the boston project
about
the boston project is indie rock pop from sugar land, texas—and, it’s my baby! all the music is written, performed, and produced by yours truly.
i started writing music as far back as 2011, and it followed me up to massachusetts when i attended berklee college of music. there, i continued to flesh out my songs and met some extremely talented musicians interested in playing it alongside me. admittedly, we didn’t get as much done as i’d hoped, but, i formed long lasting friendships and made great connections with some amazing people.
once i left massachusetts and moved back to texas, i continued to work on the music until i was finally ready to release it for all to hear. although, i lacked a name for it. up until that point, i had simply been referring to it as “the boston project”, so, the name stuck. it’s unorthodox and tells a story, which made me fall in love with it.
as time’s passed, i’ve slowed down on how much music i’ve been able to put out under the name. life, right? nevertheless, i continue to nurture the project to this day whenever i can, and it holds a special place in my heart as a therapeutic pseudo-diary, documenting the different phases of my life and serving as a reminder of my growth as a person.
you can listen to the music on most major streaming platforms, or, here on the website. i hope you enjoy it as much as i do~
releases
“the socialite” is my 6th original release, and it’s a loud and snazzy tune about being, well, too loud and snazzy.
as i grew older it dawned on me that i had sought the attention and validation of others too fiercely, so much so that it would often cause me to come off as pretty arrogant, which wasn’t a favorable quality to me, to say the least.
this song is sort of poking fun at that and was my way of getting it all out and being transparent about what i was, and in turn, making myself aware of it to stop it. i wanted the music to sound very pompous and cocky as if the person making it thought that everything revolved around them, which is alluded to in the artwork.
meaning aside, it’s a very fun song and i had a blast making it.
“i travel fast when it’s colder” was my 5th original release with the boston project, and it was somewhat of a turning point in the otherwise “current self-loathing” aesthetic of my past music and more akin to a period of self-reflection.
i wanted this song to be much easier on the ears than my previous work, as a way to show that worse days were behind me, but that i’m still picking up the pieces and figuring things out, while still somewhat wishing i could go back in time and do everything differently.
it blends in pretty well, but i had my good friend, noah elkins lay down some cello on this song during the choruses. i feel a cello always has a sense of “longing” and that it would fit the tune nicely.
as a much-needed break from all the “tragedy” of my first 4 releases — it was the holiday season, my favorite time of year, so i decided to do some covers of my favorite holiday songs. but of course, it wouldn’t be the boston project if i didn’t completely change them to the point of almost ruining the song.
as mentioned elsewhere on the site, my good friends islands of pear, chancla fight club, and myself all decided we wanted to do holiday-themed releases. so, these are my picks, and i had quite a good time making them. may have had one too many glasses of eggnog in the process…
following the surprising success of “fidgeting”, “renters insurance” was my 4th release, and i was eager to get it out there. not to sound like a broken record, but it’s much like my previous few songs in that it’s about internal struggles with coping and growing up, particularly after moving out of my parent’s house and living on my own.
i wanted this song to sound exciting but also filled with angst, which is textbook “i’m young and just moved out of my parent’s house” behavior. i wanted it to express the excitement of getting out on your own and pursuing your aspirations as a young adult, but also the fear of going at it alone and realizing what you’d left behind.
worth noting, i love my parents and we have a great relationship — i was just a whiny twenty-something-year-old stuck in his teen years at the time…c’est la vie
“fidgeting” was my 3rd song as the boston project, and to this day is my most popular song. much like my first two releases, it recounts my days of struggling with growing up and learning to face my fears, which resulted in bouts of anxiety.
i wanted this song to sound frantic and busy to let the listener inside someone’s mind which is unfortunately much the same. i came into obsessive-compulsive habits during this time of my life, and often would hyperfocus on certain things around me, searching for order. so, the lyrics of the chorus are sequenced alphabetically either by phrasing groups or the first letter of each word to convey what it’s like to nitpick at something past the point of practicality.
all things aside, it was such an awesome and meditative experience making this song, and the feedback i received from it pushed me to continue making music.
“stiff neck” was my 2nd release under the alias of the boston project. while conceptually a very morose song, i wanted it to sound very pop and upbeat to play on the duality of mood swings. this song, lyrically, errs on the same script as “pedigree”, being a narration of my past bout with anxiety and depression as an early twenty-year-old.
i wanted this song to come off as a fun and lighthearted pop tune, as someone’s mental struggles aren’t always out in plain sight. upon listening further to the lyrics and message of the song, you quickly find out that the writer is in a state of constant panic. i purposefully constructed the guitar tracks to be alarm-adjacent and instill a sense of stress and uncertainty in the listener.
goes without saying — i’m doing infinitely better these days, but this song has been a favorite of mine and my peers for a decade.
“pedigree” was the first song i fully wrote, produced, and released on my own. it was the start of my professional music career, and i put a great deal of thought into every aspect of it. the song came to be from a fun and complex guitar lick i had come up with, and then just continued expanding from there on out.
this track went through countless revisions before i was truly happy with it, and even one more after that, as the laptop the original files were stored on was stolen during a robbery. so, what you hear is a faithful recreation of the song from memory. in hindsight, while i won’t say a robbery is a blessing, i’m happy things turned out the way they did. otherwise, this song wouldn't have the same musical impact as it does now. a song lasts forever — my laptop would have died years ago.
this track was about my struggles with anxiety and depression during my younger years fueled by a lack of drive and some poor decision-making skills, becoming aware of them in real time, only to figure out the solution for it all well after the fact. it’s a great testament to my growth and maturing into my adult years, and something i can always look back to if i’m feeling lost. plus, it sounds pretty cool.