Afterburner - and a new album in the works
Greetings! Please enjoy my newest song and music video.
Over the past several years, in between being a Dad to a now 4-year old beautiful girl and my day job as a network engineer, I have been hard at work writing and producing a new suite of songs. My next album (as-yet-untitled) will hopefully be finished and released before the end of the year.
This new album will be nearly half instrumental music, harkening back to my entirely instrumental debut, Photon Life. Nonetheless, the songs with lyrics that I have written are the best I’ve ever done, and I’m excited to share all of this with the world. The lead single, which I’m hoping to release a music video for sometime in the next four months, is ominously titled “End Times,” (which may end up as the title for the album). But the first piece of music I’m sharing that will be on the album is a track called “Afterburner.”
”Afterburner” was conceived early in the writing process, when I was flirting with the idea of making an entirely instrumental album that is thematically centered around video game soundtracks. In my head this was a pseudo-soundtrack for the 1987 arcade game Afterburn (which I played exhaustively on my Amiga 1000). In Afterburn, you fly an F-14 against increasingly difficult waves of enemy fighters. The original arcade game included a motion-simulating cockpit that would tilt and swivel as you pulled on the flight stick. One of my childhood favorites.
Not long after I finished recording the demo version of “Afterburner,” I conceived the idea of an inexpensive music video that simply used replays of War Thunder games I had recorded. The problem was that I didn’t have any afterburning jets in War Thunder. I’ve been playing since 2014, but my highest tier jet fighter was an F-84, which has no afterburner. I knew that to do this video right, I had to have an F-14, because flying an F-14 at supersonic speeds against enemy fighters was the mental vision I had kept throughout the writing process. So, I embarked on what turned out to be a very long mission to unlock the top tier fighters in War Thunder’s USA tree, culminating in not only two variants of the F-14 (A and B), but also the three variants of F-4 Phantom II, plus the F-15 and F-16. Along the way I recorded lots of matches, hoping for some cool moments that I could use in the video.
Late 2023 I started reaching out to drummers I know, to see if anyone was available and interested in helping me finish my songs properly. I knew that this song in particular had to have a real drummer - it’s just too much of a jam to play along to sequenced MIDI beats. Tom Reavis answered the call and knocked it out of the park. After a few months spent getting his home studio ready, we finally recorded the drums for this song on April 21st. Last weekend we filmed ourselves playing the parts, and over the past several days I’ve edited everything together into the final video, which I hope you enjoy.
Stay tuned for more tracks and more videos! If all goes according to my current plan, I will produce at least three, but possibly four more music videos this year, culminating in the release of the new album.