detuned guitars, mispronounced words, muddy mixes
a voice lost in digital noise as the audio levels turn red

there is a misconception that art requires perfection. when we hear a new album, one carefully produced and mixed in an expensive studio, it is often immaculate. not a note is out of place, not a voice out of key. even an album full of outtakes and abandoned songs gets meticulous mixing and mastering to make sure those songs won’t stick out when they land in a shuffling playlist. mistakes can only live on in blooper reels, a punchline to be laughed at once the real movie ends

maybe that’s why we live in a world that’s so intimidated by artistry. we too often are led to believe that the only worthwhile creative expressions are the ones that are so neatly wrapped up in intent, with any warts shaved off. digitally remove that starbucks cup from that scene! fix those awkward controls in your video game remaster! mask your limitations as a singer under auto tuning! there is a self-imposed pressure placed on the act of creation that makes the idea of putting a pencil to paper or picking up a guitar daunting. wouldn’t it just be easier to let a machine guide you around the potholes and get right to the perfection?

i have been writing music under the name duckspeak for two decades now. if you look that name up on a streaming service, you will likely only find a few studio produced albums with clean guitars, time corrected drums, and subtle adjustments to my voice. what you won’t find is 90% of my music. you will not find the music i made in my parent’s computer room as a kid, made with a cheap casio keyboard and a toy guitar that only had two perpetually detuned nylon strings. you won’t find my first albums, a series of college recordings filled with songs that teeter off time and melodies played in an entirely different key. you will barely see the evolution of my voice, the growth in my songwriting, me learning to play instruments in real time. but as much as i hide them away, i know that those ugly moments cannot be separated from my polished work. every mistake, every scrapped song, every experiment, is just as much an act of legitimate expression

bones & skin is not a collection of studio-produced songs that were rewritten and remixed across several rounds of notes. these are songs recorded on iphones and laptops between 2012 and 2022. some were written and recorded in a few hours, then exported just as fast and uploaded to soundcloud. some were hastily thrown together for cover compilations that friends in the nyc music scene used to make from time to time. some feature guitar parts that are painfully out of tune. i have long thought of so many of the songs included here as embarrassing bloopers that would only discredit me

now, in an age where artistic expression is being automated out by people who are so afraid to fail and learn and fail and learn, i feel compelled to proudly share these songs with the world. the first “side” is composed of original songs in various states of disrepair. (one of my personal favorites, chemical hug, is inarguably the worst production on it.) the second is all covers that found me deconstructing perfect songs to try and find the vulnerability underneath the studio sheen. one track is a shoegaze cover of steal my sunshine. idk

i do not expect you to listen to these songs over and over, or even like some of them at all. i am laying it all bare in hopes that it dispels a myth about the artistic process. this too is what it sounds like to try to make something. it’s playing some chords into an iphone. it’s missing a note on the piano and trying to make it sound like you did that on purpose on the fly. it’s confidently mispronouncing the word respite without giving it a second thought (oops)

i hope these songs grant anyone who needs it the confidence needed to fail and learn. do not forfeit your humanity in pursuit of perfection; every stumble is part of the journey