Scale

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Lyrics and Liner Notes

In February 2025, Greg recorded the guitar part that would develop into "Wayside," and thus began the recording of Scale. By this time, Greg had developed something of a standard writing process. When sitting with a guitar or keyboard, he was in the habit of recording brief videos of himself playing snippets of music that could be the basis of a song. On occasion these snippets would include rough ideas for melodies, but more often they were simple, brief instrumental sections. In the studio he would develop such an idea into a full song's worth of music, layering instruments until a coherent backing track was assembled, and only then begin working on words and melody. This was how each of the songs on Scale was created.

The lyrical content of the album has a few running themes. Most notably, there are a number of songs oriented toward the frustration and despair that Greg and so many other Americans felt as they watched their country slide rapidly toward authoritarianism in the opening months of 2025. This circumstance not only gave rise to overtly sociopolitical lyrics, but also yielded several songs with somewhat existential themes. And as usual, Greg took frequent inspiration from the various interpersonal relationships in his life.

As the album was coming to its completion, Greg still had no ideas for a title or cover art. He turned to his old friend Brandi Parker for help. In a single brainstorming session they hit upon the notion of scale, a word with a multitude of meanings: an animal's protective covering, a device for measuring weight, the relative size or proportion of things, an arrangement of musical notes, a test to measure psychological attributes, the act of climbing something very tall. Armed with this idea, Greg consulted Gemini (an artificial intelligence-powered image generator) to devise the basis of the image that would become the album cover, and modified the image with the GNU Image Manipulation Program.

Greg used his then-standard gear on Scale: Martin acoustic guitars, an Ibanez semi-hollow body electric guitar and a Gretsch solid-body electric guitar, a Tobias 5-string bass, an Akai drum pad powering Addictive Drums samples, a Nektar MIDI controller with various piano, organ, and synth patches, and Reaper DAW with an array of VST effects and plug-ins. Mastering was completed using Izotope's Ozone Elements in Reaper.