That time a random song about giving up on New Year's Resolutions lead to committing to a year-long project

The song in question - give it a watch and turn on closed captions for lyrics, etc

Every year around the end of January I think about this song; partially because the subject matter of it being inspired by New Year's resolutions gone wrong, but also how it came to be from random restrictions and then how it directly impacted my musical career moving forward. Figured it would make a good if not indulgent blog post! But then again, what is a blog for if not that??

First though, some time travel:

Curious Quail as a project started in San José, California in 2008 as my solo thing, gradually absorbing more musicians over the years; the band earned both 'gotta catch em all' and katamari reputations as more and more people from other bay area music acts got involved. By 2014 we had a full-time 5 member lineup with some live performances featuring as many as eight or nine people on stage at once - most of whom lived either in SJ proper or close by in other Bay Area cities.

Around 2017 though we'd started to have an exodus from the bay due to the astronomical cost of living; our other vocalist Erin had relocated to Vancouver, Washington and I'd moved to the Coachella Valley, etc etc.

At this point, we were predominantly recording things remotely for what was going to become Empty Victories and meeting up for various festivals and tour dates; we'd just played the inaugural MAGWest, done various 8BitLA / 8BitSF festivals etc all while living geographically dispersed along the pacific time zone.

MAGWest 2017 live stream

Empty Victories began tracking in earnest in 2015; we'd done a preliminary single at Different Fur but the whole "having to exist as people in capitalism" made it difficult to be able to keep up with schedules and finances to record the album "properly".

Now, I say "properly" in quotes because it was going to be the self-funded follow-up record to something that had raised over $10,000 on Kickstarter, won a bunch of awards and got us radio play, festival opportunities (I believe to this day we're still the only band to ever have performed with a Gameboy on stage at Mountain View, California's Shoreline Amphitheater) and prestige for what was otherwise a "local band" - it's easy to say in retrospect that we had an unhealthy relationship with trying to "live up" to that album and its reputation.

Headlining San Francisco's Great American Music Hall on our 2015 tour - GoPro Promotional Video by Jason Cayabyab

So in January of 2018, I had a brilliant (lol) idea as the Empty Victories delays ran on and it was harder for the band to do regular live shows given geography; we would embark on a sort of band-wide "low impact" sidequest to not only keep us releasing things and in the public eye, but also get more content on YouTube; something we were severely lacking as a supposedly "serious" band that had no real music videos to speak of.

We'd come up with a fuckton of songwriting restrictions separated into multiple categories (key, tempo, song structural guides, lyric writing prompts, and instrumentation "musts have" or "not allowed" requirements), write them down on sheets of paper, toss them into an empty guitar case and then once per month pull three of 'em out at random to use as the basis for a "quick" song to write and release before that month was out, while also filming the recordings of our parts to release as performance videos exclusively on YouTube.

For the entire year of 2018.

Production still from Resolutions (January)

It also meant I would have to like, mix and edit the songs as the band's producer just from an audio perspective, so instead of a fun side project while working hard on the sequel to After the Lights Failed, I effectively was giving myself a second full time job that had some serious end-of-month crunch implications.

My bandmates liked the idea of the project as a whole but it was nearing the end of January when we were making the call and no one's schedule really lined up to jump in on something so last-fucking-minute and like no infrastructure in place for actually doing video. It felt like maybe the plan would be a bust (which would have been totally fair!!), but then we rolled the first three restrictions. They were (ominously):

142 bpm, No electric guitar, and "That feeling you get when you're super on it at the beginning of something and it goes south"

My specific brand of brain poison fucking clicked into tunnel vision "challenge accepted" mode. Inspired by the moment, I threw together this song about New Year's Resolutions and how easy they are to absolutely fuck up. It matched the theme limitation but having that limitation being the first one out of the gate in our pile of random things felt pretty goddamn signposted toward disaster.

It came together in about five days, with most of my video stuff still set up from doing a Yoshi's Island cover video with Amie Waters.

Each song I did handwritten lyrics for to accompany the release posts

And fuck, dude. The positive response to this song among just my bandmates alone when we dropped it - there was this "Oh shit, sign me up for next month" sentiment and it fucking galvanized me to take the whole thing more seriously. Like, would it really matter if we didn't get a whole year done? No - but because we'd started with the notion of failure and I'd just proved it was possible, I was pretty dead-set on seeing it through to the end.

A few months in we started drawing more than 3 restrictions at a time and letting social media polls vote on which 3 to go with

With the band being remote at this point (years before Covid hit I should point out) we started setting up the necessary things to do this properly; scheduling times where Josh or Joey could be in the Quailcave at the same time to film each other's performances, Abe and Joey setting up better micing situations for the drums, leaving tripods and lighting at the 'cave in case anyone needed to solo shoot - and we ended up getting really good at it??

Josh tracking bass for The Albatross (August) at the Quailcave in San José

Everyone would do 1-2 takes of filming themselves playing their parts (or more if they had alternate ideas - Joey'd sometimes do 3 different drum options for a song and we'd mix and match), then send it all over to the band's dropbox and I'd start cutting the monsters together into a cohesive whole.

I had a full studio setup at my place in the desert but until March we didn't really have any of the above for anyone else: February's song Abandon Ship has like two mics on Joey's drums total, Alan's violin is coming through a guitar amp, and Erin's audio and video were tracked on an iPad. Audio / visual quality definitely increases as the project goes along lmfao

And one of the neat things about being pretty modular as a group is that as schedules did or didn't line up, members of the band could come and go as they pleased month by month. I think Erin's only in like what, 2 songs total? Della debuted as a singer in this project, first thing she ever sang on. Alan's on only about half the record, Josh missed maybe three months total? Abe wasn't even "officially" in the band anymore at this point but still joined in on several songs. Hell, nobody is in the final song except for Joey since the restriction had no vocals and he came up with a piano arrangement.

Also, cant forget that his day job allowed him access to Timpani and a whole litany of percussion devices that he used throughout the project. Most notably:

Still from 'You Need Better Friends' (June)

Abe predominantly tracked his parts at home in the Bay Area - but his schedule lined up that he'd be taking a trip to visit family in Arizona and could crash at my place on the way to track and film parts for our April song, This Rest Stop Sucks. There were a lot of fun moments like these throughout the year.

Abe recording guitar for This Rest Stop Sucks (April) at the Desert Art Colony in Palm Springs, CA

On the whole, we got to go outside comfort zones with the weird writing restrictions (vending machine snacks!! your aunt is an alien!! let's all sing 'fuck' in the round!!) that we probably wouldn't have gone with otherwise on a "traditional" record at that point.

We've since lost those blockers, see the song about running a witch bar as a financial scam or our entire 2 hour songwriting competition entries for now-defunct social media platform Cohost. There's legitimately a song in there about being a "board certified necromancer".

No one should have let me write the closed captions on the project

And like hey - twelve whole months, man! We did it! I think maybe two songs total throughout the entire year missed their deadlines of "before the first of the next month" and one of them was because I got a throat infection and couldn't sing for a few weeks. All in all a pretty successful run, again, starting with the notion of failure.

Me tracking guitar for The Albatross (August) at the Desert Art Colony in Palm Springs, CA

Once the project was complete, I started doing some cleanup to remaster the songs for an actual release because the only way to listen to any of them was via the YouTube videos, and like - YouTube is NOT the best way to listen to an album. I'm super proud of the videos, but there felt like a missing audience chunk for us to have a whole album's worth of material not available on bandcamp.

Also, the audio mixes to meet the monthly deadlines were not pretty and I was happy to un-cut some of those corners while staying as true as possible to the originals. Another nice bonus was me getting some work-life balance emotional healing distance with a few of the songs that I'd definitely made bad crunch calls on in the heat of the 30 day ticking clocks.

Twelve Months as an album released on February 12th of 2019. Despite the ad-hoc nature of the way the songs were written, it feels like a cohesive whole that was planned that way all along; it's hard for me to disconnect the monthly nature in my head but we've gotten so much feedback from fans who never followed the YouTube journey, instead experiencing it as an album after the fact and it's wild to see. There's this review written by Clover from the now defunct Chiptunes=Win blog (what a shitshow that site turned out to be, story for another year lmao) that has stuck with me kinda forever. Here's a snippet:

It's been one of our more successful records, second only to After the Lights Failed which is wild for something that started from a place of near-failure with an almost shitpost song about biffing and giving up. And like, for context I've gotten composing gigs purely off this record, we've done collabs with other artists as a result of the work here, and hell Twelve Months is the reason Curious Quail performed on the main stage at MAGFest 2019 in Maryland. It's weird!!

And it's a record I have very conflicting emotional feelings about BECAUSE of how hard I pushed myself for it in ways that were definitively not healthy - but I learned a lot from that process and I'm really glad it exists! I mean hey, it's got some bops on it goddamn it! And for a band that can't often be in the same room together, it's nice to have us all together on video sonically together even when separated by time and space.

Anyway, thanks for reading, hope you enjoy the music! Here's a cat.

His name is Smokescreen Chip