My band Related to Strangers just dropped our debut album GHOST today. This is a new project myself and the members of Kindergarten Cartel have taken on and I couldn’t be more excited. Same cast and crew– me on vocals/guitar, Kevin Leonard on bass, Derrick Chan on drums/production. This is our first foray into writing original material together and I couldn’t be prouder of what we created. You’ll hear the post-hardcore and punk influences from our favorite bands like Thrice, Bayside, and Rise Against all over this record, both in the sonic ground we covered and the themes we explored.
Which brings us to GHOST. An album about loss and death.
It’s a nuanced subject, one that as humans we typically don’t like to talk about in casual conversation. It’s not exactly dinner table fare. But as I have begun to get older (turning 38 this year) and have been blessed on this journey with an amazing wife and two wonderful kids, I’ve started to consider my own mortality a whole lot more. There’s a reason for that of course– once you become a husband and parent you very quickly realize that your life is no longer your own. You have a much greater responsibility to take care of yourself so you can be there for your family as they grow, both financially as well as emotionally. And there becomes an inflection point where you’re forced to make a decision to either a) let those feelings of mortality crush you with anxiety or b) use it as motivation to get better as a human being.
For me it has played out in interesting ways. I’ve become much more health-conscious over the past two years (as anyone who is close to me knows I’ve been exercising a ton and am now positively obsessed with my VO2 Max numbers). I’m eating better food and taking better care of myself. And I also was able to work through those nagging feelings of mortality (and the anxiety that comes with those thoughts) via the songwriting process, an act of self reflection that has truly become one of the greatest gifts in my life. Exploring these themes was a process that has been incredibly hard and also incredibly rewarding. Today we get to share those thoughts with the world.
So yes, GHOST is certainly about death and the various forms it takes– the end of life, the end of morality, the end of civilization, the end of innocence. But if you peel back the onion a bit, at its core this album is actually about a celebration of life. It’s about embracing the fact that our time here on Earth is finite. It’s about doing our best every single day to make the most of every single moment. It’s about the sadness of loss and the crushing weight of grief, but it’s also about recognizing it only feels that way because the joy of life is so damn sweet and rewarding.
So come get comfy and explore the meaning of life alongside of us here today. I hope you enjoy listening to this album.
I sure know we enjoyed creating it.
TRACK LISTING
01. Ordinary. It’s no secret that the USA has an epidemic of mass shootings that seemingly gets worse each year, and this sad reality is compounded by our unwillingness to do much other than offer our thoughts and prayers to the victims after another mass shooting occurs. This song deals with the prioritization of gun-ownership rights over the safety of our children. As the title alludes to, this has become “ordinary” in our society. From an arrangement standpoint, my focus on the instrumentation was to write a straightforward rock song without many thrills in order to let the message speak for itself. This one came together incredibly quickly. I think I wrote the whole thing (from lyrics to the arrangement) in a day or two. [Complete Lyric Sheet]
02. Reaping Era. We’ve all seen substance abuse impact people in our lives. How it changes them and re-orients their priorities towards chasing their fix instead of being present with those that they love. This song takes those personal themes and expands them to include the massive opioid epidemic roiling the United States right now that has led to countless overdoses. I wanted to touch on both the personal and the larger cultural impact on this song as I thought it was important to include both perspectives. On the arrangement front, this is probably one of my favorite songs off the album considering the journey this song takes you on. The rhythm section from Kevin and Derrick this track is absolutely f***ing dialed in (especially in the verses) and has a lot of really cool dynamic elements that make it fun to play. [Complete Lyric Sheet]
03. Oceans. It’s no secret that climate change is going to have a massive impact on the lives of billions across the world. This song is sort of an esoteric commentary on that concept, a song written from their perspective about the world we are leaving our children to inhabit in the coming years. Put another way it’s about the future “death” of Planet Earth. I tried to really double down on imagery in this one as a means of getting that point across without being too heavy-handed or political with the message. This isn’t a call to arms, more of a reflection of an Earth that is clearly changing due to a myriad of circumstances and how that change is going to impact future generations. From a songwriting perspective this is certainly one of the few that we’ve loved from the beginning of the writing process and released as a single ahead of time because we believed in it so much. It’s actually gotten a bit of traction (shout out to the Brazilian gym bros reading this) and eclipsed 5,000 streams this week which is objectively more than we ever expected from this project. [Complete Lyric Sheet]
04. Event Horizon. I don’t know about anyone else but whenever I stare up at the night sky and see all the stars shining down from above I can get a little overwhelmed. I feel incredibly alive but also incredibly insignificant within the grand scheme of the universe, all at the same time. This song explores those feelings and posits the question of life’s purpose. Is it better to accept our insignificance and find our place in enjoying every moment, or does a meaningful life require a constant pursuit of some deeper meaning to give us purpose? From a songwriting perspective this is another one that came on quick– the whole thing got written in less than 24 hours. We wanted to write a “stomp rock” song that was pretty straightforward and just a fun banger to play. I think we accomplished that here nicely. [Complete Lyric Sheet]
05. Breathlessness. This is actually based off a real story from about two years ago where I had some pretty significant chest pains one morning and thought I was potentially having a heart attack or something serious. My wife drove me to the ER to get an EKG (she was an absolute rock the entire way) and luckily everything checked out fine. But damn was that ever an intense experience. My chest literally felt like it was caving in at one point and there was a split second where I thought this might be the end. If you’ve ever gone through an event like that it certainly changes you and makes you take stock of what matters most in life. [Complete lyric sheet]
06. In Fear of Faith. One of our favorite songs off this album for a variety of reasons. For starters it’s an instrumental track, which was a new approach for us to take. The beginning half of this album is pretty heavy so we wanted to slot in a palette cleanser halfway through and give the listener an emotional break to start Side B. And damn do we feel this song takes you on a journey, from the slow buildup in the first half to the cathartic explosion in the latter half. It was one of my “go to” songs when I was feeling the fatigue of taking myopic production notes on other songs during the mixing process. This song always served as a reminder to keep going. The song title plays off the themes we explored on this album and refers to how faith can be something we fear in our lives. Oftentimes we search for logical explanations instead of just accepting things for what they are. Faith is an important aspect of my life and I believe should be celebrated more. Part of being human is being able to exist in two places at once, the logical and the faith based.
07. Valar Morghulis. This song is basically a love letter to the Faceless Men of Esos from the Game of Thrones novels and HBO series. I loved that and the term means “all men must die”. You can read more about all the little subtle and not so subtle references to lore in the complete lyric sheet, but I basically tried to go all out here with the GOT fandom. The subject matter fit perfectly with the album in my opinion. My favorite part is the “Not today” lines which (along with referencing a pivotal storyline from season 1) also reflect a desire to survive. When the god of death comes knocking, we say “not today”. On the songwriting front, this one came about in an interesting way– up to this point every song we have written together has started with me coming up with a relatively fleshed out idea and sending them to the band to write their parts and tweak from there. But for Valar we started with Derrick writing a few beats in 6/4 time signatures, sending them to us, and then writing to those beats. The result is something really fun and new and interesting, a song that has a lot of different parts and sonically takes you all over the place. It sort of became a (poor-man’s) version of “Deadbolt” by Thrice as a result. Certainly one of our favorites off the album. [Complete Lyric Sheet]
08. Surrender. The concept of “Surrender” is pretty simple– when you surrender to the fact that life is temporary and death is inevitable you become truly free to enjoy all of the blessings of life. Basically carpe diem. It’s a straightforward theme but one that has become very powerful for me personally as I’ve grown older. This was our first single off the album and I think hits at the overall message we were trying to communicate with the entire body of work. [Complete Lyric Sheet]
09. A Time That I Once Knew. Easily the song that took the most out of me during the songwriting process, and one that honestly had me in tears at nearly every stage of composing it. There’s a ton of layers and detail here that I’m going to exclude from this explanation out of respect for the subject matter, but at it’s core “A Time That I Once Knew” is a second-hand account of a moment of unimaginable grief and pain over the loss of someone you love. Emotionally and spiritually this is the song that resonated the most with me over the course of the album. I still remember getting goosebumps when I got the first mix back from Derrick. [Complete Lyric Sheet]
10. Ghost. We rotated through a few closing songs throughout the course of this album but none of them felt truly correct for the project. Until we wrote “Ghost”. This one came together out of necessity and the framework was laid down over the course of a weekend in a flurried writing session. We had some trouble with writing a heavy bridge part, and Kevin and I workshopped the riff you hear during a Friday afternoon jam session at his house. You can definitely hear the Thrice influences everywhere on this song from the vocal melody to the instrumentation. Thematically I wanted to close the album on a more somber note that allowed the listener to come to their own conclusion about the state of the world. There was a part of me that considered going in the opposite direction but ultimately decided against it, feeling that the best interest of the project was to ask a question rather than provide a resolution. Hence the “Can we be saved?” refrain that closes out the album. [Complete Lyric Sheet]
CREDITS
Songwriter & Lyrics: Jason Matthew Plank
Drums: Derrick Chan
Bass: Kevin Leonard
Guitars: Jason Matthew Plank
Vocals: Jason Matthew Plank
Producer: Derrick Chan
GEAR
Software: Logic Pro X, Reaper
Hardware: Focusrite Scarlett 2i2, Apollo Twin X. RME Babyface Pro FS, Audient Evo SP8
Microphones: Universal Audio SD-1, Shure SM7b, SM57, SM81, sE Electronics
Guitars: Gibson Slash Les Paul Standard, Epiphone Les Paul Custom
Bass: Yamaha BB235
Drums: Pearl Drums, Pork Pie Black on Brass snare, Zildjian A Customs, Pearl Hardware
Amps (Digital): Neural DSP Gojira, SLO-100, Nolly, Darkglass Ultra, Parallax
