Earnest Tub by Kilometre Club

On September 6, 1984, Country Music Hall of Fame singer Ernest Tubb died.

On that same day, I was born.

On September 6, 2024, I, Daniel Field, also known under the moniker Kilometre Club, will release a 103-song album.

It’s called Earnest Tub.

Must be a coincidence.

**

This album that I am sharing with you needs a lot of context. Or none at all. Choose what you’d like. If you feel like it needs an explanation, read on.

I used to make folk music. I still do, but I also used to, too.

At some point I got into synths. Around four years ago, I thought it would be fun to see through a project that had been percolating in my head for years, creating a series of songs timed and themed to the Toronto subway system. In August 2020, I uploaded a ten-track album of songs I made in Logic using a $90 midi keyboard and stock plugins. For the first month, I don’t think anyone other than me listened to it.

For a lark, I sent the album to BlogTO, a large Toronto-based enterprise, who wrote a clickbait-worthy article about the album, garnering more listens than most of my folk music ever received (I think 50 different listeners total, which at the time was monumental).

It motivated me to make more music. Lots of it was bad. I would call it ‘experimental electronic,’ but mostly that was because I didn’t know what I was doing, and broad genre like that seemed to work.

Before releasing it, I didn’t listen to much electronic music outside of some favourites that bled into the indie music scene. I didn’t know the difference between house and techno (I think I finally get it now…).

Fast forward a few years and a lot of ambient music later, I’ve worked with multiple record labels, started one of my own, and amassed tens of millions of plays across streaming services. I have sort of lost count of how many albums I’ve released because many have appeared in different forms. But it’s a lot. More than 500 songs by my count. Probably too much music overall, but I stand by the quality of the vast majority of them.

My creative process often revolves around a concept. I can’t just sit and begin to compose and record just on a whim;

It has to be part of something.
It has to be for something.
It has to be about something.

Luckily, most of the time, I’m full of ideas. Many of my songs or albums are based around a broad or specific concept, while others are framed by musical, technical, or time limitations.

Sadly, one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned when making ambient music is that the longer one spends on a track has absolutely nothing to do with its success, with some of my most streamed songs ones on which I dwelt the shortest amount of time.

**

Over the first half of 2024, I released a triple album called An Alphabet of Distance, which featured 26 different collaborations, each tied to a letter of the alphabet. As I wrapped up recording, mixing, and sequencing it in late 2023, I started to wonder what I should do next.

As always, I often have multiple projects on the go. Some of them tend to be short EPs, remixes, or compilation appearances. But I always intersperse these with bigger projects.

I started thinking big. Not necessarily ambitiously big - I feel like Alphabet was appropriately ambitious - I wanted it to be big in an obnoxious way.

Early in 2024, I opened a session in my DAW and recorded a quick melody on a track that lasted about a minute. Rather than going back and adding layers, I set up a new synth preset and immediately after, recorded an entirely new melody in a different key.

That first session had 7 different songs, each roughly one minute long. I then went back and added layers, details, and refinements to each. Soon, an idea was born: I was going to make a lot of songs.

**

There are 103 songs on this album. Why? Because it’s an ugly number, and that made it ideal.

You can tell someone you’re releasing a 100 song album, and they’ll be very impressed. Even 101 sounds pretty cool. Tell somebody you’re releasing a 103 song album, and they will pause, think about it, and then ask about that exact number.

They will probably suggest that I could have cut three of them. I’m pretty sure I should have cut about 40 of them, but that’s not the point.

103 is a very unaesthetic number. It’s the second prime number above 100. It’s not overly memorable. There aren’t any movies about that many Dalmatians [apparently in 2027 there will be?].

**

So 103 songs, averaging around 80 seconds in length. The shortest song is around 40 seconds, the longest is about two minutes.

Most of them have consistent tones and timbres across the entirety of the song. Many are tempo synced, though some are not. They run the broad gamut within the world of ambient, from compositional to drone to piano to field recordings to synthwave to experimental. Four tracks sample a rather musical dishwasher. I’ve shuffled the track order so many times that at this point I’m not exactly sure which ones.

A few of the recordings are abridged snippets from two live performances I did in early 2024, one live on CFRU in Guelph, the other in Toronto at a Dream Concert performance.

I tried really hard to ensure that they didn’t all sound the same. But in doing so I’m pretty sure I repeated several motifs, progressions, and synth presets. There’s only so much variety when you hit three digits’ worth of material.

**

I have had a lot of fun in the past with song names. Sometimes they are the best part about making instrumental music. I’ve done the deep and serious, the vaguely spiritual, the introspective, and I have named a lot of my songs with absolutely ridiculous names.

For one album in 2021, I took song lyrics from popular songs and used them to title tracks (Dronathan Taylor Thomas). On 2022’s Minus Time, I made up 12 song names as I was uploading tracks, and for no reason, about half of them are about Dream Gopherl. One label made me change the titles of my songs because they all rhymed with each other (hint: the rejected titles were ice cream, hot steam, and sports team).

I’m no stranger to ridiculous song titles. And my previous track names are related to the song titles on Earnest Tub.

One of the song titles on Dronathan Taylor Thomas was ‘If You Like Pina Coladas and Getting Caught In The Rain’. You probably recognize that line from a late 1970s hit by Rupert Holmes called ‘Escape (The Pina Colada Song)’, but whose title is often forgotten. For about 2 years after the song’s release, I’m pretty sure I disappointed a lot of Amazon Alexa owners who would request that song with my song’s title, and rather than escapist pop, get a synthy drone song. It was a delightful accident to the tune of about 200,000 total streams. It was a happy accident that helped me realize how absurd the streaming systems can be.

**

The album Earnest Tub is named after country star Ernest Tubb. It also has absolutely nothing to do with him.

So what do the track titles on Earnest Tub mean? Everything. Nothing. Interpret them however you will. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

**

As my album started coming into fruition, I knew that it needed a bombastic, excessive, and overwhelming album cover. I contacted a Toronto-based artist who specializes in dry humour and memes named Arcane Bullshit ( https://arcanebullshit.com ) to design the cover, as I felt he would have the eye and style that would fit perfectly, and I’m very appreciative of his keen eye for detail and abundance. There are an impressive amount of tubs on the cover of Earnest Tub. I would say that most, if not all of them, are Earnest.

**

Here’s the thing. I may be talking like this whole thing is a bit of a joke, but I actually think it’s a pretty great album. The short and simple tracks are like vignettes, and they don’t require much from listeners. I spent a lot of time sequencing the album to flow nicely (though I’ll admit I front-loaded some of the better songs, and the weirder ones are definitely in the back third).

At a run time of 160 minutes, this album is not much longer than your average jam band excretion. Nothing overstays its welcome.

At the same time, I want to be very transparent that this is an album also designed for algorithms on streaming services.

These are short and inoffensive songs that fit the mold of many playlists and stations and I don’t think it’s worth pretending that they’re something else.

I am proud of them as art, and also proud of them as a commodity.

I am sure I will get some flak from others, but this is music as a product; as ‘content’, as some might say.

Does it cheapen its effect? I think that if it finds ears of listeners on a meditation or reading playlist, it has done its job as music.

Or is it that I need to pretend that I spent months making fine art for it to be legitimate?

**

Earnest Tub is an album in service of the state of music in 2024.

It is also a parody of the music that artists are expected to create in 2024.

It is an album I am very excited about, while being fully conscious of its function and purpose.

It will hopefully allow me to make more and weirder music, release other artists through my label, and let me have a bit of financial freedom in my life.

I dreamed of being a famous musician when I was young, and while I have played music my whole life, the past few years have been the first since high school where I’ve found audiences, built community, and found so much meaning in music creation and exploration.

I want that to continue. I want to find audiences, no matter how small, who want to hear what I create.

I want the time and opportunity to champion all the amazing music from Toronto and beyond.

If this album can help me do that, then it’s the greatest album I’ve ever created.

And if it doesn’t, I can (and will) say that at least I made a 103 song album.

pure imagination.

an ambient label by kilometre club

imaginarynorth.ca
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