MPDG SHOW: FINAL EPISODE
hey. i felt like typing this one out. i'm not feeling the whole "mpdg show" format anymore? so i'm gonna write this to put a cap on everything. final transmission before the earth-destroyer! NO MORE ALBUM UPDATES ALLOWED!
(i've chunked this episode into sections by topic; if you don't care about what i'm saying in one section, skip to the next one!)
graduation's soon. now that i'm at the end of school, i'm coming to terms with everything. [deprecated section about how bad my old school was for my brain health]
i finally agreed to be medicated. it's not a high dosage, but yeah, it changes things. and i'm being more open with my parents and therapist about my mental health. it's weird! i've always created art from a place of desperation. i was talking to my teacher about this today. (shoutout to my english teachers. i have become closer with them than any kid at this school.) he said that he's known writers in similar situations- they were inspired by internal struggles, but when they didn't need to vent anymore, they had to start pulling from external inspirations. i'm in that transitional period right now. don't worry- i'm still making emo noisy punky stuff. work on mpdg has NOT slowed. in fact, it's sped up!
i'm not going to pretend that my mental health problems are magically solved. i still have sooooooo much to do. i'm diagnosed with depression. low points happen. things have improved, though! i've started sleeping instead of being too anxious to. i'm making friends again, after years of only meeting people online. like, i was subjected to people's presences. i was just too reserved to let anyone get close. one of the few people i befriended disappeared. there's a song about that on mpdg.
my first and foremost priority now has been getting mpdg released. this album has been rewritten numerous times over 3 or 4 years. many of my rewrites were totally unnecessary. the final tracklist looks *almost* the same as the one from the announcement post, but things have changed under the hood; one track from "the death of surfboard man", the earliest version of MPDG, has been cut down to only its outro. the album is looking to be just over 30 minutes, per the length of the demos. in other topics, the sherbet head collab song is getting somewhere, and flamingtophat has agreed to be my co-creator for the time being. it's easier not to get trapped in your own head when you can split up the work.
as for that tracklist, here it is! final version.
1. "Intro" [a much better one, written with THE Jackie Bones.]
2. "Loserdom, Pt. 1"
3. "Loserdom, Pt. 2"
4. "I Never Believed in Untitled Songs"
5. "Automator ft. Garden Angel" [FKA A Lovely Day]
6. "We Must Not Let Them Know ft. Sherbet Head" [only "unfinished" piece]
7. "Song for the Lord" [cut down to only its outro!]
8. "Manic Pixie Dream Girl" [might get a new feature.]
9. "Endless Summer" [i cut out the entire second half of this one]
10. "I Flew Into the Sun" [i've NEVER changed this song since it was written. strange.]
Release date is still Q4 2023! That being said, I am graduating in one month and my parents have asked me NOT to start college immediately. I'll use that gap semester to record the album. Hopefully, this will give me plenty of time to produce and mix and master before November comes. I had my eyes set on commissioning Ruby Jules Audio Mastering.
Inbetween school and MPDG, I have been working on other music! I have four new Graves Into Gardens tracks, one of which is for an upcoming friend's house records comp. On top of that, I've been messing around with ambient synths- that'll be another track- and two pieces of poetry that I want to make into songs. My plan is to compile all these loosies, plus three of the demos from my EP (which I will be taking down when MPDG drops- sorry!), into a series of bonus tracks. A sort of epilogue to MPDG. It's actually in my Bandcamp drafts as "MPDG: Epilogue". I might call it "B-Sides and Travesties" instead.
I've also been working on a seperate music project. A while back, I made posts about a possible MPDG follow-up called Stupid Songs for Idiot People: a straightforward, punky album with shorter songs and more collaborations. This would keep me in my comfort zone (MPDG has not) and cut down the production time. Well, a couple months ago, this idea transformed into Dead Heather and the Hooligans, a punk-oriented side project where every song is a collaboration. I'm Dead Heather and every collaborator is a Hooligan. It's a simple, fun way to release music. I am happy to say that I've completed two songs (which I'm DYING to record) and have gotten three VERY different musicians to make collab tracks! After MPDG is finished, I'd like to shift gears and focus most of my energy on this project. Maybe I'll compile everything into one big "Heathercomp" when we make, say, 15 tracks. We'll see.
Recently, I threw together a rough Neocities page. You're currently on it. For right now, it holds links to two incomplete drafts for video essays. One is a retrospective on the Postal series, and one is about Porpentine Charity Heartscape. I'll probably split the latter into two videos, one a basic guide to her content and one a "deeper dive". In preparing for the basic guide, I tried to play or read everything she's made. I have a lot to say that will not fit into the guide. It needs its own video. It is not a "critique", because that would be stupid. There are two other videos, lower priorities, that have been on my list. Half a year ago, I wrote a short story about a candy-cane wielding murderer that I've been eager to turn into a greenscreen short film (a la that musical my friends and I made). Another great greenscreen film idea was conceptualized by my friend ONE YEAR AGO. It's a parody of 2000s coming-of-age movies. The idea was to have her act every character, much like how I acted most of the characers in that musical. She hasn't talked to me in months. I'm hoping she still wants to work on it. None of these videos are big priorities, by the way. I get burnt if I work on music in every waking hour, so I like having long-term projects to fall back on.
I am working on Jested Inc! I don't want to talk about that here.
It feels like every song I write is closing a door on part of my life. It makes sense; I spend 30+ hours writing just the lyrics for some songs. So by the time I consider a piece finished, I've damn near gone through a 12-step. I was going to a 12-step group during part of this album cycle! Hell, man, when I started this album I was making queerphobic posts online. Now I've become what I hated. It feels unreal to think of all the different things that have happened while writing these songs... There are more stories than the lyrics could ever tell. Or text documents could ever explain. I'll leave it at that. See y'all around.