Thank you everybody for the amazing feedback on the Joe Rogan album. This record was a labor of love that began over 2 years ago, and that it finally exists, and you’re reacting to it the way you are, is a thing of great joy and wonder.
I’ve been wanting to make it for 2 years, ever since I made the song, 'I Don’t Wanna Hear That', and dropped it on YouTube, where its racked up a quarter of a million streams… since then, people have been asking me EVERY DAY to get that song on Spotify, and I always said that I fully intended to, but I wasn’t going to do it until we got permission from Joe Rogan himself, and that I wanted to make a full album. I knew how that album felt, what the shape of it was, what the purpose of it was, and what it sounded like.
"You have to be the hero of your own movie."
It was going to be hard, powerful, anthemic, joyful, ultra melodic, driven by nuclear level beats that could only have been made in the 2020s, and drenched in guitars so glorious and classic they could have come from the 70s. It was to tell the story of a man who, as a boy, turned himself into someone he would have been afraid of... to show you how you too could make yourself into a monster, then learn how to control it. Who then turned himself into something else, to save himself from oblivion. The story of a man who doesn’t just talk, but embodies that which he talks about. How that man made himself, and how he stays on the path. So you can too.
There’s a quote, often attributed to Plato:
"He who is only an athlete is too crude, too vulgar, too much a savage. He who is a scholar only is too soft, too effeminate. The ideal citizen is the scholar athlete, the man of thought and the man of action.”
This is something I think of often, as I construct the Meaningwave Universe. And with this album, I wanted to show, as practically as possible, how that could be done.
Well, in the Spring of 2020, as Tom Hanks and his filthy disease wreaked havoc across the lands, and I was forced to relocate my studio from DownTown Los Angeles to our home in West Hollywood, we got that permission.
When I got the call, I was up on the roof of our penthouse apartment in West Hollywood, swinging kettlebells, and there wasn’t a cloud or a plane-smear in the sky.
My wife and son and I jumped up and down with joy.
It was perfect timing. I knew we were moving to Texas, and I knew this would be the last album we recorded in LA. Blessed Los Angeles, the place Meaningwave was born. One last sun-drenched California opus, based around the words of one of its most pivotal residents, who was - typically serendipitously - also about to embark on the same journey as my family and I. I’d been preparing for the record for years - stashing beats, sounds, melodies, concepts…. and now that we had permission, I executed it in a month, in the makeshift home studio I’d built after Tom Hanks and his filthy disease forced our evacuation of my beloved Don Studios in DTLA… As my family buzzed around me. As I pivoted from DJing in Hollywood nightclubs to DJing inside, online, twice a day for the brave citizens of the MAZ (Meaningwave Autonomous Zone). As our neighborhood, the world famous Melrose in West Hollyowood, was first turned into a ghost-town, then torched and looted and smashed and boarded up. As the life we’d made for ourselves in Los Angeles, built from nothing in five densely packed years - from sleeping on a couch, to sharing a room, to our first one-bedroom flat, to this beautiful west Hollywood apartment - came to a close.
Of course, I finished the album on my last day in Los Angeles. Then I packed my studio into some crates, loaded it into a van, and drove it to Texas.
Now I’m here, and the album, exists. And it sounds just like I dreamed it would, over two years ago, and people are finding it just as useful as I dreamed they would, over two years ago.
It's a beautiful day to be alive, here at the peak of recorded human civilization. We give thanks to the ancestors, who bequeathed us this miracle of a society.
We shall not squander this hitherto unimaginable opportunity.
AKIRA THE DON
DON STUDIOS DRIPPING SPRINGS
AUGUST 2020