Notes from the workbench.

I've released a few Ghoul on Fire projects now, and each one has had its own purpose.

Wake the Dead was the "Will this even work?" experiment. Could I take these ideas, these characters, and this sound I had in my head and actually turn them into something I wanted to listen to?

The Monsters Inside was the "I've been carrying these songs, feelings, and ideas around for far too long, and it's time to get them out" album. A much more personal project, built around songs and concepts that had been sitting with me for years.

Everybody Looks Better Dead was the "How much fun can I possibly have making a ridiculous Halloween record?" experiment. What started as one random Halloween song turned into a six-track EP full of monsters, bad decisions, and absolute nonsense. I had a blast making it.

But Ghoul on Fire, the self-titled album?

This is the one I've been waiting for.

It Started With a Story

When I originally envisioned Ghoul on Fire, it was never supposed to be just a collection of songs from a fictional band.

I wanted the band to have a story. I wanted the characters to have lives outside the music. I wanted their experiences, relationships, disasters, and questionable life choices to become part of the songs themselves.

Music and storytelling have always been connected for me. A song can tell an entire story in four minutes, but sometimes there's a much bigger story hiding behind those four minutes.

So I started writing what I called Serial Records.

These were going to be short stories about Blaze and KR-0, the two members of Ghoul on Fire. Little snapshots of their lives, their shows, their recording sessions, and the events that eventually shaped the band.

I called the collection Before the Fire.

And I was having an absolute blast writing them.

A lot of those stories pulled from my own experiences. Things that happened during my years of recording, performing, playing shows, and generally making questionable decisions in the pursuit of music.

Not direct retellings, of course. I took bits and pieces of real experiences, mixed in some fiction, exaggerated the hell out of everything, and handed those stories over to Blaze and KR-0.

It was a fun way to revisit parts of my past while creating something completely new.

But then something happened.

Apparently, I Wrote a Book

The little stories started connecting.

Characters developed. Relationships changed. One event led to another. The individual stories started forming a much larger narrative.

Suddenly, these weren't just fun little fictional band records anymore.

There was an actual story here. With a beginning, an ending, character development, and everything in between.

What was supposed to be a collection of short stories had turned into a full-fledged book.

Before the Fire had become something much bigger than I originally intended.

And I loved every minute of it.

That's one of my favorite things about creating without worrying too much about what the finished product is supposed to be. Sometimes an idea takes you somewhere you never expected.

I didn't sit down with the intention of writing a novel about a fictional band.

I just wanted to tell a few stories.

Apparently, nobody told the characters they were supposed to stop.

The Music Was Always Part of the Story

Even as the stories grew into a book, the original concept never changed.

I wanted to create music and stories that existed together.

Not just songs inspired by a book. Not just a book written to explain a collection of songs.

I wanted both to be part of the same world.

And that's exactly what the self-titled Ghoul on Fire album became.

Across 16 tracks, there are songs that directly reference events from Before the Fire. There are songs built around the emotions and themes of those events. And there are songs that simply capture the personalities, energy, and chaos of the band.

Some moments will mean a little more if you've read the book. A particular line might suddenly carry a different meaning. A song might remind you of a conversation, a character, or something that happened along the way.

But you don't need to read the book to enjoy the music.

And you don't need to listen to the album to enjoy the book.

They stand on their own.

They just happen to make each other a little more interesting.

That was always the goal.

A Little Bit of Me Is Still in There

One of the things I've enjoyed most about creating Ghoul on Fire is finding new homes for old ideas.

Some are completely fictional. Others come from experiences I've carried with me for decades.

One of my favorite examples is Say My Name Again.

There's a section of that song featuring lyrics I originally wrote roughly twenty years ago, back when I was actively recording and performing my own music.

Those words sat around for two decades, waiting for the right place to land.

And somehow, they ended up fitting perfectly into a song featuring KR-0.

There's something incredibly satisfying about hearing something I wrote twenty years ago become part of a completely different project, in a completely different world, and still feel like it belongs.

Then there's Play It One More Time, another personal favorite.

For all the loud music, distorted guitars, electronic chaos, and ridiculous energy Ghoul on Fire brings, I still love those moments when a song slows things down just enough to hit you emotionally.

That sadness hiding underneath the noise.

Those moments matter just as much to me as the songs that make you want to crank the volume until the neighbors complain.

And this album has both.

So What Happened to the Serial Records?

Turning Before the Fire into a book created another little problem.

I still wanted people visiting the Ghoul on Fire website to have something to read. Something that connected them to the characters and the events surrounding the music.

But I didn't want to put the entire book on the website.

I wanted the book to remain its own experience.

So I came up with something different.

Blaze's Journal.

Instead of publishing the entire story online, Blaze's Journal offers smaller, more personal glimpses into her world.

Thoughts, observations, little moments, and reflections on events happening throughout Before the Fire and beyond.

It's not a replacement for the book, and it isn't meant to tell the entire story.

It's another window into the world.

You can listen to the music, read a few journal entries, learn a little about the characters, and hopefully get curious about what else is happening behind the scenes.

It's another way to experience Ghoul on Fire without having to commit to an entire novel.

And, more importantly, it's another fun thing for me to create.

This Is What I Wanted Ghoul on Fire to Be

When I started Krimson City Studios, I made myself a pretty simple promise.

I was going to make the things I wanted to make.

Not because I thought they'd sell. Not because I was chasing an audience. Not because somebody told me what kind of music I should release or what kind of stories I should write.

Because I wanted to.

And Ghoul on Fire has become one of my favorite examples of that philosophy.

I get to write stories about a fictional band in a city I've spent years creating.

I get to turn those stories into songs.

I get to take pieces of my own past, twist them into something new, and give them to characters who have somehow developed personalities and lives of their own.

I get to make loud, chaotic music with the occasional emotional gut punch.

And if a random idea turns into a six-song Halloween EP, or a few short stories turn into an entire book?

Well, apparently that's just how things work around here.

I've spent more time developing this self-titled album than any of the other Ghoul on Fire releases. Not just producing the music, but building the world around it and finding the connections between the songs and the stories.

And now, finally, it's all coming together.

Ghoul on Fire isn't the end of the story. There's a lot more music to make, a lot more stories to tell, and plenty of bad decisions left for Blaze and KR-0 to make.

But this album feels like the moment the original idea finally became real.

It's the album I've wanted to make since the beginning.

And I'm really fucking happy with how it turned out.

Turn it up. Welcome to the fire.

M.K. Static

Krimson City Studios

Sometimes I start a project with a plan.

This was not one of those times.

One night I decided I wanted to make a Halloween song. Nothing serious. Nothing connected to some massive story. Just something fun, stupid, spooky, and maybe a little ridiculous.

So I made Everybody Looks Better Dead.

It was exactly what I wanted: a big dumb Halloween party song about costumes, monsters, dancing, and everybody looking a little better when they’re pretending to be dead.

Cool. Halloween song accomplished.

Except apparently my brain didn’t get the memo that we were done.

One song became another. Then another. At some point I stopped making random Halloween songs and realized I was accidentally documenting the worst costume party imaginable.

So naturally, I kept going.

Barely a Costume came from making fun of that particular breed of Halloween costume that’s basically just regular clothes plus animal ears. You know the one. Congratulations, Tiffany. You’re a cat now.

Then Final Girl introduced an actual killer to the party, because apparently the drunken costume party wasn’t chaotic enough. Unfortunately for him, he picked a house where Blaze was already drinking.

Bad career move.

Then things got considerably stupider.

We Summoned Kevin introduced Kevin, a demon who gets accidentally summoned during a séance and turns out to be less ancient embodiment of unspeakable evil and more accountant who would really like everyone to stop screaming so he can explain the paperwork.

I have no defense for Kevin.

Kevin happened.

By this point there was absolutely no pretending this was still “a Halloween song.”

She Came as Herself brought the dead girl into the party, because if everyone else is dressed like monsters, demons, killers, and whatever the hell Tiffany is supposed to be, of course the actual supernatural creature just shows up as herself and starts dancing.

And finally, Don’t Let the Morning In became the end of the night. That moment when the party has somehow survived the costumes, the killer, the séance, Kevin, and everything else, and nobody wants to admit it’s almost over.

Six songs.

One increasingly questionable Halloween party.

And absolutely no plan.

That’s probably my favorite thing about Everybody Looks Better Dead. It wasn’t supposed to become anything. There wasn’t a concept document sitting around waiting to be turned into an EP. I didn’t spend weeks figuring out the story or deciding what each song needed to accomplish.

I just wanted to make a fun Halloween song.

Then I followed the stupid ideas wherever they went.

Apparently they went to a costume party with a serial killer, a demon accountant, questionable animal ears, and a bunch of people refusing to go home.

And honestly?

That’s exactly the kind of weird project Krimson City Studios exists to make.

Origins

1. Where did the name "Ghoul on Fire" come from?

It's an obvious play on the phrase Girl on Fire, but monster-fied. "Ghoul" fits the supernatural world, and the "fire" comes from where I felt all of my previous creative projects ended up: tossed aside and burned to ash. The difference is that I was able to revive them, rebuild them, and make them sound better than ever.

2. If someone has never heard Ghoul on Fire before, how would you describe it?

If you took every supernatural creature and monster you could imagine, threw them into a metal concert with an EDM DJ, lit the whole thing on fire, and somehow smoked the experience... that's probably what the hallucination would look like.

3. Was there a specific moment where you realized this was the project you'd always wanted to make?

Yes. I was experimenting with some new tools when I heard songs I'd written over twenty years ago sung back to me in a completely different voice. That was the moment I realized this was going to become much more than just another music project. It was going to become the soundtrack to a world I'd been building for years.

The Music

4. Your songs jump between horror stories, mental health, comedy, heartbreak, and absolute chaos. What connects all of them?

Me. That's my brain every single day.

5. You have one album built around original stories and another around mental health. Why split them?

I needed the separation. The Monsters Inside was an album concept I'd wanted to make for years. I had tried before, but it never came together the way I imagined. When these songs started falling into place, it finally felt like the right time to let it become its own album.

The other songs are deeply rooted in the world, characters, and stories I've been building for years, so giving them their own space felt natural.

6. Do you write lyrics first or build music first?

Lately, it's been lyrics first, then music, then usually another round of lyric edits.

Years ago I relied on the music to inspire the lyrics. Somewhere along the way that completely flipped.

7. Are the monsters in your songs actually monsters?

People always point out that Frankenstein was the doctor, not the monster. But when you really think about it, the doctor often feels like the real monster.

That's how I look at monsters in general. Just because something has fangs, green skin, or has lived for hundreds of years doesn't make it evil. Sometimes the real monsters are sitting in a boardroom. Sometimes they're the thoughts in your own head that refuse to leave.

Creativity

8. You spend just as much time building worlds, websites, artwork, and visuals as writing songs. Why?

Everyone needs a creative outlet. I just happen to have several. I enjoy finding every way I can to bring this world to life using whatever tools I have available.

9. You also code, design, and build AI tools. Does that technical side influence the creative side?

Absolutely. My world isn't just monsters wandering around in the dark. It's heavily influenced by technology, cyberpunk aesthetics, and the intersection between the supernatural and modern tech. My technical background naturally finds its way into the stories.

10. If someone looked at your hard drive, what would surprise them the most?

Which one? (Laughs.)

Probably how long this project has actually existed. Some lyrics are twenty years old. Some characters are over a decade old. Some melodies have been rewritten half a dozen times. Ghoul on Fire looks like it appeared overnight. The name may have, but the heart and soul of it absolutely didn’t.

AI

11. You're very open about using AI. Why?

Why hide it?

To me, AI is a tool that helps me bring creative ideas to life faster. If you've listened to my music, you've probably noticed there are a lot of mental health themes. For years I had ideas scattered everywhere with no realistic way of bringing them all together.

AI helps me organize those ideas so I can spend more time doing the part I actually love: telling stories, writing songs, and creating. The ideas are still mine. AI helps me build them faster.

12. Some people see AI as replacing creativity. What's your perspective?

It's just another creative tool.

People sometimes complain that an AI-generated flyer should have been made by an artist. The funny thing is... I am that artist. I've spent years designing artwork, websites, graphics, and media. AI simply speeds up parts of my workflow so I can focus more on the creative decisions.

With music, it lets me hear my lyrics interpreted through different styles and emotions. That's the exciting part.

13. Which parts of Ghoul on Fire are AI-assisted, and which parts are completely yours?

The writing is mine. A lot of it was written years ago, long before AI was part of my workflow.

Today, AI helps during brainstorming. It's like having a dictionary, thesaurus, rhyme book, and research assistant available instantly. It can search through years of worldbuilding notes and help reconnect ideas I'd forgotten about. Sometimes it gives me the skeleton of an idea that I can shape into something uniquely my own.

The music itself is AI-generated, and that was part of the fun of this project. It allowed me to explore a genre I've always loved. I also use AI for some visual references and artwork because I'm a very visual creator.

14. Do you ever worry people will dismiss the work because AI was involved?

I know some people will, and honestly, I'm okay with that.

I didn't make this music for them. I made it because it's the music I wanted to hear.

If someone else enjoys it too, that's incredible. If they don't, I genuinely hope they find the music that speaks to them.

15. If AI disappeared tomorrow, would Ghoul on Fire still exist?

Absolutely.

It might sound a little different, but I've been writing, recording, and making music for over twenty years. Ghoul on Fire would survive.

Personal

16. Many of your songs deal with anxiety, ADHD, depression, rejection, and loneliness. Are those personal experiences?

Without getting too deep...

Yes.

One hundred percent.

17. You've said every character has a piece of you inside them. What do you mean by that?

Every character I write carries something from my own life. Whether it's riding motorcycles, a personality trait, or a personal interest, I always find a way to weave pieces of myself into the people I create.

I don't want to spoil too much, but they're all reflections from different angles.

18. Is writing music therapeutic or exhausting?

Depends on the day.

Sometimes I have ten great ideas before lunch. Other days I fight for every single line.

19. What do you hope people feel after listening to your music?

It depends on the song.

If it's something from The Monsters Inside, I hope people realize they aren't alone. We all carry monsters inside us, and learning to live with them matters.

For the lore-based songs, I simply hope people have fun, get curious about the stories behind them, and maybe become interested enough that I finally have an excuse to publish more of the world.

20. If one person hears a Ghoul on Fire song and thinks, "That's exactly how my brain works," what would that mean to you?

That maybe I'm not as alone as I thought I was.

Fun Questions

21. Coffee or energy drinks?

White Monster.

22. Favorite time to create?

Nighttime. Between 10:00 PM and midnight is the sweet spot.

23. How many unfinished songs are sitting on your computer?

Probably close to a hundred Logic projects in various stages of completion.

24. What's something people assume about you that's completely wrong?

That I'm just prompting an AI to write songs for me.

25. Which Ghoul on Fire song should someone hear first?

It depends on how you want to feel.

If you're looking for something emotional, start with Life Goes By or Porch Light.

If you want something you can blast in the car, Ghostlane or Blood Anthem (Drink Up).

If you want a story, start with Feral or What the City Never Knew.

26. Which song is your favorite?

Life Goes By.

The song started many years ago and has evolved into what I think is its best version. Hearing those words sung back to me after all this time still gets me emotional.

27. Which song was the hardest to write?

Lyrically, Life Goes By because of its intricate internal rhyme structure.

Emotionally, Porch Light. It was difficult to write without getting emotional myself.

28. Which song surprised you the most once it was finished?

Ghostlane.

I wanted that badass biker tearing through the city at night feeling, and I think it absolutely nailed that vibe.

Future

29. Where do you hope Ghoul on Fire is in five years?

Honestly, I'd be happy simply making and releasing the music I want to hear.

That said, it would be amazing to find the right people to bring Ghoul on Fire to life as a real band and perform these songs on stage.

30. What's next?

Whatever I want.

It's my world.

31. Ghoul on Fire feels very different from your previous projects. What’s changed?

For years, I wrote music with one eye on the audience.

I wasn’t being fake, but I was compromising. I wrote songs I thought people wanted to hear. I chased trends, wrote around guest features, and slowly drifted away from the reasons I started making music in the first place.

Ghoul on Fire is the opposite of that.

Every song starts with one question:

“Would I put this on in my own car?”

If the answer is no, it doesn’t get made.

I don’t think about streams, algorithms, playlists, or whether a song is “commercial enough.” I think about whether it makes me feel something.

Ironically, I think that’s made the music more honest than anything I’ve created before.

If other people connect with it, that’s incredible.

But for the first time in my life, I’m creating without asking permission.

32. Success means different things to different people. What does success look like for Ghoul on Fire?

Success is looking back ten years from now and knowing I finally made the music I’d always wanted to make. If one person connects with it, that’s amazing. If a thousand people connect with it, that’s amazing too. But I’d rather have one hundred songs that are unapologetically me than one hit song that feels like it belongs to somebody else. I’ve already spent enough years compromising. Ghoul on Fire is about finally allowing myself to be who I already was.

When I started the 1 Bad Day project a few years back, it was going to be the next evolution of my music journey. While working on that project, along with many other non-music projects, it became apparent that all of these things were more related than I had thought.

Music evolved into stories. Stories became art, apps, and design. Old, unfinished albums resurfaced. Somewhere along the way, I started building an entire fictional universe around it all, which eventually became music again.

The one thing I kept coming back to was that I wasn’t creating this stuff for anybody else. I was creating it for me.

What do I want to hear? What do I want to read? What app do I need to create for my own use?

Not: What do other people want? What will other people buy?

Once I realized I was doing things for me, it all changed. It became easier. It became enjoyable again.

I create a lot of stuff. Most of it is just for me. Every once in a while, though, I finish something and think, “Other people might like this.”

So I decided I’m going to share it.

Not sell it. Not chase numbers with it. Just put it out there.

If people find it and like it, great! If not, I didn’t make it for you. I made it for me. Just me.

And I like it.

That’s all that matters.

So today, I’m rebranding and relaunching.

The design studio where I build everything is now called Krimson City Studios. Any creative idea, experiment, project, or creation can now live under that umbrella. The music project that started as 1 Bad Day has evolved into Ghoul on Fire.

Over ten years ago, I started writing The Kolor of Krimson. Through years of evolution, character changes, rebuilding the story, abandoning ideas, and introducing new ones, it twisted and morphed into what is now Nyxira: The Undying City. It’s finally at a point where I’m happy with it, and now I’m working on releasing it in the most creative way I can think of.

Ghoul on Fire is an offshoot of that world. Writing those stories became so much fun that eventually they crossed over into our world, and the music became real.

Right now, between those two projects, this is where I’m having fun.

As I create, I’ll keep plenty of things to myself. But if I make something and think someone else might get a kick out of it, I’ll share it.

That’s really what Krimson City Studios is now.

A place for me to make things I want to exist.

When I started building Ghoul on Fire, I wasn't trying to figure out what kind of music people wanted to hear.

I was trying to figure out what I wanted to hear.

That's become an important part of how I approach everything at Krimson City Studios. I'm not chasing an audience, an algorithm, or whatever genre happens to be getting attention this week. If I'm going to spend this much time writing, recording, mixing, editing, and obsessing over tiny details that probably no one else will ever notice, I should probably enjoy the thing I'm making.

And apparently what my brain wants is a woman screaming over distorted guitars while electronic noises malfunction in the background.

Fair enough.

Why a Female Singer?

I've always preferred female vocals.

There wasn't a complicated creative strategy behind making the singer of Ghoul on Fire a woman. When I listen to music for myself, I'm naturally drawn toward female vocalists, especially singers who can move between something intimate and vulnerable and something huge, aggressive, or slightly unhinged.

So when I started figuring out what Ghoul on Fire should sound like, creating Blaze as the voice of the band felt natural.

It also gave me some separation from my own musical past.

I've spent plenty of years being the person behind the microphone. Ghoul on Fire didn't need to be another version of me standing there. Giving the songs a different voice let the project develop its own identity.

Blaze isn't supposed to be me.

But sometimes she's singing something that came from me.

There's an interesting creative space between those two things.

My Brain Likes Noise

The rest of the Ghoul on Fire sound is probably even easier to explain.

I like busy music.

Give me heavy guitars, electronic layers, strange noises, glitches, synths, vocal effects, breakdowns, things moving through the stereo field, and some sound buried in the mix that I don't notice until the twentieth listen.

That kind of music scratches an itch in my brain.

It's why Ghoul on Fire keeps drifting around metalcore, industrial music, EDM, and whatever strange territory exists between them. I don't feel particularly compelled to make the project fit perfectly into any one of those boxes.

Sometimes I want a guitar riff that punches through a wall.

Sometimes I want a ridiculous electronic drop.

Sometimes I want the song to sound like the equipment is actively dying.

Preferably, I want all three.

But I also love the contrast.

Every once in a while, all of that noise needs to disappear.

A piano. A voice. A little space.

Those quieter songs are just as important because sometimes music isn't there to energize you. Sometimes you need a song that gives you permission to feel something you've been carrying around for a while.

I want room for both.

Then the Music Started Telling Stories

The Ghoul on Fire serials grew out of that same approach.

I've written plenty of fictional stories, but these are a little different because there's more of my own history buried inside them.

Years ago, I was actively recording and performing music myself. I have stories from that period of my life. Strange gigs. Tiny victories. Bad decisions. Inside jokes. People you meet once and somehow remember forever. The weird feeling of hearing something you created played somewhere you weren't expecting. The first time someone knows your music who wasn't there when you made it.

I'm not interested in simply retelling those stories.

That's not what the serials are.

Instead, I steal pieces.

A feeling from one night might end up in a completely different situation. A conversation gets dismantled and rebuilt between fictional characters. Something that actually happened becomes the seed of something much stranger.

The truth gets chopped up, distorted, run through Nyxira, and handed back to me wearing combat boots.

That's much more fun.

Fiction Gives the Memories Somewhere New to Go

That's probably my favorite part of writing the serials.

Ghoul on Fire gives me a way to revisit parts of being a musician without trying to recreate my own past.

Blaze and KR-0 aren't reenacting my life. They're having their own experiences in their own world. But every once in a while, there's a little piece of something real hiding underneath.

I know what some of those moments feel like because I've been there.

Then I get to ask the much more entertaining question:

What would this look like in Nyxira?

A normal venue can become a nightclub full of vampires.

A strange person you met after a show can become something that isn't entirely human.

An equipment failure can become a supernatural problem.

A dumb backstage joke can become an entire song.

And suddenly a memory isn't just a memory anymore. It's raw material.

Somewhere Between Me and Them

That's where Ghoul on Fire has become especially interesting to me.

It's fictional, but it isn't disconnected from me.

Blaze can sing things I feel without being a fictional autobiography. KR-0 can carry pieces of my history without simply being me with a different name. The serials can borrow from things I've experienced without documenting exactly what happened.

And the music can just be the music I want to hear.

Heavy when I want heavy.

Chaotic when my brain wants twelve things happening at once.

Quiet when something needs room to hurt.

Funny when things have gotten entirely too serious.

There doesn't need to be a marketing reason for any of it.

I'm making music for myself.

I'm writing stories I want to read.

And somewhere along the way, the two started feeding each other.

I'm pretty happy letting them continue to do that.

The Monsters Inside is an album I've been trying to make for a very long time.

I just didn't always know that's what I was making.

Some of the ideas behind these songs have survived different projects, different band names, different versions of me, and plenty of hard drives full of unfinished music. A few existed as concepts years ago. Others came from thoughts or experiences that kept resurfacing no matter how many times I moved on to something else.

They never quite went away.

Eventually I realized maybe they weren't supposed to.

The Album That Wouldn't Die

I've written and recorded music in some form for a large part of my life. Like most people who do that long enough, I've accumulated a graveyard of unfinished songs, abandoned projects, old sessions, half-written lyrics, and ideas that seemed important enough to save even when I didn't know what to do with them.

Most of those ideas eventually stay buried.

These didn't.

One of the clearest examples is "Get Out of My Brain."

That song can trace its roots all the way back to my old Krow project and a song called "I Need Therapy!" The original was a silly, upbeat song about hearing multiple voices in your head.

Somewhere along the way, that idea changed.

Instead of multiple voices, what if there was only one?

And what if that one was worse than all the others?

That became the seed for "Get Out of My Brain," a much darker song about the one voice you can't escape because it's coming from inside your own head.

"Life Goes By" also started life as an old Krow track. It's been reworked and rewritten over the years because the original version never quite did the idea justice. I knew there was something there worth keeping, even if I hadn't figured out how to say it yet.

Other pieces came from later projects.

"Someone's Watching Me" and "White Coats" originated during the 1 Bad Day project. Even "Welcome to the Fire" is a completely reworked version of another 1 Bad Day song.

Different projects. Different sounds. Different points in my life.

But the ideas survived.

That ended up being a theme with this album.

Anxiety. Depression. Loneliness. Intrusive thoughts. Paranoia. ADHD. Feeling like life is moving faster than you're prepared for. Feeling completely alone while surrounded by people.

Different songs came from different places, and not all of them represent where I am today. Some are about things I've experienced. Some are about thoughts I've had. Some take a small feeling and turn the volume way up just to see what it sounds like.

But there's a piece of me somewhere in all of them.

Why Make an Album About This?

Because sometimes my brain is an asshole.

That's probably the simplest answer.

I've always used music as a way to process things. Sometimes that means making something loud and aggressive. Sometimes it means writing something ridiculous because I need to laugh. Sometimes it means sitting down with a thought that I don't particularly want to sit down with and figuring out how to turn it into three or four minutes of noise.

The Monsters Inside became a place for that last category.

I didn't want to make an album that tried to explain mental health. I'm certainly not trying to diagnose anyone or pretend that a song can fix something complicated.

I wanted to make an album about what some of these things feel like.

There's a difference.

Anxiety isn't a definition in a textbook when your brain is replaying the same conversation for the hundredth time.

ADHD isn't particularly funny when you've got twenty tabs open in your head and somehow the one you actually need keeps disappearing.

Loneliness doesn't always mean physically being alone.

Grief doesn't always arrive when someone dies.

And sometimes the thing you're fighting isn't something anybody else can see.

Those are much more interesting things to write songs about.

When It Became an Album

At first, these were songs.

Some were old ideas I wanted to revisit. Some were new. Some had been rewritten so many times that very little of the original remained.

Then I started hearing them sung back to me in a new voice.

And something changed.

Songs I'd known for years suddenly hit me differently. Lyrics I'd written and stared at on a screen came back sounding like someone else was telling me my own story.

It got emotional.

Then other people heard them.

They got emotional too.

That's when I realized I wasn't just cleaning up old songs or collecting a bunch of tracks that happened to deal with similar subjects.

There was an album here.

The songs were talking to each other.

More importantly, they were saying something I'd apparently been trying to say for a very long time.

It Isn't All Darkness

This was important to me.

An album called The Monsters Inside dealing with mental health could very easily become an hour of emotional blunt-force trauma.

That's not what I wanted.

There are difficult songs on this album. Some of them are probably going to hit harder depending on what you've experienced and where your head happens to be when you hear them.

That's why the album begins with "Before You Listen."

It's not there because I think the album is dangerous or because every song is devastating. It's there because I know music can amplify whatever we're already carrying.

For one person, hearing someone put a familiar feeling into words can be incredibly comforting.

For someone else, on the wrong night, that exact same song can make the room feel a little smaller.

I wanted to acknowledge that.

But The Monsters Inside isn't just about being trapped with the monsters.

It's also about living with them.

Laughing at them.

Getting pissed off at them.

Outlasting them.

And occasionally turning them into a song because apparently that's cheaper than letting them continue taking up space in my head rent-free.

Making It Sound Like Me

The other important part of this album is that I didn't want "mental health album" to become a genre.

These songs still needed to be music I actually wanted to listen to.

That means heavy guitars. Electronic elements. Glitches. Layers. Noise. Big choruses. Strange little production choices. Songs that occasionally sound like someone dropped a metal band and a computer down a flight of stairs together.

And then sometimes almost none of that.

Some songs needed room.

There are moments where the production backs away and lets the vocal carry everything because burying an emotional lyric under another wall of sound would defeat the purpose.

That contrast became part of the album.

Chaos when the thought feels chaotic.

Space when it needs space.

And enough melody running through all of it that the songs still feel connected.

Why Now?

If some of these ideas have been sitting around for years, why did they finally become an album now?

I think the answer is simply that I finally stopped worrying about what I was supposed to make.

Krimson City Studios has increasingly become a place where I make things because I want them to exist.

That's it.

I'm not trying to reverse-engineer an audience. I'm not trying to figure out which song an algorithm wants. I'm not trying to build an album around what somebody else thinks I should sound like.

I wanted this album.

I wanted these songs out of my head.

And once I approached it that way, years of disconnected ideas suddenly started fitting together.

Songs that had survived previous projects finally had a home.

New songs appeared beside them.

And somewhere along the way, the pile of unfinished thoughts became The Monsters Inside.

Why Release It?

Making the album for myself is one thing.

Releasing it is something different.

Sometimes it's incredibly difficult to explain what a certain level of anxiety, depression, ADHD, or another mental health struggle actually feels like.

You can describe it.

You can explain the symptoms.

You can tell someone what's happening inside your head.

But sometimes words by themselves just aren't enough.

That's where I hope the music can do something that I can't.

Maybe someone who has experienced these things hears a song and thinks:

Yes. That's it. That's what it feels like.

There's something powerful about recognizing yourself in something someone else created. Even if it doesn't make the problem disappear, there's comfort in knowing somebody else understands the shape of it.

But I'm just as interested in the person who doesn't relate to it.

Maybe someone hears "Ten Minutes," "Open Tabs," "I'll Never Matter Here," or another song and thinks:

Wait. Is this what it's actually like inside someone's head all the time?

If that happens, then the album has done something worthwhile.

Because sometimes saying "I have anxiety" doesn't explain it.

Saying "my ADHD is bad today" doesn't explain it.

Saying "I'm depressed" doesn't necessarily communicate the noise, exhaustion, repetition, frustration, isolation, or sheer absurdity that can come along with it.

Maybe a song can.

Giving the Monsters Somewhere Else to Live

I don't expect everyone to connect with this album in the same way I do.

I'd actually be a little concerned if everyone did.

But I think that's part of why I needed to make it.

There are things that are incredibly difficult to explain in normal conversation that become strangely easy to say when there's a distorted guitar underneath them.

There are feelings that sound ridiculous when you try to describe them but make perfect sense when they're screamed through a chorus.

And there are things you can carry around for years without realizing how heavy they've gotten.

Making this album didn't magically solve any of that.

That was never the point.

I just finally gave some of those thoughts somewhere else to live.

Some of them have been trying to get out since Krow.

Some followed me through 1 Bad Day.

They changed names. They changed voices. They changed sounds.

But they survived.

They're not only in my head anymore.

They're in the songs.

And maybe that's why The Monsters Inside survived long enough to finally become an album.

More than twelve years ago, I bought a brand-new MacBook and thought: I want to tell a story.

I came up with a basic premise, a few characters, and a location where it would all take place. I started outlining backstories and figuring out the larger story. I even had a title I liked: The Kolor of Krimson.

The original idea was about a down-and-out MMA fighter living in a dystopian city, looking for answers while cybercrime and corruption unfolded around her.

There was just one problem.

How the hell was I supposed to tell it?

I'm a huge comic book nerd, so naturally I thought a comic would be fun. There was one minor complication: I can't draw to save my life.

So I started looking into 3D rendering tools like Daz. I learned the software, built some characters, and created some fun images. Then the sheer weight of how much work it would take to tell an entire story that way finally hit me.

Maybe music?

I could write and produce music. A concept album could tell the story in a completely different way. That sounded like a great project.

Until I never started it.

Years went by.

Every so often, the same question would wander back into my head:

How do I bring this thing to life?

I could see it. Almost like a movie playing in my head. I could visit the world, spend time with the characters, imagine scenes and conversations, but actually turning all of that into something finished was another story.

Probably my ADHD doing what it does best.

I had too many notes. Too many ideas. This character. That character. Story outlines. Branching paths. Is this person a good guy? A villain? Both? What happens if this connects to that?

All the things.

And then, a few years ago, I was doing some AI-assisted vibe coding and decided to experiment with building a world-building system. The idea was basically a website that could act as a character directory and help organize a fictional universe.

The funny part is that I wasn't even building it for myself. It started as an idea for another writer.

But I needed demo characters.

So I opened the vault.

I pulled out a few characters I had written more than a decade earlier and started putting them into the system.

And something woke back up.

The story was still there, but I wasn't the same person who had created it twelve years earlier. My interests had changed. I'd wandered much deeper into darker territory: monsters, ghosts, creatures of the night, supernatural weirdness, creepy places and things that probably shouldn't be knocking on your door at three in the morning.

So I started reimagining everything.

My original main character got a new name. And green skin.

Her old name went to another character who fit it better.

Five or six core characters became ten. Then twenty. Then I stopped pretending there was going to be a reasonable number of them.

But the important part wasn't that I was creating more characters.

The world was getting bigger.

Every new character created another possibility. Every possibility created another story treatment.

What if this happened?

What if these two knew each other?

What lives over here?

Who controls this part of the city?

What happened here fifty years ago?

What happens if that thing meets this person?

Instead of creating characters because a story needed them, sometimes I could create the character first, discover who they were, and realize there was already a place waiting for them in another story.

The original narrative started turning into a crossover world.

Then the crossover world became a universe.

And at the center of all of it was the city.

I started writing detailed character treatments and pulling pieces from my own experiences, along with little fragments inspired by people and things around me. Local AI image models let me experiment with character designs and, more importantly, keep those characters visually consistent. For the first time, I wasn't just imagining these people. I could actually see them.

That changed things.

I started building systems to track relationships, locations, histories, factions, stories and connections. One idea would suddenly explain something I'd written months earlier. Characters who had nothing to do with each other would develop strange little connective threads.

Dots started connecting everywhere.

Before I knew it, I had an Obsidian vault that felt one static shock away from coming to life.

There was still one problem.

I could write story treatments all day.

I knew the characters. I knew what happened. I knew what they would say. I could describe a scene in absurd detail. But when it came time to turn all of that into traditional prose, with narration and dialogue flowing naturally from one moment to the next, I struggled.

I knew exactly what the story needed to be.

I just couldn't always get it there on my own.

That's when I decided to see if AI could help bridge that gap.

I started very carefully with a single short story.

I connected the character treatments, world information and story notes relevant to it. Then I worked through the story piece by piece.

Not:

"Write me a story."

More like:

"Here's what's happening. This character says this. That character responds this way. This happens next because of what happened earlier. By the end of this section, X, Y and Z need to have happened, but this other thing cannot be revealed yet."

Then I'd read it, change things, redirect it, add details, remove things that didn't belong, and keep working.

It was meticulous. It was time-consuming.

For every line that ended up in the finished story, I probably wrote twenty lines explaining what that line needed to accomplish.

Because I already knew the story.

I already knew the world.

I finally had a tool that could help me translate what was happening inside my head into something another person could actually sit down and read.

And somewhere during that process, The Kolor of Krimson stopped being the right name.

The thing I had originally imagined wasn't there anymore.

What started as an idea about a homeless MMA fighter looking for answers in a futuristic dystopian city had mutated into something much stranger: a world where monsters walk the streets, ghosts interfere with electronics, supernatural occurrences are treated as another fact of life, and the city has accumulated so much technology that it barely knows what to do with it.

A place built from more than twelve years of abandoned ideas, resurrected characters, music, code, artwork, personal experiences, unfinished experiments and countless what ifs.

Nyxira: The Undying City was born.

And after twelve years of trying to figure out how to begin its story, I finally found the words:

"The storm didn't roll in. It detonated."