I have been wanting to update my website for quite a while. I finally got the process going late last year. 

I worked with Rogue Studios again, the same group that built the site for A Light in the Woods, and we had a lot of information to organize. But they were lovely to work with for the entire process. I highly recommend them if you’re ever in the market for a custom website.

In terms of design, we began by thinking of layouts that handle wide varieties of material gracefully. In the end, the reference we settled on was the magazine.

Magazines switch between topics, styles and editors often. They’re built in an almost modular way, handling large groups of text as nicely as multiple-page spreads with no text at all. And I generally like the way they look, and how much they play with margins and space. Once we settled on that idea, the first round of designs already felt great. It was just a lot of refining from there.

I wanted to keep things really simple to navigate, so the site is divided into the three main mediums I like to work in.

For the Audio section, I decided to expand the "liner note" concept from my past two releases. I now have them for every release, going all the way back to Ghost. My hope is that this will give the catalog more context – something I believe is sorely missing these days – and serve as an overarching story for my past twenty years of making records. There’s also a lyric button under each write-up. The lyrics that you find on google are almost always wrong, so this will be a nice database of the actual words.

But I spent the most time updating the Family Tree albums.

Some of you might be aware of the guidebook for the series. I made it for the limited-edition vinyl boxset as a way to explain the connections between the 44 songs. But I made that book during a terribly stressful period, and there are a good number of mistakes and typos in it. This was back in early 2016. Me and my partner had recently taken in a teenager, were helping other relatives get on their feet, and I was the main witness in a trial against other family members. I was 33 years old, totally overwhelmed and barely holding it together. In hindsight, I’m amazed I got anything finished at all. It was a really tough few years.

But this new website gave me a chance to revisit the project. I originally intended to just clean up the errors and transfer the book over to this new format. But after reading through it after all these years, I changed my mind. It needed a proper re-write. Something much closer to my notes from when the project began.

When I was creating the original guide, I had two major concerns. 1) I needed to be mindful of the page-count because of printing costs and 2) I was worried about saying too much.

At the time, I felt that if I shared too many details, it wouldn’t leave enough room for the listener to imagine and put things together themselves. Over-explained stories are a pet peeve of mine, so I tried to say as little as possible. But after re-reading my descriptions, I felt I went too far. Most of the explanations are cursory at best. Even Josh, my partner, didn’t pick up on a lot of the meanings and he was around for three of the four albums.

So the liner notes are entirely overhauled. There’s much more information now, and I think making the connections between all the stories, characters and lyrics will be a lot easier. I didn’t explain absolutely everything, but I think if anyone has the time and patience to go through it all (a tall ask in its own right), the project will make a lot more sense.

When I reprint the guidebook, it will be with all this new information. So if you have the old one, well, it’s a collector’s item now. I won’t reprint it that way again.

Moving on to the Writing section, we migrated my old blog over, and I’ve added the three short stories from the Family Tree Guidebook. I have some fun plans for this section, but I’ll save those ideas until they’re ready.

The Visuals section is a hub for my paintings and illustrations. I’ve spent the past couple months finalizing a bunch of almost-done pieces, so there’s a lot more art here than was on my previous site. I'll be updating this section pretty often, since a lot of my free time has goes to drawing and painting these days.

And finally, you might notice that there is a “buy” button under all the albums and a store link in the footer. That’s because I have a webstore again. Wild.

At the moment, the store is pretty lean. It’s just the uncompressed audio files. If you’re really into sound quality and want to own the original versions of any releases, the albums and EPS are all there. But I’m going to be making some physical merch soon. More on that in a future post, but I’ve got some fun ideas.

But if you check out the store, you’ll see that there is a new single there. It’s called “From Time to Time” and it’s the first release for Mixtape #2. It’s a free download, and it’ll stay that way until I upload it to streaming services. Then it’ll switch over to costing $1, like the other singles. But I want to make sure that it’s always available for free in some form, for those with limited funds.

For details on the song, it’s part of an ongoing theme for me. I had an odd dream, the kind that lingers for hours after waking up, and I wanted to capture something about the mood that it left me in. Somewhere between nostalgic and listless. And it’s the first song fully recorded in my new work room.

We decided to move again late last year. San Francisco was proving to be an ill fit. Too expensive and increasingly not our speed in terms of the culture there. But the place we jumped to was a surprise for both of us. We visited some friends down in the desert a few times in 2024 and fell in love with it. I never thought I’d enjoy a place like this – all sand and space and strange animals – but I do. It’s been a really cool change of pace. And I’m back to working in a bedroom, albeit a really fancy one full of analog equipment. But it suits me at this point in my life, and this song is the first one I’ve made here.

So go download it if from the store if you’d like to hear it. I’m not sure when I’ll put it on streaming services, or even YouTube. For the time being, it’s nice to release something in a space I created, instead of always trying to make it work on other company’s platforms.

I also have a lot to say about what pushed me to build this website, leave social media, and make all the recent changes I have. But I didn’t want my first post to be about other spaces and all the things I am no longer doing. I have a lot of harsh words for the current state of the music industry, and the state of things in general. But let’s save all that for another day. No need to be so negative all of the time.

So welcome to the new website. I’ll be updating it often, since I'll largely be communicating here and through my mailing list.

I hope this finds you healthy and well.

- Ben