Here are some outtakes from the third emotion photo shoot with Cortney Armitage. The concept for these photos represented regret in a vulnerable way. We wanted to capture the idea of cleansing yourself of something you regret doing. A moment where you are truly alone with your thoughts. The final product ended up nailing the vision and I have to credit that to Cortney because this was fairly dificult for me to take seriously.
I've decided to start releasing music and additional collaborative art through the Raw Emotions Vault. There are songs that I love and mean so much, but haven't quite found a home, or haven't been produced yet but were written during the month of a specific emotion. The same is true for photos, videos, essays, animation treatments, designs that never get to see the light of day but have so much character. Creating and sharing is the core of the Raw Emotions project, the vault is allowing me to take that even further. It's imperative to me that EVERYTHING is heard, felt and seen during this Raw Emotions project. The vault is a safe space for art to be shared every week, and sometimes even more often than that.
This first Vault only release is called Wasted Days. I wrote it with one of my best friends, Caroline Pennell, and always regretted never putting it out. Figured it was only right I revisited that regret this month and finally let it out into the Raw Emotions world.
Here's the original piano demo of Back Where You Belong. I decided to release this song for Hopeful this month because I felt that it accurately represented the hope you can have about coming back to someone you love in a relationship. This song has helped teach me that being hopeful is brave. I used to think it was a cop out to hope, but I realized that in order to hope for something, you have to accept the fact that it might now happen. I think there is true courage in having hope.
Fun fact: This song was the inspiration for the flowers behind the back photo I put in the last post.
Here's the final released version!
These are images from mine and Cortney's second emotion photo creative collaboration. For this month's emotion (hopeful), we wanted to be up for the sunrise - representing new beginnings, fresh starts and hope for a great day ahead. For the location, Coney Island seemed like a natural choice. (NYC is a huge inspiration to my work and I wanted to make sure to feature areas of the city in my work.) The goal was to capture contemplative moments while looking out into the water and horizon. I think we did a good job accomplishing it.
We also tried this concept of an image with dying flowers behind my back to represent holding out hope for someone you love. We felt the other images were more striking and in-line with the messaging we wanted and decided to keep the others for the Vault only!
Here's the demo for Space Left Between. We ended up re-recording the guitar and vocal for this song 3 times and every time it just didn't feel right. In the end we used this exact vocal and guitar as a core of the final track. It is the only song of the first Raw Emotions EP with parts not recording in NYC.
Here's the final version :) The photo was done by Cortney Armitage.
To capture each months emotion visually over the next 18 months, I've partnered with an amazingly talented photographer - Cortney Armitage. Every month, we will be collaborating on images for both the single artwork and monthly emotion artwork. Here are some outtakes from our Times Square shoot. We wanted to try a double exposure, layered look, where I appeared to be invisible. We chose Times Square for our location because it's easy to feel invisible in the busiest and most crowded place in NYC. You become one with the crowd, blending in instead of sticking out.
Here is the original Kurt Cobain T-Shirt artwork that was released before I decided to scrap the idea completely and go with strictly photo based song covers with no text. It just didn't feel emotional, evocative or even artful. There is something in this simplicity that I do still love, but it wasn't right for Raw Emotions. Raw Emotions needs to feel like it's taking a snapshot into real life.
Here's the final artwork we went with for Kurt Cobain T-Shirt. I actually took this photo myself of my good friend (and fellow artist), Naomi, on one of my LA writing trips.
This video was shot by my good friend Manish. We slowed the song down 4X and then I literally wrote all of this over the course of 14 minutes.
This is honestly where Raw Emotions began, but I had no idea at the time. This song was completely inspired. I think we finished this demo within a few hours of being in the studio. It would take 18 months to realize this title was the core of the next major creative phase of my life. I made this with my friend, writer/producer Daple.
Before the release of the project there we a host of different covers that we explored for Raw Emotions. I honestly still love so many of these, they just weren't right for the song. They felt more like artistic collaborations. These were all created by the BADASS designer Mihailo.
I took some of the designs above and combined them into this sketch. To the right is the digital mock-up of my concept.
This is the final design we chose for Raw Emotions project. I wanted something that couldn't be defined by an emotion, a person or even a genre of music. Raw Emotions is about embracing ALL of the emotions, ALL of the sounds, ALL of the people and saying "I don't give a fuck, I am who I am."
