On Faith


by Brendan S

I worked on a CD called Control + M, or just CTRL + M like a made-up key command, and this prophetic CD was on the backburner for twenty years. I felt a smile from Trent Reznor when I released it, and a lot of people ended up liking my own favorite song off the CD.

I was making it to be intentional -- with songs like "Rightness" about pantheism, and other songs such as the Electric Ant, which didn't make the CD, because I only found that song later on .. I wanted to approach deep moral, and existential subjects about God and humanity, and I was about fifteen when I started working on it.

It turned out to be five songs, from my high school years surrounding the early millennium, and 911 years.

One song, or the song people seemed to enjoy the most was "Committed" -- and it has lyrics that reference a bad healthcare system, bats, and other references to what we are (now) experiencing with the Corona virus.

I even thought of the word "Contagion" a lot while I was writing the song. The word was just stuck in my head. Like a dark rhyme from hell.

Eventually, I kicked the shit out of the only computer that had Control + M on it, and I lost all of the songs for about 17 years.

I found the songs all separetly, on different CD's, and drives, in a desperate search one day to maintain my musicianal dignity, and I found all of the five I felt made the most sense ..

No Electric Ant, though.

So, I posted it as soon as I could -- with new layered vocals to make the lyrics clearer, and actually had to look into old notebooks, and re-transcribe my own lyrics for a while.

I put them into notepad, and sang it through in a single session out of all five songs, to keep it in the same vein of quality.

I guess I told probably twenty, maybe forty people about the CD while I was making it, and it was sad to never release it after I'd talked about it so much.

Over the years, and all my experiences, I never looked for the CD, because I thought it was truly gone.

I gave up searching for CTRL + M probably on a definite level when I was 25. It seemed like an impossibility to find.

I found the song "The Electric Ant" (my favorite dark track) -- and I found myself staring at the sun, on my knees in a field, thinking about my book Super-Terrestrials, where I claimed we would all be, in a state of completeness, when wea re fully enlightened, to end up walking on a stretch of endless beach, only searching for more.


I am a paid musician now, and I have over forty CD's on Spotify.

I found CTRL + M almost before I really started posting CD's. It kind of spurred me.

I won't forget how good it felt. It really reminded me that music is meant to stay alive -- and keep us alive -- and that I was never ever meant to give up on myself at any time in my life.


- BLS