In Details have released their first album, A Series of Tiny Demises and debuted a video for “Hound” from the album! The video is beautifully shot by Ethan Bielik.
We sat down with In Details to get some background on the new album and to find out what is next!
Tell us about the writing process for A Series of Tiny Demises…
If I had to sum up the process in a word, I’d say, “Walking.” The majority of my music is the result of dramatic overthinking, and the songs of A Series of Tiny Demises are no exception. Little shoots of creativity seem sprout best while I’m caught up in menial tasks, like sauntering around or even at work. Hound came together on the clock in an old car garage, and Lions and Pears was actually written in my parents’ chicken coop (and recorded on an iPhone, in the absence of notepaper).
Musically, I knew I wanted Tiny Demises to be a tribute to the pop-punk idols of my youth – Taking Back Sunday, Motion City Soundtrack, and the like. So lyrically, I was trying to capture the romantic and intertwined existential angsts that pervade that kind of music. But as each piece of the whole EP came together, I began to hear something happening between the stanzas, something deeper and disturbed – a sort of sub-textual darkness. I’d like to believe this makes for a more interesting art piece, but it’s also something that occasionally keeps me up at night.
Where was the album recorded? Tell us a bit about the experience…
I recorded this album with Nick Ingram at Capital House Studio in Galena, Ohio. Nick’s actually the first producer I sought out to work with after hearing their work; others have been more personal connections. I’m happy to say the experience exceeded expectations. Capital House Studio is managed by Nick Moore who also runs In Vogue records, so off the bat I knew I was in for a more professional experience than what I’ve grown accustomed to. Nick (Ingram) is a very relaxed, easy guy to get along with who’s talents cannot be underscored enough. Watching him work in his DAW is definitely the experience of viewing a master at their craft. He’s also not shy when it comes to pushing the artist in the vocal booth to get the perfect take, which pays off enormously in the end product. I feel like I definitely learned a good deal about making a quality recording, so working alongside him was not only satisfying, it was educational.
What is next for In Details?
I just put a record out, so the immediate future is about celebrating and promoting the album. There’s still a few songs from Tiny Demises I haven’t got to debut live yet, and there’s quite a few stops in my circuit that I haven’t been back to play any of these songs yet. Filling that gap will be the first step.
Looking beyond and into the future, I hope it won’t be so long between now and my next release as it was the first two (In Details’ debut record, Glass, preceded A Series of Tiny Demises by two years). For me, it’s really all about the songs and deciding how to publically breath life into these entities with whom I’ve become so well acquainted in private. I have a few tracks I’d love to take to Nick Ingram again, because I love what he does so much. But I also want to make something different, maybe something very acoustic, or maybe something very harsh and electronic. There’s all these tendrils of inspiration, but it’s all theoretical until I’m actually in the studio.
Working on Tiny Demises was also the first time I branched out into visual media to accompany the audio, a creative process I’m still very inexperienced but very fascinated with. There are many limitations associated with video production, but that leads to lot of outside-the-box thinking. Generating more visual content is something I definitely I’m going to strive for.
One thing I know for certain is that I want to collaborate. I’m privileged to live in a city surrounded by unbelievable talent, and I think the strength of our artistic community is so much more potent than what any one artist can produce. It’s almost a duty of a recording artist to find a way to capture and preserve a piece of it for posterity.
I have a lot of aspirations; we’ll see how many meet reality.
