single is another kind of first step – the shift from Princess Barbara being a band with a limitless instrumentation palette to one limited by the physical instruments I have here at the "studio." Gone are the MIDI horns and the CPU-melting VSTs and the decision paralysis that comes with that – I want to finish more songs now.

the recording setup

Side A of the single, Frend, follow this new "rule" almost entirely – I do think there's one computer synth in there technically.

Side B, Return to Amender, is actually a resurrection of an old sketch done when I was still writing with Pat. That song used to have a ton of Crystal sounds in it and an entirely different vibe and chorus that all got removed. I kept the first vocal melody and Pat's drum parts that went along with that but re-wrote everything around it, gave the song a new chorus, and buttoned it up. I always really regretted that we never finished this one and I kinda wish I knew what it would have sounded like if we had... but all that considered I'm happy with how it ended up.

There is a spoken work portion of Return to Amender – it's from the speedrunner tomatoanus who explains how other runners beat games on youtube. In particular, this sample is edited from the explanation for How Speedrunners Beat Tony Hawk's Underground in 32 minutes, but he actually takes a break in all of these videos for this sentiment. There have been a lot of really down times in my life where I was watching his videos in the background and I heard this shit just when I needed it. It fit for the song for me, so it's there, just wanted to call it out.

For the cover art I reached out to an old pal I met working in software consulting, Alex Baratta. I follow him on Instagram and noticed he started experimenting with linocut around the time I was wrapping up the writing for the two songs. I am a sucker for most any kind of print and I really liked his style – so we agreed to collab! Just as I remembered Alex was wonderful to work with; he immediately had an idea of what he wanted to do and sent a ton of scans for me to pick from before sending my favorites in the mail. I think it turned out _perfect_: