Hello World...

What is this place you've found yourself? Who the hell are These Dead Machines? Fair questions...

So...hello, my name is Dan. I make music under the name These Dead Machines.

I've been making since getting into playing guitar in my teens, from hitting it with distortion on full and working out Nirvana songs to being in various bands over the years from Big Wednesday to theSidecarAdventure then most recently Mark of 1000 Evils - that being the one where I also tried using my voice (which some people might call singing).

The pandemic came along and we toyed with shaking things up as a band, which eventually led to us amicably going our separate ways. One of the good things from that period was getting myself an electric drum kit. I'd never been able to get my limbs to work properly for drumming but had a minor breakthrough at rehearsals, so wanted to play more...and potentially annoy my neighbours.

I'd been working on a bunch of songs for the band, which could one day become an album...but then got distracted as I was exploring what I might sound like over the full bad sound. One song appeared...then another... then felt like I wanted to get some out into the world. Doing the majority of the work at home and working with Mike Lawetto do get the vocals down, engineer and mix, I got a few singles out - including an attempt at a Christmas song!

Part of it all stemmed from that part in the pandemic when none of us really knew what was happening or what might happen next. I looked back at the handful of songs we'd released as a band compared to the countless unfinished songs or jams from rehearsals and felt a wave of disappointment - that if for whatever reason, I couldn't make music again, I wouldn't have much to show for it.

While focusing on a single song for any length of time isn't easy, I bounced around a few and it started to feel like many of them naturally went together as a body of work...and so an album felt like an ambitious thing that I hadn't done before so why not?

I miss playing as a band, jamming at rehearsals and all of that...but the benefits so far with These Dead Machines is letting it be whatever it wants to be, so there's room to try out different sounds and kinds of songs than maybe I would've done before. What you lose with one hand, you gain with another...and whose to say there's not a way for it to be a live performance based thing in the future.

So there's music out in the world and that feels good. I hope it might reach some people's ears who appreciate it and slow grow some kind of an audience and see where this take me.

Cheers,

Dan