Everything’s amazing,
but then again couldn’t be worse
Released June 22, 2022
Album Context:
Thematic approach: The bulk of these songs were written across 2020 and early 2021. This was a period of immense change for all of us and channeling new energies into songs felt constructive. I hadn’t sat down to put together an album since 2017, when I felt like I had said all I needed to say sonically and didn’t know what else to write. Once the new songs started flowing, they felt markedly different than before. So I decided to retire my old “Natty Ward” artist moniker and adopted the name “Feel Loudly,” which had become something of a personal mantra since early summer 2021. We have been living through weeks where it feels like decades are happening. Despite this tumult and despite this decay, we are still here, experiencing the world through feeling. We are balls of humanity, floating around, experiencing the universe through disparate magnitudes and flavors of loud feelings. And the ways in which we proclaim and connect over these feelings help make us feel more human. I’m still refining my sound and will continue to do so over more albums, but I hope to harness these loud feelings to create “campfire songs for a dying world.” As Bertolt Brecht wrote in 1939, “In the dark times / Will there also be singing? / Yes, there will also be singing / About the dark times.”Recording approach: I began recording this album in May, 2021. I was able to finally bring up my recording gear from FL to my home in NY at the end of 2020 and was waiting until I had built up enough passion to bypass that classic starting-a-big-project activation energy. The room I was recording in was the same one I was using to do my professional managerial class work-from-home job: the spare bedroom in our Chinatown apartment. I had laid down a few early tracks and thought they were pretty good. When I listened back a bit later, THEY WERE NOT. I could feel the horrendously fucked vibes of the room in which I had my soul dementor-sucked (in a corporate sense) out of my body every day. I threw all those recordings away and it left me feeling pretty defeated. To spark some more sonic authenticity, I took a necessary week off from work and spent the first day of it at the rehearsal space my friend Tim and I had started jamming and writing songs in back in January/February 2020 before COVID sent him back to Australia (miss you Tim). This is a magical space! It’s a storage unit in Brooklyn that’s been repurposed as a music rehearsal space. I immediately felt the punkrock storage unit energy of February 2020 and laid down the bulk of the bases for these tracks over a few sessions within this space. I recorded acoustic guitar and vocals at the same time. After this foundation was established, I’d record additional guitar, vocal, bass, keyboard, and beatbox parts as needed. We ended up moving in summer 2021 and I was able to finish up final recordings within our new apartment in East Harlem, where the vibes were quite strong. I also left my old job and returned back to classroom teaching. As the new school year started up and I became consumed with my students & building out my classes, it took me a long time to finally finish the recording, mixing, and mastering of the album. I also did everything on a 2009 MacBook with an ancient form of GarageBand that was prone to crashing and not having enough memory to export the tracks without glitching. It did all kind of fit the overall ethos though.