1. Components

Album Package (110*110*30)

Air KiT (60*60)

Square Card : 4ea (95*95)

Photo Card : 3ea (54*86)

2. Album Information

Artist : Indigo FM

Type of Media : KiT

Release Date : 2024-01-23 15:00:00

Production Company : MUZLIVE Inc.

Weight : 170g

3. Album Introduction

The album began after the dissolution of Indigo FM as a band in October 2021.
The pandemic and other mitigating factors proved to be more than the ensemble would weather. This ending, however bittersweet, gave way to a cathartic period of creative introspection. At first, plagued by overthinking and writer's block, Esteban, at the behest of his wife and musical collaborator, Emma River, began by writing music without any purpose other than self-expression, with no pressure or agenda. Gradually, over the next few months, the music began to flow. The result is the album A Billion Burning Suns.

4. Track List

- Heavy Weighs The Crown

Heavy Weighs the Crown was basically me just wanting to write a Strokes song. One my favorite albums of the past few years is the New Abnormal. I’ve listened to it so many times and studied the guitar parts and bass parts etc. because I just loved the sounded and needed to take it apart to understand it. Once I understood how a lot of those chord progressions worked and how I could get the flavor I so enjoyed I thought I would try to make my own version of it. Form-wise this song was interesting for me because I had three different sections but instead of turning it into a verse chorus and bridge like I would usually do, I thought it would be cool to write a verse melody and a pre chorus melody over the verse chords and then save the bridge as a pre chorus. Of course, I don’t think I really thought about it that way at that time but that was the way the sections really flowed nicely into each other. For this one I didn’t record anything until I was finished writing the melody and the form was set which means I probably have a zillion voice notes on my phone of me figuring out what to sing while strumming an acoustic. Once I had the chords and melody, I set about making two distinct guitar parts that were through composed and I could (in theory) play in a single take. One for Albert Hammond and one for Nick Valensi (of the Strokes). In keeping with that philosophy, I played a rhythm part on my Strat and the other part on my D’Angelico (I don’t own an Epiphone Riviera like Nick Valesni). For the groove I sequenced some drums that I thought fit the vibe and made sure to really write to the song instead of just keeping the beat or using loops (the result was lots of tom). The Bass was probably inspired by “Last Nite” which in turn I read was inspired by “American Girl” by Tom Petty and then it morphed into my own version. The working title of the song was “lemon avocado” for months until I finally sat down and turned my automatic writing into passable lyrics.

Composed & Arranged by Esteban Obando
Lyrics by Esteban Obando

- Hold That Thought

Hold That Thought originated from a guitar riff I had since college. I made a demo using the riff back in about 2014 but lost it in some back-up mishap or other. The riff stayed in my fingers though. One day I remembered it and played it on electric guitar. I changed the key and the tempo and a few notes. I played a bass part over it and thought the bass line ended up being way cooler than the original riff. Left it alone and thought nothing of it. A few days later, I met up with Alexis at a mutual friend’s dinner hang and we got to talking and set up a day to come over to his studio and mess around with some ideas. Alexis programmed a beat, and I started playing that bass riff over it and the rest started to take form quickly. I had been messing around with a melody idea and had a verse and a chorus bass line but nothing else of substance, so everything just got fleshed out in the moment which I think is reflected in the immediacy of the record. We came up with a guitar riff for the verse and found some cool mellotron patches and other sounds that really filled up the production. The whole outro part I believe came a little bit after. I had been listening to a Paranoid Android by Radiohead and wanted to write something with lots of voices, classical flavor and descending chords that modulate into different keys. My own version of that ended up being what is on the record. I always thought it would be cool to write a song that had two very disjointed parts that made sense together. We tracked the vocals a few days later and that gave me a chance to not overthink the lyrics (which I often do). They’re abstract but evocative and there’s enough there to hang your hat on. That’s what I like to do anyways. I don’t enjoy spelling out how I’m feeling or anything like that because it’s often way too complicated to explain frankly not as interesting as anything that could be interpreted differently. Lastly, Alexis had Jarvis come in and play drums over the sampled beat and the result was probably the grooviest and danciest song on the album.

Composed & Arranged by Esteban Obando
Lyrics by Esteban Obando

- Delusions

The original title for delusions was “Simple Song” because that was all I was trying to do. I wanted to write the simplest song I could possibly write, with just one section repeating in ballad from. I strung some chords together on my Taylor and then I thought “I haven’t written anything in ¾ time in ages” so I started strumming away but the whole thing sounded a bit stock, so I fingerpicked it instead with a Travis picking technique. I had very seldom, if ever, Travis picked on a song not in 4/4 time so the result sounded interesting to me right away. After I had the riff worked out, I started singing with the intention of singing few words in the clearest and most direct way possible. Again, I just wanted to write a simple song. After a while I had a few couplets to choose from and started to whittle them down into a story. Over the next few days, I went on walks while listening to my voice memos and wrote several variations and way more couplets than I needed. I choose the best ones and arranged them into a story. The Outro section came after. I found a 6/8 drum loop on splice and really liked the way it sounded but when I put over my fingerpicking part it overpowered it so I wrote a new part on electric playing simple diatonic chords moving differently from the chords in the verses. Since I’d been staying in strict couplet territory for the verses, I thought it would feel liberating to do something different in the choruses, writing a three-line section that would repeat where each line had a different length and wordier rhythm. I was inspired by listening to a lot of Elliot Smith to double-track my voice and sing very intimately which adds to the lullabyesque aspect of the tune. Emma River then contributed a beautiful vocal arrangement to the song that elevated it way beyond what I could’ve done myself. All the electric guitars and verbed out textures were influenced by listening to a lot of shoegaze music those days which I absolutely love. What does the song mean to me personally? I think it’s a song about retreating into yourself and how that can be both comforting and alienating at times but again it might mean something wildly different to someone else and in fact I hope that that is the case.

Composed & Arranged by Esteban Obando
Lyrics by Esteban Obando

- Tell It Like It Is

This is my angry song. I was listening to a lot to post punk music a la Joy Division and wanted to write something with that Peter Hook bass playing approach. So, I put on a drum loop, plugged my bass into a guitar amp and jammed out until I had something. In the spirit of the genre, I was going for, I wanted to keep the writing as simple as possible, so I kept the verses and Choruses similar chord-wise with a few variations. I thought it would be cool to differentiate the sections merely by adding guitar, since a lot of joy division is just drums and bass during the verses. I came up with a simple but, in my opinion, effective guitar riff that could go over the choruses and colored in the bass line nicely. After I had that, I thought the bass was too obvious in spelling out the chords and moving with the guitar, so I adjusted it a little bit to make it more interesting and that led to an interesting alternative version that eventually became the pre chorus. I got rid of the drum loop and sequenced some drums that fit in better with the different section which Bas later replaced with real drums. For the bridge I wanted a complete departure from the punky approach. I thought it would be cool to come up with a guitar arpeggio loop and a bass guitar loop that repeat in different spots to form interesting harmonies. Something headier to offset the simplicity of the rest of the song I suppose. I had to adjust a few chords and bass notes to make it work, the result being that the bridge section sounds through composed. Then I wanted a polyphonic vocal thing to go on, so I just sang oohs and ahs until I had something that felt weird and fresh to me. The words were relatively easy, and this was one of the rare songs where I knew sort of what I wanted to write about before I started. I had had an unpleasant encounter with someone where I just let the other person say their bit and restrained from saying what was on my mind but thought about it for a while after. The song was therapeutic in a way. I don’t often write that way but try anything once I guess and now, I have that person to thank for this song so in the end I’m grateful for them.

Composed & Arranged by Esteban Obando
Lyrics by Esteban Obando

- Message Through

For Message Through, I wanted to write a song that didn’t start with guitar or melody or anything like that but rather a solid beat and synths. The way I usually write is I’ll sit down with a guitar and start singing nonsense and eventually whittle it down from there through some weird magical process that I don’t really understand. It was early January and I had just gotten back from a trip to Alaska and Seattle and in the Seattle airport I saw this Sub pop store that sold little synthesizers and I thought “what the heck?”. So I bought a little Korg Volca bass synth and played with it on the plane ride back to LA (with headphones obviously). I forgot about the little thing I programmed on the plane until I sat down at my little home studio. For Christmas, from Emma (my wife), I had also gotten a tiny drum machine that’s about the size of a small calculator called a pocket operator (Teenage engineering) which was loads of fun to play with. I midi synced both together as a little experiment and recorded it to protools. At that point I thought oh well this is interesting let’s add some other textures so I added a lead guitar line and made it sound as weird as I could by layering different sounds and doubling and layering etc. Since the whole thing so far was sounding kind of repetitive, I thought it would be good to add a bass line that colored the loop differently and after jamming out for a bit I came up with a sort of A section and a B section. The thing that tied it all together was the guitar arpeggio that worked as a sort of call and response thing with the lead line. On that part, I set out to play the simplest combination of notes that would fit over the piece to give it a hypnotic effect. I found and tweaked a Native Instruments loop from Butch Vig drums that would come in halfway through the song to take it somewhere different and really open it up. Much later in the process, I had Bas track over the drums I had sequenced, and he did a great job and gave it his own vibe as well! The pocket operator is still audible in the track however as well as a butch Vig tambouring loop that just sat well with the rest of it. After that I stripped away most of the original Korg stuff because it was too busy and organized the piece to give it a form and recorded myself singing nonsensical lyrics over the track to see what shape the melody would take and let it sit for a while. The only line I think I kept from that original version was message through. A few months later when it came time to sit down and write the lyrics, which is a part I both love and dread, I eventually wrote about the feeling of shutting down as a defense mechanism, something I often do unfortunately and what that feels like.

Composed & Arranged by Esteban Obando
Lyrics by Esteban Obando

- Infinite Skies

This one is another song with a roundabout origin story. I stumbled upon a song by and artist named Joey P through tik tok of all places and liked it right away. I listened to many times and internalized the cadence of the verses so one day when I sat down to make a demo idea and it came time to sing over the little guitar progression I’d come up with I sang with a similar flow but with very different melody to match the chords. The collision propelled me to continue the idea. Since none of the verses started on the one chord and had some modal interchange chords etc. I figured it would be impactful to start on the one chord and just by jamming on that one chord it led to a line cliché type thing that led to sort of melodramatic chord progression which I liked for the song. Around the same time that I was working on that song I reconnected with another schoolmate from Montreal who had just finished an album of synthpop music which he shared with me, and I thoroughly enjoyed listening to. While chatting he turned me on to Steven Wilson and in particular the song “Drive Home” which I now love. He told me the song reminded him of me somehow and I thought that was interesting and sort of knew what he meant by it. For me it was an abstract feeling I can’t really describe but there’s certainly an element of nostalgia in it as well as it being sort of whimsical. I channeled that into Infinite Skies in a spiritual, if not directly musical, sense and let it guide me, especially for the long outro full of ambient sounds and guitar noises. Lyrics-wise this song was incredibly difficult to write because I was so in love with the original cadence that I had to find words to fit the melody without altering it in the slightest and present a story of sorts. I remember looking out of the window in the back seat of my car when I was about six years old, and my family was living in Orlando. At that time, we would sometimes go and visit my cousins in Miami. Not to besmirch the state of Florida but, in my opinion at least the terrain during those road trips was a little monotonous, so I would just look up at the blue sky and let my thoughts wonder and that’s how I got the title of the song “Infinite Skies”.

Composed & Arranged by Esteban Obando
Lyrics by Esteban Obando

- Night Drive

I had a sketch of a song from 2018 called “Simple Thing” that I found while looking through an old hard. It had a cool a minor line cliché type guitar riff, was fast and straight and palm muted and had a similar rhythm to “Everlong” by the Foo Fighters. I remember showing it to someone around that time and they suggested it might be cool to alter the riff and make it more strummy and referred me to “Space Oddity” by David Bowie. In 2022, I tried precisely that and as always missed the mark and ended up doing something completely different but that is the origin of the strummy acoustic guitar part. That initial changed inspired me to write a B section with lots of Maj7 chords for a dreamy, nostalgic feel. I then also came up with a quick bridge that used a very simple chord progression, but which was modulating from the original key to make it sound like it was going somewhere completely new. As always, I mumbled some words into a microphone and tried to feel my way into a melody until something tangible started to form and even kept a slowed down melody line from the 2018 demo (the beginning of the pre choruses). After that I worked on a bass line. I’m not a bass player so I thought of having the bass be in a guitar register which led to the intro riff. As for the chorus, I’m playing two note chords in the bass which I think was inspired by the way I sometimes play guitar. How the guitar arrangement of this song came about is a complete mystery to me. I just jammed for hours and eventually something beautiful started to come out and I’m just incredibly grateful it did. I also tracked a few guitar solo ideas for the outro which in my head absolutely HAD to have an epic David Gilmour style guitar solo. When it came time to actually track the solo, I got a bit in my head about it and then I thought “what if I just take some of my best phrases and reverse them?”. Lyrics came months after and were probably the most difficult to write for the album. Eventually I had the idea to write the chorus in an ABBA rhyme scheme, which I’d never done before and that unlocked something in my lyrical brain. I didn’t set out to write a song about anything, but it blossomed into one of the most meaningful songs of the album for me. Night Drive is a song about connection and how being in each other’s lives and finding meaning through that connection lights up a universe that is infinitely vast and empty. That’s my takeaway at least.

Composed & Arranged by Esteban Obando
Lyrics by Esteban Obando

- Howling At The Moon

This song came about in a very indirect way. In 2020, I was making music online with a childhood friend from Montreal who’s a talented singer and songwriter and we were having fun doing so. On one of our very first zoom songwriting sessions, I played him some chords on the piano which were A minor, G and D. We built a track around those chords but ultimately ended up shelving it. That Christmas I was at my parent’s place in Florida for and just messing around on their grand piano. I liked what I was playing so I recorded it on my phone and what I realized was that it was probably inspired by spending time working on that track with my friend. I also wrote a B section that had some passing chords that were sort of operatic sounding. I mumbled a melody on top of it which I thought was pretty but didn’t really see how it could fit with other stuff I was writing so I forgot about the whole thing. About a year later I was going through old voice memos and found that little piano jam and immediately tapped into the feeling I had when playing it and decided I had to take it somewhere although it was a bit out of left field. For some reason, although piano is my first instrument and I love it deeply, over the past few years I’ve become a bit bored with the sound of it. I love Billy Joel, Elton John and Ben Folds for example, but I don’t hear a lot of anything like that in the music coming out these days. In some ways it’s a lost art and since most of my process involves me multitracking and working out parts on my own in my home studio the things that make those Elton John and co. recordings great, which in my opinion is the push and pull of the piano against the rhythm section gets lost to the ubiquity of the click track and working with midi. All that to say, playing piano on my own records doesn’t appeal to me as much as it should so I thought about “how I could turn the piano jam into a guitar part”? and the result is 90% of the song. The rest was just about finding nice ambient guitar parts that filled in the brooding sort of gothic atmosphere. Lyrics-wise I wrote a verse that just flowed out naturally in the space of an afternoon which ended with the line “howling at the moon” so what did I do in the choruses? I sang as though I was howling. A bit on the nose maybe but it fit the mood of the song so well I just let it be what it wanted to be. I had a lot of trouble writing a second verse and wrote maybe ten different versions before settling into what’s on the record. The last thing I did was to flip the order of the verses because I thought it presented a better narrative. The problem is I was trying to be too specific in what I wanted to say without realizing that it didn’t matter so much what I was saying as much as the atmosphere the words were creating. There’s a story in the lyrics somewhere but it’s vague and fragmented which is perfect for the song and captures, for me at least, a feeling of longing and melancholy.

Composed & Arranged by Esteban Obando
Lyrics by Esteban Obando

- Only The Best

Only the Best was just one of those songs that wrote itself. I was going through a little bit of a hard time personally and lots of projects that I had put a lot of myself into were coming to an end which left me feeling a bit bitter and void. I knew I wanted to write great music, but I was placing too much emphasis on the GREAT part of that equation and not enough on the writing. It was November 2021 and I was suffering from a severe bout of writer’s block. One day I just told myself “I’m going to listen to a playlist (I ended up listening to a folk playlist on Spotify) and write a song I think would fit on there”. I thought about it as an exercise and surrendered any expectation that it would be a song, I would actually use for anything. Once the pressure was gone, the song was done, lyrics and all in about an hour or two. I put it away and then found it a few months later while going through demos and thought it had potential and worked on it some more. Most of the differences from the original demo and the final were in the guitar part. Originally, I was strumming the chords but in the end, I decided to come up with a Travis picking part on the acoustic (which I love because I’m a big folky). The part I come up with was cool but incredibly hard to play cleanly in standard tuning so then, being the lazy musician I am, I came up with a tuning that allowed me to play as many open strings as I could and make the pull-offs easy to play so that I could sing and play the thing without my head exploding. The guitar solo at the end came later and was the collision of two ideas. The first was to write a section that looped three chords in three measures to give it a sense of imbalance and forward motion and the second was me trying to play a solo like Tom Morello in “Like a Stone” by Audioslave in a very broken telephone way. So there you have it, sentimental folk music meet Tom Morello.

Composed & Arranged by Esteban Obando
Lyrics by Esteban Obando