petriform

wrote a comfy coffee shop SNES chiptune for a compo hosted by Button Masher! ☕

being as attached to FamiTracker as i am, this happens to be my first ever SNES tune, as well as my first using Furnace. there’s a first time for everything, i suppose! still getting used to it!

my new EP, “…especially any of this,” is now available on bandcamp!

thank you all listening party attendees 💜

the bandcamp description goes into more detail, but to get right to the point: these are songs that were left on the cutting room floor of the “nothing is for sure” sessions and revisited for the five-year anniversary of that album. i wrote a lot of stuff for that album that didn’t make it; more than i have for any album before or since! i think i did that material justice - you be the judge!

download free / pay what you want - enjoy!

(and if you happen to be attending MAGWest in a couple of weeks… swing by to see me! i’ll be playing some of these new songs for sure!)

celebrating five years of “nothing is for sure,” a Big Post! live set and streaming playback stats, the story of “albacore song,” and more!

“nothing is for sure” is now five years old! i still consider this to be my most consistent non-concept album (if you want concept albums, i’m begging you to listen to “florence”), and it remains a mainstay of my live setlists! “the jacket” continues to be a part of my ~brand identity™®~ five years on, though i’ve retired the specific jacket that is depicted - performing in that in the summer was Not Great! (a current depiction would see a vest with way, way more buttons.)

i was curious to see what the play stats looked like after these five years, especially in comparison to how i’ve treated the material in live sets over the same time period. this is gonna be a long, wildly self-indulgent post, but if i can’t nerd out about my own shit, how can i expect anyone else to? and hey, there might be insights applicable for other independent musicians somewhere in here, maybe! (maybe?) so here are the stats!

all told, “nothing is for sure” looks to have attracted over 30,000 streamed plays between the four services i queried. i… wouldn’t have imagined that! i’m not going to compare these numbers to any other album of mine because assembling the data takes work and i’m lazy! maybe for the next album anniversary! these numbers aren’t inclusive of the instrumental versions, by the way.

as far as the live numbers go, looks like i’ve played songs from “nothing is for sure” 39 times over 15* live sets since 2017. eventually i’ll finish porting my setlists into an actual database for ease of analysis, but today’s not that day.

_{*it’s 16; i played a set in february 2020 (oof) for which i’ve lost the setlist. it’s not accounted for in these stats or anywhere else.}

initial takeaways from these charts:

• i’m really overdue to perform “gone without!” (okay, and “delete!delete!delete!” too, but i feel like that one is inflated by being track 2.) i’ve been aware that people like this one a lot, whereas i personally prefer most of the other songs on the album. i couldn’t tell you why that is. i aaaaaalmost played it for the first time the last couple of sets, but switched it up at the last minute because i felt (and still feel) like it’ll be difficult to perform (the verses are fast and long).
• on that note, i DO plan to play every song off this album live at least once, and i’ve been slowly chipping away at that goal. god help me when i try to pull off “punch buggy slug bug” live; it’ll almost certainly be the first and last time. i think i’ll save “over like rover” for last - it’s only fitting, right?
• dang, now i have it in my head to just play a set that’s just the album front to back. pls book me to do this 🥺 (but ideally book me to do “florence” in full first)
  
• i dunno why spotify likes “pace yourself” in particular but thank you spotify listeners
  
• in retrospect it’s curious that neither i or the listening audience seem to regard “ahead of your time” relatively highly given that’s the Song That Says The Album Title

all that said, here are some…

fun facts about “nothing is for sure” live:

• the first “nothing is for sure” track i ever played live was “killian is lying to you” in march 2017 at DNA Lounge in san francisco - over 15 months before the album’s release
• this was the only song from the album i played live before its release.
  
• the most recent “nothing is for sure” track i’ve played was “albacore song” just this past month (may 2023) in san jose, in a set that also included “stay (wish on a star),” “k7 (k9 - k2),” and (for the first time ever!) “wilson phillips screwdriver”
• i’ve got a lot to say about "albacore song” later!
  
• since the album’s release, i’ve never gone a single set without playing a song from the album.
• since the album’s release, i’ve never gone a single set without playing “stay (wish on a star)” specifically. this wasn’t on purpose. it’s in my top 5 most-played-live songs and is creeping up on a few that i no longer play often.
• even if i’d never played “stay (wish on a star),” the bullet point prior to that would still be true.
  
• i’ve had multiple sets post-“Dither Beach” where i failed to play anything from “Dither Beach” but still played stuff from “nothing is for sure”.

tell me about the downloads! the $ale$!

okay. without getting too specific, compared to my other full-length albums on bandcamp, “nothing is for sure” is the:

• 2nd highest-grossing*,
• 4th most-purchased,
• 5th most-downloaded.

(if you’re wondering what the top albums are for those rankings, “Don’t Worry, You’re Great!” is all of them. the way things are going (streaming going up, downloads and CDs going down), ostensibly, it’ll be that way for a long time.)

the parameters with which i personally measure “success” for my own projects are complicated, but “nothing is for sure” was a success.

_{*album downloads on my bandcamp are name-your-price. digital gross is pretty much entirely what folks feel like paying. this figure includes CD sales; without CD sales, it’d be 5th.}

okay so what did you mean about “albacore song”

so people who’ve attended my live shows will know about this, but people who have only listened online might not!

i first played “albacore song” in july 2018 at DNA Lounge; the first show post-album-release. cool! that was the one and only time i played it… until chiptune colleague piecesofeight spun up a mashup thereof with Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” that struck a chord with me.

so as a nod to that, and in service to my (wavering) habit of doing at least one cover per set, i played “albacore song” once more - again at DNA Lounge, three years later - but this time, i swerved into a cover of “Like a Prayer” for a couple minutes, and then back into the rest of “albacore song.”

thus began a tradition of me using “albacore song” as a medley-riffic launchpad for covers that i invoke wherever I can! i’d done (and still do) similar stuff (swerving covers into “Super Dog Park”) before, but “albacore song” has gone from a played-it-once song to a recurring trojan horse of sorts for covers in my live arsenal - if you hear me go into “albacore song” these days, expect to hear Something Else before it’s over!

this is the first time i’ve committed these to writing in one place, but here are the covers i’ve rolled into “albacore song” so far:

• Madonna - Like a Prayer
• The Catherine Warwick version of Pollyanna from MOTHER (twice)
• M2M - Don’t Say You Love Me (gotta repeat this one, it was fun!)

and they likely won’t stop there! i’ve since thanked and gotten to meet piecesofeight in person (after having played a set that, ironically, was my first irl set to not include albacore song in years. oops!). you never know when someone or something will alter your course for the better in unexpected ways!

it turns out even less is for sure

those of you who have been around me for a while have known me to periodically release companion pieces to my full-length albums when there were songs that just barely didn’t make it onto those albums (most recently for “florence”).

the thing about the “nothing is for sure” sessions, though, is that i had a LOT of material in consideration. way more than any other album i’ve ever done. coming off of “Don’t Worry, You’re Great!” i was on fire, writing tons and tons. i’ve entertained the idea of doing the “nothing is for sure” companion piece before, but it’d be a greater task than usual due to how much viable material was in there to begin with.

but as you may have seen me announce, i’ll be releasing an eight-track companion piece consisting of the best of those leftover projects titled “…especially any of this” before the end of the month! more “nothing is for sure” for all! this is the biggest companion piece i’ve ever released, so i’m excited! and… i’ve got my next album coming along on top of that! stay tuned!

tell me about it!

i can crunch the numbers for as long as i want, but there’s no substitute for real feedback. so if you have something to say to me about “nothing is for sure,” fire away! what did you like about it? favorite song(s)? ones you want me to play live more? ones that sucked? hey, the album isn’t getting any newer or younger - i wanna know!

all in all, whether you were there for “nothing is for sure” when it came out or you’ve arrived since, i hope you continue to enjoy what i still consider one of my best albums and proudest achievements. thank you!