Joseph Shabason - One For The Money (2023) [Hi-Res]

Joseph Shabason on his new collaboration with Thom Gill:
"One For The Money, like most things in our lives, started out as a joke and then turned into something real. The reality of music these days is that you make records and your songs get put onto playlists with absolutely absurd names. Chill Music To Code To, Deep Office, Chill Study Music etc. We have been lucky enough to have some of our songs on those playlists, and were truly astonished to see that we were actually making money. Who the fuck knew! So we thought it would be hilarious to write a bunch of music with highly searchable titles in order to get onto more of those playlists. Initially we drank coffee and came up with the dumbest song titles we could think of: Ambient Music + Playlist (Viral)....Or we googled the names of the most streamed songs on the internet and tried to come up with some slight variation so that we could capitalize on people mistyping the actual song they were looking for.

But at the end of the day we weren't gonna make a joke record that sounded like a joke....so we just sat down with no real direction in mind other than to have fun and make a record that felt gentle, and started writing tunes together. All of our output so far has stemmed from both of us being free for a few days and just writing collaboratively so we approached this record the same way. One of us would start with a sound or progression or beat and we would just riff on it until the song took shape. Most of these songs are relatively improvisatory with the exception of To Boy With Luv which we decided to shape a bit more traditionally. I think that the fact that we knew that we really only had three days to make the album played into the sound of it. To my ears the songs feel free and loose rather than manicured and precious. We kept the instrumentation sparse and concise and focused more on mood rather than traditional songwriting. The end result feels like a musical snapshot of three days where we focused on jokes and making music. Fun!"