So... is this, like, a Steampunk thing?

First off, I didn't do a music video this week, I've been on the road for a bit of a family issue and haven't recorded any new songs. While the final recordings will likely differ a lot from the basic acoustic renditions I've been posting here, I still like to give you an idea what they sound like.

Anyway, one of the questions that I expect will come up, at least from a marketing angle, is whether or not this album will fit into the "Steampunk Music" genre. The flippant answer is "sure, if you want it to." The less flippant answer is, "I think this will fall into the realm of what many Steampunks find interesting in both terms of style and subject matter, though my specific goal isn't necessarily to produce a Steampunk album."

The argument over what does or does not constitute Steampunk Music is, of course, contentious and ongoing on the battlefields of the internet. It's also, to my mind at least, largely a kind of stupid one. My understanding of Steampunk and retro-futurism is that it's meant to encompass either a) an alternate historical period where technological and social development took a very different and more rapid course or b) a view of the modern or futuristic period filtered through the lens of Victorian-era fashion and technology. Either way, if this alternate timeline is to encompass the whole world, there should be as much variety in musical genres as there are in the allegedly real world that we inhabit.

With that in mind, most of the songs for the Dead Lovers Project are from the 1800s, in the sense that they were either written then, were first collected then, or were known to be popular then. This is not through random chance, the period that brought us the Industrial Revolution also brought an increased scholarly interest in folk and popular traditions in music. Francis Child, Cecil Sharp, Sabine Baring-Gould and their cohorts were active from the mid 1800s to the early 1900s, making folk song collecting a pastime closely associated with Victorian scholars, many of whom also fit the mold of amateur gentleman/scientist/scholars beloved of Steampunk stories.

The subject matter is deliberately dark, after all, I'm singing about death, which was also a bit of a Victorian obsession, as it is in some of our own subcultures, though it being me I have a sense of humor about it. I'm also planning to use a mix of traditional and modern instrumentation to accompany many of the ballads, though I'm not sure how stylistically weird I'm going to let myself get (drum loops and digital instrument, for example, are really not my style, but part of me says that I should experiment with them on at least a couple songs for just that reason).

So... is it Steampunk? It is if you want it to be.

(and, if you're booking paid gigs at a Steampunk event, then yes, it's ABSOLUTELY Steampunk music!)