Over the years since I produced these songs, I’ve gotten from time to time notices that people downloaded the first and second album, but I never go around to presenting the third album as a cohesive whole. Now it’s up on YouTube. I doubt that anyone happening to read these words actually cares, but in case you’ve enjoyed any of these songs in the past, the whole album warrants a listen.

YouTube video’s description:

This is the third of three completed concept albums about a trio of friends living in a nowhere town: William Griffin, a sensitive and increasingly unhinged songwriter; Claire, his blind and illiterate next-door neighbor and perpetual mystery; and Lorenzo, their friend, who is inexplicably a sentient triceratops.

I made roughly eighty songs about them during Udio’s brief, lawless glory days, when a generation could sound like an actual band playing in a room, and you could still use swear words. The project ran through three albums and into the beginnings of a fourth before I ran out of steam, around the same time that changes to Udio’s model made the music feel notoriously worse.

Returning to these songs now is strange. Some of them still make the hair rise on my arms. William, Claire, and Lorenzo feel like forces within me that split apart, took on lives of their own, and built a mythology that contained that strange period of my life.

The earliest seeds of the lyrics date back to 2021. I can play guitar, but I was never going to become all the bands these songs required. The music changes radically from one track to the next, because each song takes whatever form its emotion demands. The characters and their shared emotional history are what hold the albums together.

This third album is more cohesive than the second one, and is bolstered by the improved audio quality from Udio’s model generation at the time. But this album lacks the more varied, distinct narrative arc of the previous one. Some of the songs on this album are real bangers, though, and Behind the Door may be my favorite of the series emotion-wise.

William’s story doesn’t end here. I just haven’t gotten around to producing the entirety of the fourth album. Maybe it’s time to pick it up again.