4. Hollywood Lovers

We each have some sort of dream. Whether it’s big or small, you’ve had it for 20 years of six months, it’s something we all share—a desire to find purpose, love, and passion. Even though this song is specifically highlighting the dream I’ve had since I was 12 years old, pursuing acting and music in Hollywood, this song still entirely represents the dream we each have.

One of the biggest, most inevitable challenges we often face with our dreams is that we idealize them. Not even that we try to idealize them, but that the world makes us believe it’s something it’s not—a facade of paint over rust. This track embodies the struggle between wanting so badly for your idea of your dream to be reality, but understanding it isn’t always going to be that way.

Hollywood is actually personified as a girl in the lyrics of the song. She is persuasive, over-promising, and beautiful, but she’s abusive, harmful, and volatile.

One of the biggest things about Hollywood itself is that it’s known to have a facade of beauty covering everything that it truly embodies. While I still have my passions of acting, music, and composition, I’ve made it a goal of my own to be completely cognizant of not letting it change who I am as I’m pursuing it. Which is definitely a challenge whenever the world tells you the complete opposite.

Lyric Facts

1. Will I be Peggy on the H looking for a line — in 1932 there was a woman named Peg Entwistle (Peg E. or Peggy). She had a small role in a major motion picture and her scene ended up being entirely cut from the film. This led Peg to climb to the top of the Hollywood sign with a letter about her feelings about the situation, and then jump off of the H to commit suicide.

2. Am I just a lover waiting for the tower light to call out your name — the blinking light on the top of the Capitol Records building on Hollywood Blvd actually blinks the word “HOLLYWOOD” in morse code, and has been doing it ever since the building was built in 1956.

5. A Trip to Paris

Written about my wife, Marin, this song is probably one of my favorite songs I’ve ever written.

I wrote it during a time where we were engaged and going through the biggest rough patch we’d ever had in our relationship. We’d always dreamed about going on a trip to Paris together and I thought it fitting to compare her to the dream we shared together. It’s less about her being compared to Paris itself, and more of her being compared to taking a trip there.

Trips are my love language, actually — experiences in general are. So this was the best way I could compare my feelings towards Marin, even when things were really hard.

Being grounded is one of the most important things whenever your relationship hits a rough spot. This song represents that — reminding myself that Marin is the best thing to ever happen to me.

6. To the painter, from the poet

This is the first project I’ve taken a new songwriting approach with, starting with To the painter, from the poet. All of the songs I’ve written leading up to this point have been about my personal experiences with love, heartbreak, and life. This track is about two fictional characters in a book adapted to the movie which inspired me.

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott has been adapted to the screen twice, with its most recent adaptation by director Greta Gerwig in 2019. Upon seeing the film, I knew I wanted to write about the character/relationship development between Laurie (Theodore Lawrence) and Amy. To the painter, from the poet is written from Laurie’s perspective after he’s realized the love that has been in front of him all along, but only realizing it too late, when Amy was already engaged to marry. This song represents Laurie’s longing to be with Amy and his plea to have him as her husband instead.

The meaning behind the title.

While Laurie isn’t necessarily deemed a poet in the book or film, Amy is a painter studying in Paris whenever the two have a conversation about love. Amy’s belief is that love isn’t a feeling, but a choice. Laurie immediately responds stating, “I think the poets might disagree.”

I could go on and on about the lines from the movie that inspired the song, but I’ll let you dive deeper and listen more intently to discover that.

7. Is this planetarium real or am I dreaming?

The second instrumental on the album.

It goes back to my roots of including a piano instrumental on each project I release. However, as I originally structured it as just a piano instrumental, I realized it needed to be so much more than that. So I took the challenge head-on of creating the biggest, most complex composition I would have ever created. It includes woodwinds, brass, piano, and all sorts of tempo and dynamic changes throughout. I truly believe it represents the album as a whole in the best way possible. And it definitely, obviously, doesn’t need my voice to be that. That’s part of the beauty of it, too. It’s just music. It’s the universal language. That’s how this track should be.'

If you’re attentive enough, you’ll be able to hear not only the main theme of the album in several parts, but melodies from other tracks on the album (and not on the album, wink wink) throughout.

The meaning behind the title.

The main motif of the album is that space resembles love. Is this planetarium… represents the internal battle of wondering what is actually love and what is a worldly facade. While the world wants us to believe love is easy and holds no blemishes (the safety/confinement of a planetarium), actual love is much harder/more challenging, but ultimately so much more rewarding and beautiful (space).

8. Mine!

Mine! acts as the sequel to Hollywood Lovers. It’s the ongoing self-retrospection one has whenever they have become something unfamiliar to who they were.

In this track, the lyrics offer a sort of aggressive tone, showing that the character in the story (played by me) has become something he isn’t, and that the girl (personification of Hollywood) is leading him down a path he won’t be able to come back from unless he regains ownership over himself and makes his thoughts his (hence, “I gotta make you mine”).

Music Video Facts

1. The girl is the personified version of Hollywood.

2. The world they’re living in is actually a facade made by Hollywood, and the mirrors represent reality (hence Hollywood trying to hide or remove them).

3. Peggy is a character referenced in Hollywood Lovers and is briefly shown to illustrate she is also trapped in this alternate reality.

4. The theater at the end is where the character was the entire time he was dreaming. Everyone stands up clapping for him because he escaped the clutches of Hollywood unlike the other people who were sitting in the theater, and he can now leave.

9. Murphy’s Law

Murphy’s Law: a supposed law of nature, expressed in various humorous popular sayings, to the effect that anything that can go wrong will go wrong.

Another thing I loved about Nolan’s Interstellar is the part where Cooper tells his daughter, Murph, that Murphy’s Law doesn’t necessarily mean anything bad that can happen will happen, but that if anything can happen it will happen, both good and bad. So truly, it all depends on how you look at it.

This song is written with the positive perspective from Murphy’s Law — that if a broken relationship can be mended, it will be mended. Several lyrics in this track also derived from the period in my relationship with Marin where we were broken up during our engagement. It was a difficult time, but we were able to fix the damage and mend it back together. We’re now happily married for almost two years!

10. Rage, Rage

The third and final instrumental on the album.

Its name has actually been the most difficult for me to nail down, simply because I needed it to be PERFECT. Originally, I wanted it to be more romantically beautiful, yet it slowly morphed into a somber, almost hauntingly melancholic orchestral piece. That’s when I realized it needed to be Rage, Rage in order to mold perfectly into the following track, Blind eyes could blaze like meteors.

Rage, Rage prepares the listener for the final emotional pillar of the album. It immediately shifts the tone of the self-retrospection from tracks like Mine! and Murphy’s Law to a longing for self-retrospection from the world.

The meaning behind the title.

The title, Rage, Rage, is pulled directly from the poem, Do not go gentle into that good night, by Dylan Thomas. The poem is most popularly used in Nolan’s Interstellar. How could I not continue to pull inspiration from a film so deeply rooted in love, science, and exploration?

11. Blind eyes could blaze like meteors

The book end finale for Part One.

This is probably the most lyrically simple, yet most emotional track on the album. It’s about opening our eyes to what love actually is instead of causing large amounts of damage by pretending to know what it is/looks like.

Being a Christian my whole life, I’ve been raised in the church. As I’ve grown older and understood more about who Jesus is and how he loved people exceptionally well, I’ve come to realize (as many do) that there are an unfortunately large amount of Christians or church-goers who pretend they know how to love well and actually do the opposite.

While this song is primarily inspired by wanting others who claim to be Christian to truly love like Jesus, it’s really focused on the entire world/society understanding how to love. In order for us to function properly as a human race, we must learn how to love. It is the most extraordinary thing we are capable of doing, but not doing it well also has severe consequences, hence the title of the song.

The meaning behind the title.

Another excerpt from Thomas’s poem, Do not go gentle into that good night, it is the perfect follow-up track to Rage, Rage. They also intertwine as probably the most fluid transition between any two songs on the record with the thunder soundscape, same key, and progressions. I believe this makes them both the perfect ending to Part One.