Hello Herd!

I’d just like to give a “brief” history of the creation of this album. Broken up into four sections: The Original Album, The Book, The Ukulele, and The
Physical Release.

The Original Album:
The overall story of A Nautical Affair started 2012 when I was in college. I kept fantasizing about buying a boat and living off at sea. I had never driven a boat, nor have I been on one more than a handful of times. But something about the idea of escape and isolation just intrigued me. I wrote tons of little songs about being on the ocean, but none of them were ever fully realized. Until one day I wrote a song called Young Sailors about the awkwardness of loosing virginity, and comparing it to a boat in a storm.

After college and my first real job in LA, I moved back to Oregon in late 2015 and met up with my good friend and old bandmate Daniel King. We showed each other music we’ve been working on and started writing new songs together. He learned Young Sailors, and then took one of his songs and morphed it into Fishy Lady. Shortly after I wrote Shipwreck and realized there were three sea songs that could be played in consecutive order to create a mini story. We then recorded and released: “The Young Sailors EP” which contained the aforementioned three songs as well as a random song we were working on called Peaches & Cream.

Once I got a taste of that mini story I couldn’t help but start writing sea themed lyrics to any song we were working on. Even after the fact I went and changed lyrics in the songs Drowning, Perfidy, and Dear Sailor to be more in line with the story. Adding in the character names in place of generic pronouns. After a while we had a collection of ten songs somewhat frankensteined together to create a cohesive story of an affair between The Sailor, The Fishy Lady, and The Capn.

The Book:
When we finally released the album in 2017 we had many requests for a lyric book and I always wanted to fulfill that. But I didn’t really know how to go about it, so it was left unmade…until a few years ago. I got another job in LA working on restoring old photos and creating old music ads from scratch. During this time I found myself getting pretty handy on the ol’ Photoshop. We had also sold out of all our original pressings of the album. With both of these in mind I thought I’d finally be able to create a booklet that would be fun to add into our CD repress.

I called up the original cover artists, and great pal, Matt Tate and asked if he would be willing to draw up quick sketches for every song that we could put in the booklet next to the lyrics. What he sent back became the start of a much more epic idea than I could have ever imagined. He created beautifully hilarious character designs of The Sailor, The Capn, and of course the gorgeous Fishy Lady…who is now a literal fish. In order to make sense of the full visual environment he thought of a little side story that could add to what you were looking at while the album plays. He sketched out that The Fishy Lady’s Wig could control storms and that The Capn was trying to steal it. Also added Dan and I slowly loosing our clothes to match the front cover as we get into shenanigans in the background. He did that side story as more of an inside thing that only we would really know the full details of, but enough to make people look twice when reading along. But I was so fascinated by the idea that I thought it would be fun to implement it into the booklet somehow. At first we were just going to have a few lines of context and an introduction to the lyrics. But after many very long phone conversations we got to a conclusion that we should just make the entire thing a mini story book.

We talked through all the beats in the lyrics and found a way to flesh it out a little bit more. Staying true to the original story, but also interlacing a rhyming plot between each song to help give context to what’s going on outside of the narrative first person lyrics. During these long phone calls we would just go crazy with any idea we wanted. Trying to keep the story interesting, but mostly just stuff that makes us laugh. The nudity got stronger. The “residue” on Perfidy’s artwork got more intense. We even ended up going super meta with it. Deciding that this was all just the fantasy writings/drawings of a real life crazy man who had somehow fallen in love with an actual boat. Sneaking onto the boat while it’s captain wasn’t around and having sex with different parts of it until he was finally sent to jail. And this story was his fictional perception of the insanity that was really going on.

That last idea never left our heads. It was just so fucking funny to us. So much so that once I received the final drawings and was starting to create the book in photoshop the allure of making this look as much like a real sketchbook of a delusional man came to fruition. We joked that “wouldn’t it be funny if the entire thing was written out in pencil? That would be ridiculous and take way too much time…but lol!” *paraphrased*. So what did we do? Or what did Matt do? Wrote out ever single lyric and poem by hand. Then he would take a picture of the notes and text them to me and I would extract the text out and paste them where I wanted on my photoshop file. He then sent me borders and little drawings that I could place around. This allowed the entire book to be made using only pen and pencils. There isn’t a single digital artifact in the entire book. The only outside source was a free old blotchy paper background image I found online and then personally altered further to make look even worse.

The Ukulele:
Once the book was mostly complete I recalled back to our original phone calls, and one of the ideas I brought up was possibly recording a song or two in ukulele to help add a little bonus to the album re-release. When I first wrote Young Sailors, I also adapted it onto the ukulele because I had just recently acquired one and wanted to play songs on it. So I thought I’d actually record that and maybe a more broken down version of Shipwreck since it was first written on the ukulele already. Then once again we joked: “Wouldn’t it be funny if I recorded the entire album on ukulele? What a fun, implausible thing to think of!” *also paraphrased*. Once I started to get into the first recordings I realized that I could easily just do what I did with Young Sailors and adapt it into the only Ukulele key I know how to play. C. So I took my Sea themed concept album and converted all the songs into the key of C. Now it’s really C themed. Because of this, almost every song starts and ends on the same chord. Allowing the entire album to be played from start to finish without taking any breaks between songs. Just one solid 33 minute song. I recorded all the ukulele and vocal tracks. Took my little cajon drum and added drums to each song. And then Dan re-wrote all his bass lines in the new key using his Ukulele Bass and added some lead Uke to Dear Sailor. Once the recordings were all finished I tracked down some ocean/beach sounds and layered them over the background making it sound as if it was recorded on an island.

The Physical Release :
After a year and a half since the books conception we finally had a finished product…that only existed on my computer. I had no idea how to get a book made, printed, or anything. Because of the immensity of the books images, we were unable to print it the size of a CD booklet like originally planned. It was just too hard to read when it was that small. We knew it had to be an overly large print. I was lucky enough to use my fathers businesses professional printer and get a batch of full sized color books done. We then stapled and hand cut (with scissors) every single page of the book available. I also recorded, mixed, and “mastered” every track on the album. Making it as home made as it can get.

I am extremely proud of the little art project we were able to make. And I am eternally grateful for my two best friends whom without this project would have never been produced. Though this is a completely fictional story, much of it was sparked from deep personal emotions and feelings I went through during those years. Much like our “meta” version of a man fucking a boat…this is my fantasy perspective of some of my history. Now I feel like this story is completely realized and I can close off a chapter of my life.

Joel
The Elephant