wayback: 9 tracks, 10 minutes
wild: 8 tracks, 11 minutes
shaky hands: 7 tracks, 12 minutes
I think I’m noticing a pattern here…
After releasing “Barely Holdin”, I got busy with midterm and end of term exams so I wasn’t able to make any new music. Plus, I was working on other personal projects like making games. From September through November of 2024, I made a lot of Bosca Ceoil tracks which were mostly just short ideas that I can expand on later. The folder where I put all my files was named “unexpected” because I thought I wasn’t going to release anything until 2025. Over time, more and more .ceol files got added into the folder and I was kind of stumped on making even one complete track. Eventually, there was a file which was the most promising named “beeep.ceol” but still, I couldn’t get around to finishing it.
At one point, in my school’s music club, I messed around with a classical guitar and ended up with a weird chord progression.
F - A - B♭ - E
(I know, the E is off-key)
I tried making a song (Yes, a song with lyrics and vocals) with it but it never sounded quite right. I used the chord progression in Bosca Ceoil and it still sounded weird so I tweaked the E into a Gm and it was good enough for me to make a little melody out of it. The track sounded pretty cute and I was like “Yep, this is the one!” and gave it the name “fabbe.ceol” like the original chord prog.
It took a while, but eventually…
… I finished it. I still wasn’t sure about uploading it to Bandcamp since the track was really short and didn’t sound as quality as my previous releases. So, I procrastinated on uploading it for a LONG time. As for the title, the song had little awkward pauses in between the bars and I thought that was funny, so I named it “awkward stare”. It wasn’t until the 29th of November that I finally put out “awkward stare”.
I wasn’t intending on releasing a whole album so the cover art was pretty bare bones. I used MS Paint to make the text then FireAlpaca to add a grainy effect and the wavy text. It went through several iterations.
Remember “beeep.ceol”? I finally went in and finished the whole thing. At first, the song was just under a minute and a half, plus the song structure was WAY too boring. So I put all my brain cells together to add more instruments, structuring the song better and making the track longer. The result was a fun, upbeat 2:30 track (I get really happy when I make >2 minute songs lol). With this one finished, I had a boat load of motivation to create more and more tracks to make a full album.
The album is supposed to be about how awkward I am. I’m, like, really slow and clumsy at doing basic things. I also tend to be a bit fidgety like, for example, I fiddle around with my pens a lot when class gets boring. Thus, the song was named
“shaky hands” is the intro track. It’s very fun and upbeat but I especially like it at the end where it gets really slow and chill. I took heavy inspiration from the song “Sky Magnet” by Frankie Cosmos. That song had a very simple but calming outro to it.
I, like most people, get nervous in situations like talking in front of a crowd or a stranger. When I tense up, my hands tend to shake a lot and my friends and family always point it out. Because of this, I named the track and the whole album “shaky hands”. Plus, the song is pretty fast-paced and energetic, like the shakiness of my hands.
Another fun thing about me is, when I get anxious, I lose my ability to talk! Like, there was this one time when I was doing a History presentation in front of my whole class. I was in the middle of talking but then I forgot a crucial detail. I was panicking to remember what it was so I just stood there silently. My friends were all at the back saying “spit it out!”
The song at the start is so happy and joyful and then when we get to the next part, the joy abruptly stops and it sounds more menacing, kinda representing me forgetting the words I need to say in a presentation.
There are times when I get really sad. Sometimes, to the point where I want to bawl my eyes out. But since I’m all grown now, I have more control over my emotions so I usually don’t cry. “on the verge of crying” was meant to be like that. The song is split into 4 parts: the verse, chorus, the second verse and the second chorus. The verses build up quickly but when we get to the chorus, everything just stops (like how I stop myself from crying).
I’ve also been writing a lot of songs (with lyrics!) on my iPhone notes that I sing while strumming my guitar to. Most of it is pretty cheesy, I’m not gonna lie. I wrote these songs late at night before going to bed so I probably wasn’t putting a lot of thought into the lyrics.
WARNING: cringe.
The chord progression (at the last line) was pretty sick, though. So I used it to make “falling apart” (pretty obvious now that you’ve read the lyrics). I put this track after “on the verge of crying” to liven up the mood a little. It was getting a bit TOO calm.
Okay, “unease” is an intriguing one. I wrote a little song named “permanent vacation” (the name comes from a Yucky Duster song). I was trying to make a love song (even though I had little experience with it) and I actually liked the lyrics a lot. It wasn’t great, but it was better than the other ones I’ve written before.
Later on, I wrote another song “where did you go”. Didn’t exactly love the lyrics, but I like its chord progression. Returning to the present, I combined two of these songs into Bosca Ceoil. The piano melody you hear is how “permanent vacation” was supposed to be sung and the chord prog for the entire song was from “where did you go”.
At the end of “unease”, you can actually hear a motif of the outro of the intro track. I made it like that so everything in the album feels more connected. It’s cute and I think it’s a good way to close the album.
There were lots of unused tracks here and there but this time around, I’m not going to make “shaky hands: the ones that didn’t make the cut” since none of them are very interesting.
That’s all for “shaky hands”! Hope you enjoyed my rambling.