Halfway to Home EP (2026 Mixes)

Setting a new frame around some old songs.

[Where to listen]

In Retrospect:

It’s been over a decade since posting my first track online: a loop cover of “Another Routine Day Breaks” by Brokeback, uploaded to Soundcloud in 2015.

Over the following two years, five tracks were released with my friend Ian under B-Side 1-1, and in 2020, I published my first original, “Halfway to Home.” This song marked the outset of a renewed confidence in my journey as an independent artist, giving me the courage to share new work for years to come…

Between 2020 and 2023, I produced eight more singles. Shortly after “Better Days for Drifin'” dropped in 2023, I resolved to expand beyond my humble pod on Soundcloud and ship some songs to bigger streaming platforms, DSPs like Spotify, Apple Music, and kin, self-distributing through Landr and CD Baby. Of those songs, “Halfway to Home,” “Blossom,” “Equinox,” “Cut Off,” and “Better Days for Driftin'” made the cut—decidedly the cream of the crop. It felt exciting to potentially broaden their audience, like the next natural phase in my path as a musician.

The Catch:

Although I was ready to promote these tracks on more platforms, it came with a caveat: distributors required the audio to be mastered, and my tracks were maximally-mixed at best. At the time, I had only a hunch of what mastering meant as some vague term related to the Loudness war and Nirvana. Frankly, I didn’t care the tracks sounded quieter next to a bunch of compressed music, and I brushed off the practice as some industry-ridden ruse. Nevertheless, I was determined to distribute them, compelling me to learn more about it, even at an elementary level.

The more I looked into it, the more mastering seemed like a highly-technical effort offered at a relatively great expense, executed only by studio professionals with stellar equipment and qualifications in audio engineering. While I found plenty of articles that described the barest essentials and tidbits on how to go DIY, from what I gather, that’s still kinda the deal. But having been fresh out of college with empty pockets, it came down to either figuring it out for myself or finding a way to build my own frame.

The Scratch:

The initial answer appeared while in Ann Arbor, MI, on a family road trip, where after some online research, I dug up Masterchannel.ai. At first glance, the site looked like an accessible means for automatically adding the gloss needed to get my music on streaming, and to that end, it served its purpose. Of course, 2023 was a much more naïve time, both for me and for AI-assisted production tools. By 2026, AI had already become an all-time slur on the creative world, and unfortunately, that cast a bit of a stigmatic shadow over the mastering job on these songs.

Even so, as an autodidact who values the purity of process, I was reluctant to ever rely on AI for its grade of plastic mastering, never fully satisfied with the perfunctory polish that Masterchannel put over the tracks, even if it had worked effectively, and thankfully, as a stopgap for getting them to stores. My discontent with “the frame” AI gave me only grew after investing in iZotope’s Ozone Suite and learning how to do my own masters in a DAW.

2024’s “Fading (Away)” was the first official single where my hands got dirty at every stage of production, from recording and arranging to mixing and mastering. After it was finished, I remember looking back on the previous five singles on streaming and feeling a tinge of “if only I knew then what I know now.”

Recently, it dawned on me that I had finally obtained the means to scratch that itch and could take a crack at some deeper masters. Fortunately, as an unsigned, independent writer, composer, and producer, I find myself in a situation that affords full control over my own recordings. So, over one dedicated week, I set to work on all my mixes from 2020-2023 to release in one cohesive EP-length retrospect named for the 5-minute 2020 anthem that started it all.

Same songs; new frame.

The process is like putting a new frame over an old art piece. In audio, mastering often serves as the icing on the cake: it wraps up the final mix in an extra texture of volume, vibrancy, and clarity. In this case, it helps bring the tracks “up-to-snuff”—not quite a re-do or re-mix even, more like a “re-balancing”—so at this particular level of production, they are on par with the whole discography. It might help to look at it by visual analogy as a deepening of the color tone, the boldening of contours, or a way of highlighting inherent contrast. At the bottom of it, because mastering can be such a thin film (more about the treatment of audio than anything truly ‘musical’), average listeners may miss the difference in the sound, especially with normalization settings enabled, which is what makes this whole project mostly an instrinsic reward.

For me, hearing these tracks played back in a newly-buffed quality, after they’d been steeped in time, is a refreshing, near-therapeutic experience. Not only was it satisfying to finally smooth out some of the rougher edges on a technical level, but there were also moments of catharsis in revisiting older workflows as space opened up to facilitate dialogue with my creative past and reflect on artistic growth. For instance, throughout the process, Present Self often conversed with Younger Self in an attempt to conserve the mindset, intentions, and spirit of the originals.

It’s interesting how these “conversations” didn’t play out in echoes of internal monologue. On the contrary, much of my past self spoke through emotion—feelings that were frozen in the audio, yet all the while resounding through the waveform over a continuum of sentimental timespace. It was a cool sensation that gave me due patience during the course of the work without any hard internal conflicts. At one point, I did get pissed off at younger me on “Cut Off” because he somehow managed to permanently delete all the .wav recordings (WTF!), so I wound up needing to re-dub my vocals on the mixdown before doing the master. Then the beef was off, and funnily enough, “Cut Off” became my crown ‘cut’ off this EP.

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1) Halfway to Home – 03/05/20

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2) Blossom – 03/29/20

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3) Almost Perfect – 04/12/20*

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4) Subspace – 04/18/20*

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5) Equinox – 08/23/20

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6) Myth – 10/09/21*

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7) Cut Off – 02/03/22 //

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8) Better Days for Driftin’ – 08/02/23 //

* Until now, these tracks in particular have lived exclusively on Soundcloud and Bandcamp. They were mastered for the first time to be included on the EP.

// Both “Cut Off” and “Better Days for Driftin'” appear as their own singles on streaming services. This is meant to show they exist within the conceptual sphere of the EP while also remaining outside of it as unique releases.

**For archival, nostalgiac, and ethical reasons, I thought it best to keep the original mixes available where they were first uploaded on Soundcloud (same for the cover arts). Other platforms, including DSPs, Bandcamp, or Subvert.fm, promote the remastered versions, as I feel they are a better representation of the work**

The Frame is a Good Look.

These songs hold special meaning to me as a reflection of my journey and growth as an independent musician over the past several years. Remastering them is a way of honoring them, something I wish I could have done when they were first released and now (in part because of these tracks), I feel sufficient in accomplishing.

For recent listeners, I hope you dig up a treasure or two from this collection of earlier works, and for longtime fans, a lifelong thank you for supporting me and listening all these years 🙏.

On balance, I hope everyone can find something to enjoy in the revisitation of these tracks and their framing within the EP.

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Listen now to Halfway to Home EP (2026 Mixes)
wherever you get your streaming.