My name is Charlie Cloud. I haven’t always loved music, but in the past few years playing songs and studying music has become a true passion of mine. It was a few summers ago when I first picked up the bass guitar, which went on to inspire me to learn regular guitar and then to an honors project on learning the piano and finally to performing songs at LREI coffeehouses. Discovering all that music has to offer has been a step by step experience, and my senior project is the next step on that journey. With all the instruments I’ve played and all the songs I’ve learned, the one part of music I have yet to experience is creating something of my own. I’ve never done any kind of songwriting before, which totally excites me. I love to jump into new things headfirst and this project will definitely not be an exception to that.

My plan for my project is to spend as much time as I can in my family’s house in Connecticut to isolate myself from the distractions of the city to focus solely on music. Our house in Connecticut has everything you could need for a recording studio including guitars, amps, microphones, a piano, and a full drum set. I plan to turn the space into a home recording studio and to limit my technology use to see what kinds of sounds and songs I can create with a complete focus on music. While I will keep my computer with me through the project for recording and accessing online resources, I will limit phone use to only certain hours of the day and use it strictly for the purposes of communication. I plan to take full advantage of a massive vinyl record collection left in the basement of the house after my grandpa’s passing. I am not cutting myself off entirely from online music and streaming, but I hope to use a lot of these records for inspiration. I plan to spend most of the week in Connecticut, while 2-3 days I will commute back to the city to attend the weekly school check-ins and to participate in a clothing making senior seminar. For my service plans, I hope to volunteer at the Little Guild, a local dog rescue adoption center just a few minutes up the road from our house in Connecticut. My family and I have worked closely with the institution and we adopted our dog Rocky from there back in 2021.

Going into my project I understand that my experience in making music is very limited, so it is difficult to say how many or how few quality demos I will end up creating in my time. As a contingency in case it turns out songwriting is much harder than anticipated and I end up with nothing I feel to be worth sharing, I plan on also heavily documenting my experience in the creative process as well. This will include not only typical senior project check-ins, but also video footage I plan to record of the process. When we finally reach June and it’s time to share our project I will have a week by week explanation of what it was like spending so much time in a solely creative environment along with a short documentary of my experience and of course a few demos of whatever I end up creating. I am very excited to start work on my project and cannot wait to see what I’m able to create.