An eight-year experiment
Kanye West's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, the whole album, stripped down to one man and one acoustic guitar. The chords were there the whole time. The hard part is hearing them.
The project, in motion
The premise
Most great pop songs hide a simple chord progression under a wall of production. If you can find the chords, you can find the song. For eight years I've been finding the songs, one track at a time, until the whole album was done.
I recorded the full record acoustic and put it on YouTube. The notes on each piece live in the YouTube description: half music theory, half journal entry. If you play, you can play along.
Live around Chicago
Eight years didn't happen at a desk. A huge part of the work was getting out and playing these songs live, all over Chicago: back bars, breweries, open mics. Performing them is how you find what actually works, so I road-tested the arrangements in real rooms as much as I refined them at home.
One more, off the album
An acoustic mashup of Radiohead's "Creep" and Kanye's "Ghost Town", performed live at Pollyanna Brewery in Roselle, with me, Allan, and Ryan on cello.
And here's an earlier rendition, before Ryan and his cello joined.