Help the River Flow: Fund Flying Needle's Next Album

Hey, Tim here from Flying Needle.

It's been about six weeks since the release of Bronze Age . That little album represented a difficult reflection on a hard period of my life and my hopeful vision for a future beyond our daily diet of doom and fear. I wasn't just trying to proselytize and lecture everyone about how to live right and avoid running headlong into despair — I was trying to convince myself. I'm still not convinced, so I'm going to keep making music until it all makes sense.

I don't need to tell anyone that it's been a difficult few weeks in America — a difficult many years in fact. But I've remained pathetically, stupidly hopeful. I don't know how to be any other way.

Indeed, there's no other explanation for why someone like me would stay up until 3:00 am most nights writing and demoing songs about our failing state and the rather lonely place many of us occupy within it.

The result of these sleepless nights is my second album: River Rouge.

River Rouge is a concept album about a river that flows from Zug Island , Detroit — where I was born — out into the colonized and exploited places of the world, and then back to Detroit.

These songs represent my belief that our abandonment of the American working class and the waning of democracy in the United States is directly related to the suffering we have caused in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine. The money spent by the American government to brutalize and oppress people abroad is money taken away from our education system, our social safety net, and our healthcare system. And the military industry's tools (e.g. booby trapped cell phones) will eventually be used against our own citizens.

This is all to say that it's all one long river and that river runs two ways.

I have finished demoing about 25 songs and now I am getting ready to dive headlong back into the home studio and get these songs down for real.

For years and years I mostly made music with just a dumb keyboard, a $50 acoustic guitar, a practice amp, and my laptop microphone in my bedroom. While I have always been inspired by scrappy artists like Daniel Johnston who produced their work with no resources and never used a lack of gear as an excuse not to make art, the reality is that I am trying to make some fairly grandiose music with rather limited resources — only a couple mics, no room treatment, no money for studio time or mixing or mastering, and not a lot of time outside of my job. Making Bronze Age was very hard because it's a very intensely produced album and I had very limited materials to work with in the recording phase, which made the post-production phase exceedingly long.

Music can be quite expensive to make depending on what you need. And what's worse is that 99.9% of us will never get any revenue back for what we do now that music has been fully and completely demonetized and culturally devalued. Music is no longer a commercial venture, but simply a gift we try to give the world, a vain gift because it involves the assumption that someone else needs this, that it isn't just something we do to indulge our egos. (My work is especially presumptive because I assume you all want to hear me rant very righteously about politics!)

Gosh this is never easy is it? I need more money. I need money for mics, room treatment, a new interface, and mastering. I need about $5k. I need to get better sounds in the box and be able to process those sounds without my computer getting hot and crashing.

I'm going to make this album no matter what. That's a guarantee. I would make this album if I had to do it with a clip-on mic, phone voice memos, and a cheese grater. And I'm going to be recording it in every snatch of time I can steal in between my low-paying job and all of my other life responsibilities. I'm going to be recording it and mixing it between 10 pm and 3 am, getting 4 hours of sleep, and then going to work with my ears ringing and my brain all melted. And I'd like to make the best sounding album I possibly can, and it'll be a lot easier to do that with just a little more gear.

So one way you can look at this fundraiser is as a plea to help me make this album while retaining just a little bit more of my general sanity.

It goes without saying that if you contribute anything to this, you will get a free copy of my surprise upcoming EP (coming in December!) and a free copy of River Rouge (late 2025). Larger donations will get swag if I can finally afford to make a run of t-shirts/hats.

I'll close by saying that I've loved every bit of attentive listening and all the kind words people have sent my way about the music. I'm going to keep rockin' and rollin' over here and I appreciate any little bit of help you can give me.

Love,

Tim