Jeff Goldsmith
This Beast
The goal was simple right? Just make another record…..well it turned out—it wasn’t actually that simple this time around……
When I finished my last album “May You Find the Light, Before the Devil Knows He’s Right” in 2021, I immediately started writing and recording another album. This made total sense to me because up until that point my cadence for releasing albums had been about every year beginning in 2019. But as I began to formulate songs over the course of the next year, I encountered a brand new problem, I was actually getting better at music production. The years of late nights mixing and editing had somehow started to shape my ears differently, and I was noticing things like EQ and leveling. On the surface this is a great problem to run into because I knew I was getting better. However, for someone like me with an attention problem, this actually posed a lot of problems. Suddenly every mix was never good enough, and mixing sessions would start to stretch for such long periods of time that I would grow tired of songs and ideas and completely abandon them. My brain tends to operate in a way where things can constantly be in a state of flux where I’m re-doing things, re-arranging things—in a way nothings ever done. And a state of constant growth can clash with how my brain operates—because they sort of conflict with one another—leading to me just being universally unsatisfied with the results. It kind of crushed me. So I decided that I needed to forfeit the idea and simply focus on scoring work.
In early 2024 I met with a couple of friends for coffee and told them I wanted to re-explore making a record at some point this year. I needed something that was mine, where I made no compromises and followed only my intuition and my feelings, and most importantly I just needed to get it across the finish line just to prove to myself I could do it again. One of them said that was a great mission statement to have for 2024. I agreed.
So in June of this year that’s exactly what I started to try again. I just wrote and created, trying not to overthink anything in terms of arrangements or parts, or even songs. I was getting some things out. It was productive and inspiring. It reminded me of why making records and writing songs is my true passion. I sort of ended up with an instrumental record I was pretty happy with in only a few weeks of work.
Later that month I had to depart for a long weekend to go be onset for a film project and decided to spend a few days on the road just taking field recordings. I was a bit burned out at the time probably from taking on too many projects at once and I thought spending time with the naturally occurring sounds around me would be fun to do and maybe a good reset.
I think it’s pretty obvious who my musical influences are when you hear my music. But there are other influences (possibly even bigger ones) I have that tread underneath the surface, one of those being Jeremy Michael Ward. I had been thinking about Jeremy a lot that weekend. I never knew Jeremy and I honestly don’t know a lot about him. But I have been strongly influenced by his work over the years—much more so in recent memory as I’ve done more scoring work. His usage of diegetic sound and field recordings in context to songs has always been something I deemed as groundbreaking on a number of levels. The main one being—it gives a “feel” to things that is entirely indescribable in words. Im always looking for that feel in everything I do. Ive always been driven by the feel of a song, as I think the feeling is just as powerful as the music itself.
I worked with Jeremy’s cousin Jim Ward a bit on his 2022 Sparta record. That weekend I messaged Jim and told him how much his cousin had recently been a big influence on me and I sort of felt like I was channeling him a bit doing these field recordings. It was kind of giving me some perspective about my journey the last few years up until this moment. Jim and I talked a bit about projects and it reminded me of what a great collaboration I had with Jim during the making of his Sparta record. Jim was such a stand up guy and showcased a level of respect I still think is rare. He made me feel like an equal, which is paramount to any true collaboration. It inspired me further.
When I got home, the drive to finish the record was pulsing through me now. I was feeling inspiration come from many different levels at that point, my current experiences and my past, recent scoring projects with directors like Jack Walterman (Walterman Productions)—I’d really tapped into a special place of creative energy. I was taking many of those field recordings and weaving them into those songs. I made more ideas. I recorded more—I let it the f*** out. And suddenly, I had a record. I thought it was done. I was satisfied. I emailed Carl Saff (Saff Mastering) and scheduled for it to be mastered.
A few days later late one night, like a wall something hit me. I don’t really know what it was, but I ran downstairs to my studio at the 11th hour, and completely improvised vocals that night. Not necessarily to provide a voice on things—but rather to add one more instrument that inside felt urgent…it felt uncomfortable and intimate…and I knew it needed to be there. Now, it was done. And honestly, that is the record you hear now.
I’m not writing this out in an attempt to give context to everyone because I personally feel the album should speak for itself in that sense. It’s a beautifully uncomfortable listen that I’m very proud of. Rather, I’m explaining this because the creative process is a weird thing and other creator’s stories have always proved inspirational to me. Positive experiences, bad experiences, dull experiences, experiences of people we’ve never met, experiences collaborating with other artists, all provide us source material to pull from. And everyone has something to say, even if you may not know what that is yet. And that’s the most special thing about music, is that sometimes you don’t need to know what that is to start the journey. Who knows, the journey itself, may in fact be the story.
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