The third Vague Pains Album, Memory, will be officially released tomorrow. I’ve already posted it to Soundcloud and Bandcamp, but it will appear in all of the other music services at midnight.

Like the other Vague Pains albums, Nik Hughes played drums, Daniel Salcido did the mixing and Brad Blackwood did the mastering. I’m really thrilled with how it came out thanks to everyone’s help and hard work.

True to the title, Memory has some references to the previous Vague Pains albums, and some of the songs began as tracks on a ten album Moby Dick project currently underway for my other other band The Drownies.

For me, the most exciting part of making music under Vague Pains is collaborating. For the first, self titled, album it involved working with several incredible studio musicians which took the songs in directions I never could have dreamed. For Fragile Rush, it was stripped down to just me making the music with Nik on drums, with a more personal feeling result. Similarly, on Memory it’s just me, some backing vocals from my wife Shannon, and drumming by Nik, and this time there was different kind of collaboration. I asked friends and family to send me samples of audio, anything at all, that gave them a feeling of looking back, and used their responses in the songs, “L’esprit de L’escalier,” and “Arrow of Time.”

I started Vague Pains with the idea to take my musical ideas and -with the help of talented professionals- get them as close to perfection as possible. It soon turned into something far more interesting (to me at least): being “wrong” in interesting ways. It could be a strange artifact on vocals, disorienting changes in time signatures, or a synth/guitar that doesn’t quite follow the beat. Every now and then you stumble into something special.