Over the next two months, I’ll be writing about each of the six new songs featured on Unfall II, starting with the three songs which released in January, followed by the remaining three songs after they release everywhere on March 15. (Note: You can hear the full EP right now, plus four bonus tracks, by joining the Friends Club.) These posts will include explorations of each song’s ideas and themes, plus stories behind how I wrote them and how each song functions as a sequel to one of the tracks from my debut album Unfall.
Before that series kicks off, I’d like to share a brief explanation of the meaning behind “124,” the recurring numbers seen across the artwork for Unfall II (Part I). This was a fun bit of serendipitous double-meanings. Back in 2019, I decided to release my first full-length album on my upcoming 28th birthday: January 24, 2020 (which happened to fall on a Friday – the global music release day – that year). In 2024, my birthday fell on a Tuesday, which used to be the global release day (prior to 2015), and this became the release date for the first half of the sequel songs. Thus 124 (the date of my birthday) became code for:
1 = my debut album
2 = sequel songs
4 = the fourth anniversary
In other words, on 1/24, I released my first album’s sequels for its fourth anniversary. Cool, huh? I thought so!
It would have been perfect to release the entirety of Unfall II on the fourth anniversary, but it simply wasn’t meant to be: the EP wasn’t finished being mixed in time, without me scheduling a rushed distribution where I would have no time to promote the EP and the songs probably wouldn’t have appeared on all streaming services until a few days late. Unfortunately, these past few years have included a string of needlessly rushed album rollouts – a lesson that I have finally learned and taken to heart. Granted, I still have a strong affinity for specifically-timed music releases, (and I’ll be publishing an article later this spring about why anniversaries are so important to me, such that I’ve insisted on releasing projects on January 24, November 18, etc.).
That said, the circumstances which forced me to split Unfall II into two separate releases led to another happy accident: I needed to make a new version of the album artwork to differentiate between part one and part two, so the March 15 release (pictured below) will quite literally “fill in the gaps” of what was missing on the artwork for Part I.
Here is the official track listing for Unfall II. Can you guess which song each of these is a sequel to?
- “The Ride (Hold On To Me)”
- “Improve You Wrong”
- “Worth the Risk”
- “Death Decide”
- “Synthetic Desert”
- “Honest Living (Someday Best)”
To make sure you don’t miss those behind-the-song posts, join the Friends Club or sign up for my monthly newsletter! Thanks for reading.
