It’s been one year since Genesis Frog was released. What do I think of it now? Read more if you’re interested!

(one thing I didn’t touch on is how much fun it was to work with Marina and Rikuru on the art they made for me - thank you both so much, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it! it is all still so beautiful)

Just going back and listening to this album, I can’t believe how ambitious I was. Overambitious perhaps, and without the skillset I thought I had. Pretty much everything I’m hearing upon listening to it again sounds like a sloppier version of what I would do now. Since then I’ve gotten better at orchestration, sequencing, and most importantly, pacing. There were way too many sloppy transitions in this thing, and if there’s anything that makes me cringe the most it’s when the music moves to a new idea un-organically.

That’s where my overambitious mind wasn’t thinking it through clearly enough, I suppose. I had so many ideas about how the album would be formatted and how the same ideas would come and go. I wanted to “wow” Homestuck listeners with the kind of cohesive and playful album experience they hadn’t had yet. I also wanted to emulate an orchestral suite like Rimsky-Korsakov or Ravel.

It was good for a first try, I think. The pacing up until halfway through Our Glorious Speaker is actually really good in retrospect. The combination of Prelude and Pondsquatter was seven minutes of some of the album’s most solid music. Our Glorious Speaker though, it was one of the first pieces in the album I ever started back in 2010. I should have known to scrap the first half and stick with the Sarabande arrangement. I do like the musical idea that introduced in this one, but it was too slowly introduced too slowly after Pondsquatter. I was asking a lot of listeners to get through this many slow pieces in a row, and that may have affected how well the album did.

Prospitian Folklore is one I’m afraid I just don’t like anymore. Like Our Glorious Speaker, it would have benefited from being cut in half. One of my goals for the album was for it to be listened to all the way through at once, and I still consider that the ideal listening experience for it. Like, you wouldn’t know what track you were on necessarily when listening. I think that’s part of the reason why so few of these tracks are consistent within themselves, and this one is one of the biggest offenders. After the woodwind choral, it completely loses itself and goes into territory unrelated to the rest of the piece, or indeed the album. I had no good reason to do it other than the programmatic excuses I gave myself. It’s too bad, the material in this one would have allowed for a rousing climax.

The Consorts’ section, however, is probably Genesis Frog’s strongest point. More people have Buy NAK Sell DOOF listed as their favorite than any other track, and I can’t blame them. At last, after the crawl that was the album’s first third, we get a high energy track with lots of playful orchestration, though perhaps 40 seconds straight of naks was a bit too long. Then we calm down a bit with Pink Shells, one of my personal favorites from the album. The combination of violin, marimba, and bassoons was really fun to write for. I could have done so much more with the orchestration, though! It feels just a little empty, and I wouldn’t mind at all going back and reorchestrating this one.

I never publicly said this because I was hoping someone would figure it out and tell me, but the title of Entrance of the Salamanders is a reference to Entrance of the Gladiators, aka that one circus song everyone knows. I love this one too, it’s almost shamefully aping Danny Elfman, but what composer hasn’t imitated him at least once? I know I have several times, and am continuing to do so, though my reasons right now are a little better. This was also the first time I used an electric organ, and since then I’ve fallen in love with that sound. Thip of the Tongue was formally the least stable of the four Consort themes, but I’m conflicted about it. I almost want to scrap the beginning section so people can get right to hearing the dance music, but I’m so fond of the orchestration there. Ideally they’d be two separate movements of a single piece.

Great LOFAF Expedition of 2009 and Breeding Duties were the pinnacles of the ambition I had for the album. I was almost treating them like suites within a suite, which would have been fine if they were both twice as long. As it was, I switched from idea to idea much too fast in each, though it was less of a hindrance in LOFAF. Yet despite their imperfections they both have some of my favorite material in Genesis Frog, from the contrapuntal march in LOFAF to the mysterious harpsichord sounds in Breeding Duties. Stoke the Forge still sounds awesome, though I’d like to redo it with some better sounding samples. It could use a little more punch, as it is.

The Temple’s Withered Bloom, to me, is the most impressive piece looking back at Genesis Frog. Maybe it’s just for me personally, but I’m really fond of the harmonies I used in it, and to a lesser extent the orchestration. Probably the only time I’ve featured the tuba in a serious context. Hopefully not the last! And the way it transitions into Bilious is effective too. Bilious itself is nice; the material meanders a little too much, just like with previous pieces in the album. But I don’t mind in this case, as when it does meander it’s still with the relevant material and I did a lot of cool composer things with it. Things that I completely forgot I did and was amused when I heard them again. I wish I had used a real guitar. That’s the big regret with this one.

Speaker barely warrants reflection, it’s just a prelude to The Vast Croak just like Prelude and Pondsquatter. It did its job well enough. The Vast Croak, though, while being a cool idea, seriously needs to be stripped down. I shouldn’t have repeated the first section; it’s too long to be listening to that badly orchestrated mess. The medley in the middle is where it shines, and was so much fun to write. The beginning and ending sections seem like mere formalities and I almost think the piece would have been better without them, or at least with them dramatically changed. What’s unfortunate about The Vast Croak is how sloppy it is. I was so burnt out by the time I got to it that I desperately wanted to finish it as fast as I could, which is never an advisable solution.

The last thing I’m going to note is that the harp pattern at the end was taken from the very first real piece of music I ever composed. It was really special to me, so I decided to cap off the album with it! Now, would I make something like this album today? Absolutely not, my style and technique have changed enough since then that I would want to tackle something much different. In that sense it’s cool to think that this album can only exist the way it did last October, when that was the best effort I could put forth. I’ll always consider it an important stepping stone for me, and I can only hope whatever I produce next lands firmly on another stone and not in the river.

-Alex