When I first started writing songs, I would often try and represent different natural environments, like an ocean, swamp, or desert. Mainly I would accomplish this through instrumentation, licks/chord progressions, and lyrics, but this time I decided to be a little more literal and add actual recordings of nature into the background of the song. Hence, Cave Music.

One interesting fact about the album is that the songs were written over a relatively long period of time...I came up with the chords for Complete in Spring 2013, and I wrote Shoebox in Summer 2014. Usually, I try to create a collection of songs for each 'time period' of writing, because songs written around the same time tend to have some unifying aspect to them. This album spans 3 periods of songwriting for me: Summer 2013 in Princeton (I was going to create an album called Make Up Your Mind that had about 11 songs on it, which never happened, but some of them survived and made it on Cave Music), my senior year of undergrad at UCSD Fall 2013-Spring 2014 (mostly spring), and Summer 2014 in Mountain View.

I recorded most of this during Fall 2014, which I spent on break from studying. I found the samples and put them into the mix during Spring 2015. I also created this <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7fNIP6hM70&feature=youtu.be>, which listens to you play music, and responds in real-time by generating a layer of ambience from the nature samples.