This album is basically an amalgamation of music that I've made over the past year. It's in no way a holistic project that is supposed to have an overall structure but simply a mixture of a few different styles that I've played with. I'm calling it the "Yale Demo" because it represents where I was at with music when I got to campus and all of the rest of my music will grow from here. That said, I did put the tracks in order so that the first two tracks are the most musical, the middle will be the slowest and most emotionally intense section, and the album will finish with "Sailing Down the Speedway" which is an inherently abstract track, made more so by the fact that you can't distinguish many of my words without listening to the track a few times. The first song "Terminal" emerges from the tradition of rap that I started with which is based in a criticism of the contradictions and hypocrisy that I saw all around me in the suburbs, a space in society that is typically considered desirable but I want to show the ignored issues that are made worse as they are hidden. The track moves from broader images of suburban assumptions, to personal criticisms and finally to the political implications of those thoughts. The second song “We All” I made with my close friend Paul Thompson. The song is about the interplay between the abstract ideas that exist in our minds and how those connect with the what’s going on in shared real world experiences that everyone shares. “Dirge for a Mirror” is the spoken word track on the album. This came from the time I’ve spent with my poetry group at Yale, Teeth Slam Poets. The poem relates the experience of freedom and imagination of childhood being boxed in with the regularity of being a college student/young adult. “Stay at Homeless” takes the ideas of “Terminal” and relates them through one specific story about a stay at home mother. It’s one part of an upcoming project I’m working on about gender issues in our society. “Sailing Down the Speedway” is an abstract track where I played with seeing how fast I could rap, but it shows how that idea of playing with rap allows me to transfer ideas cathartically into music.