//MUSIC/ALBUMS/THEYUS_COMPILATION.mp3

A personal token of lots of hard work during the pandemic with a group of amazing friends. This was the first semi-serious project that I started up with two of my best friends and progressed it during a time of uncertainty. Below is a set of assorted tracks and demos that were all going to be put on an officially released album, unfortunately the band got scrapped in 2022 and never saw the stage again.

From 2019-2023, Theyus was a music project that I had conceptualized in my bedroom while I was learning guitar. As I was learning my instrument and experimenting with new pedals, I was journalling and writing down different songs and names.

There were journal entries with just random shapes that just showed how to play a song. I had created my own version of tabs in order to understand how to play certain songs since I had no idea what i was doing at the time.

My best friend at the time, Christian, helped me understand my instrument and was a vital resource in discovering new tunes and driving me to become a better musician. This was roughly around the time of 2018-2019. Come 2020 was when I had finally moved out of my parents house and ventured off into the unknown.

I had bass amps, guitars and even a drum set that I had gotten in order to make the dream of starting a live band a reality. Our drummer was one of my childhood best friends, Chad Porter, who was primarily a trumpet player but was learning drums in his ensemble class in high school.

Then Bennie came into our lives, another insanely talented musician who was just discovering guitar at the time. She was learning finger picking styles in like the first few months of playing!

Eventually, I went to Bennie and I was like, Hey Bennie, here’s a synthesizer. I want a synth player in my band to add some extra low end and big synth chords. I wanted to have a really big Blade Runner sound in the backdrop of this like psychedelic punk rock conjunction. Overall at the time, it all came together in a very beautiful way.

One of the first songs to ever get written by me was 'Matador'. A vision of underwater beasts devouring a space crew that crash landed on a barren ocean world. Every song was filled with delay and fuzz and RAT distortion bass lines, and an ounce of groove from Chris' playing.

Theyus was not communicated to be a set project produced by me, nor was it set in stone to be a collaborative project. There were a lot of moving parts of this band that I had taken responsibility of and I enforced a lot of the creative direction of the band. However, I would argue that a lot of the energy that was the most important for the band were the talented folks that took a chance on me.

Bennie took the synth and began practicing things at home, and then would come with us to the studio and basically would double down on the root notes and play these huge chords with some of the most gnarly oscillators on my synth.

Chris would play these really fun, swingy bass lines, and they had this way of adding a very smooth and rich touch—adding like this groovy swing. It was very like—he was really embodying like this Geezer Butler-type sound from Black Sabbath into Theyus.

Chad just would slam the shit out of his kit! I'm talking this dude was putting chips into the cheap ass cymbals that we started out with. Chad picked up all of these drumming techniques in such a fast pace, it floored us.

Together we had a collection of songs that were in this journal that I talked about earlier that had all the directions for songs like Cryptid Rampage, it had Planet Stan, it had Savage, it also had songs like Antioxidant and Matador. And those were all songs that were collectively made around the same time.

Eventually, we rented our own studio—and we started producing music out of there. You'll notice 'Sheathed and Scrapped' has two different labelings of tracks. One is the big [DEMO] label. This just means that the song was recorded in logic on my own with fake drums and synthetic bass lines or bass lines i had recorded. Everything without the tag was a fully collaborative recording process with all the band members.

There’s always a future vision with whatever project you choose to do, maybe not all the time, but i like to think everyone usually has an idea of what they want to do as they start a project. Start crocheting? Maybe you wanna make a sweater. Learning how to cook? You're hoping to make a bomb ass Thai dish at some point.

With Theyus, I was hoping to make it "big"... Wtf does that mean? I was hoping Theyus would tour and be on KEXP, play SXSW, hit the entire east coast! I didn't know what the limit was, I was in my early 20s and I desperately wanted to make music my "career", even though I still want that, I understand now that there is more to it than just bashing it out with some friends on a DIY stage.

Theyus gave me a taste of what it was like and I was hooked, but I was not in a mature state of mind to lead a project of this caliber. This was a whirlwind of undetermined potential that could have grown together, but due to my arrogance and ego I tore it apart.

We all lived together at the time and I was trying to run a project that I thought would be collaborative, but new ideas that weren't mind I felt personally attacked. for whatever reason... I said, I’m in control of this project, and I shot down a lot of really great ideas from my mates because I was very protective of this project. There was this overwhelming sense of greed that over took me and the project, and resentment was the stake that drove itself through me, Theyus, and eventually my friendships.

This project was like my baby—it’s my first real band project that I had ever been a part of, so I kind of held on really tight to the idea that, Oh, this was the project that was going to make us famous, when obviously that was not the case, and that was also just not the truth either.

At this point I have had time to grow as a person and looking back on a lot of these tracks, the amount of creativity and ideas that all of us were exuding was brilliant. And it is unfortunate that I, as a creator and the leader of this band—shot a lot of those ideas down. It’s unfortunate because I don’t think we’ll ever really know what this project could have sounded like if I wasn’t such an asshole.

But I think there is some kind of the beauty to this story, I look back on a form of myself who is young, who’s hungry and ambitious, but also was very arrogant, rude, egotistical, and I worked and worked to try and make something out of nothing—I’m incredibly proud of myself because I did do that. I ventured out into an unknown world and laid down a mark.

However, I understand more than ever now that there was so much of me that was young, immature, neglectful, arrogant, and every other part of being an annoying little shit. I am continuously learning and I definitely will continue to learn to be the best version of myself tomorrow.

Everybody’s grown so much from this project, but this was just a small blip in all of our artistic catalogs that I’m incredibly proud of from the perspective of a creator. I'll never forget Theyus, as it was such a strong learning moment for myself. Unfortunately, a lot of these connections that I had with these folks have fizzled out and have decayed over time because of arrogance, because of fear, because of ego.

And for anybody who at the time experienced what Theyus was, probably had a really great time. But as for the creatives on the other side, there was an awful, unneeded stress and anxiety that existed within this band where I was at the helm and I would refuse to say acknowledge any ideas—for what reason? I don’t think I could tell you. And I think that’s the part of this that was really terrible as the outcome of this story. I truly just did not respect the creative abilities of my bandmates, nor did I communicate to them properly what the conditions of this project were.

That was Theyus—an incredibly passionate, juvenile music project that drove me pretty much crazy. But since that experience I've grown immensely, I also feel incredibly driven to begin making music again after working through all of the emotions of Theyus. I hope you all enjoyed the little history portion of this post as much as I felt writing it!