"It's Like Importing a Spark From the Past": Tom Callahan on Finishing an Album

I’ve spent the last 5 months of this year developing Song Ritual.

It’s the app I wish I’d had for most of the last decade. It’s essentially a studio session prompt generator which draws from your own inspiration, as opposed to going in the studio with a “let’s see what happens” approach.

It contains a vault where every idea, voice memo, and napkin scribble lives in one dedicated place. You can create or pre-save Creative Sparks for the days you don’t feel creative and at the centerpiece a timer and year calendar that tells you the truth about where your creative hours go.

Lately I’ve been interviewing the producers using it to get a glimpse about what actually changed in the studio for them.

In today’s edition we give Tom Callahan the spotlight and hear his experience with Song Ritual and premiere his latest work Subliminal Midgard.

We’ve all been sold a similar picture of what the “perfect” studio session looks like.

• A clear evening.

• Nothing on the calendar.

• Four hours, minimum (because anything less isn’t worth opening the session for).

You wait for that window and when it finally arrives you sit down and realize you have nothing to say, you feel blocked.

Then by the time the window closes you tell yourself the same thing you told yourself yesterday, last week and last month.

“I just need more time”

Like many of us busy with life, work, and responsibilities Tom doesn’t get more time in his current routine and his album Subliminal Midgard was tracking in at ten months to a year for completion but after Song Ritual, it came in at nine.

It was finished ahead of schedule.

Let’s find what made this possible from his own words…

So what changed for Tom after using Song Ritual?

Flow is what we’re all told to chase. That creativity is about finding that moment where you lose yourself in the work and let time disappear.

But nobody mentions the time that disappears when trying to chasing the perfect circumstances to make flow happen.

This is the blind spot Tom was able to identify with Song Ritual.

What made you realize you were losing time?

Using Song Ritual. I could see the time I was using where I couldn’t feel it. You get into a flow state where time outside of the song’s timing gets lost when you’re mastering especially. It becomes about frequency and amplitude full stop.

The problem is, time does matter if you want to finish things, especially in my case. My cognition and memory give me about two useful hours at a time before I have to take an hour break, and the next time, I can maybe go for an hour before I need an hour break if I’m doing seated work. Covid tore up my body like a five year old sociopath with a hammer. If I work beyond those constraints, I start making really strange errors.

I would use this app, with or without those limitations, however. It lets you see what makes your music tick and makes the right space for creative processes to obtain focus. There are a lot of checklist apps and apps with creative prompts, but there were none that I’ve seen that set the stage to let you be creative using your own personal inspirations like Song Ritual.

Once you can see the leak you can plug it, and his fix wasn’t discipline, it was a starting point.

What did you notice once you started using it?

I noticed that I was taking hours to master a single song where it felt like less than an hour, sometimes even beyond the point of cognitive degradation. It was taking more time to master than to perform the part! It led me to reverse engineer my dabbling process and build a default process. No sense in building from the ground up when starting with a certain configuration will work 90% of the time and cut your load down significantly.

Your timeline moved up. What caused that?

It was the mastering thing, first, being a bit shocked at the fact I had run out a long timer. Streamlining knocked time off and left more time free to create the last three songs, which left more time to search for the right cover art. It became a cascade effect. The changes I made to mixing should bring the time down even more.

More time mastering than performing, it was clear that in Tom’s creative process the part where you’re actually being a musician was the smaller slice.

His first days with the app were spent emptying his pockets (creatively).

• Napkins, scraps

• Phone notes

• Ideas trapped in books and spread across tables,

All of this went into the Inspiration Vault. Then he discovered why the vault is such a powerful tool.

I found something interesting about inspiration by using Song Ritual: If you’re feeling flat, an inspiration written down can bring you back to a memory of that moment, and lets you recall the feeling of that moment as if it were happening in the present. This may be basic to some people, but I hadn’t tried this before the app. It’s like importing a spark from the past to light the fire now.

And here are two more things he mentioned that are worth sharing with you all:

Anything that surprised you?

How much the rituals already there made sense, and how few I ended up adding in the end. I was also surprised at how smoothly the app worked for me. It was the first time I’ve beta tested where not once did I roll my eyes.

What would you say to someone who keeps starting but not finishing?

Put a one-track single out next week, on SoundCloud. Just do it, you’ll never learn to fly if you don’t step off the branch. It doesn’t have to be genre defining, it just has to reflect some facet of your life. Make it simple. Use your cell phone microphone if that’s your only option. Be silly if that’s your bliss.

Now it’s out there, you’re vulnerable. You just took the hardest step. Maybe you got trolled, maybe ignored, maybe it landed with a handful of people, maybe it’s very popular. Let all of that roll off like water off a duck’s back. Those things aren’t the point. The point is that you stepped off the edge and found you could fly. Build on that.

If you made it this far, stick along to learn more about Tom’s music.

What kind of music do you make?

Under the Ursus Volans moniker I make noise/ambient music. My biggest influences for this genre are Vangelis, Patrick O’Hearn, Lycia, soulwhirlingsomewhere, Justin Bell, Yul Brynner’s Ghost, Claude Debussy, Thollem McDonas and Lustmord.

Under the Bloodware Overdrive moniker, I make cyberpunk music, a little different than the usual genre definition. The influences should give an idea of the vibe: Prince, Ministry, Coil, UNKLE, Unchipped, Collector of Dust, Roughhausen, Android Lust, Period Bomb, the composers of the Cyberpunk 2077 soundtrack, and VNV Nation.

Both projects have significant inspiration in visual media, including video games. The illustrated edition of Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot, for example, or images from orbiting telescopes. The art installations and architecture where I live. The rhythm of my city and Night City. I think if you had to unify the principles of both monikers under one word, it would be “soundtrack.”

What are you working on now?

I’m about to release an album as Ursus Volans called Subliminal Midgard. In the process of physically making the CDs right now. While that is happening, I’ll be brainstorming for the Bloodware Overdrive album, which I’m calling Antaeus for now. The beats are already made, I’m getting ideas about what to build up from there.

What does finishing this project mean to you?

Finishing this project means that I can let it stand on its merits. No excuses, this is it. This is the best reflection of what I’m trying to communicate with my current skills and tools. It also means that my health doesn’t get to stop my expression yet: it can only slow me down. Still have a fire inside, not a pile of ashes, yet.

➔ https://www.subvert.fm/barren-symmetry/subliminal-midgard

➔ https://www.subvert.fm/barren-symmetry/live-midwinters-improvisations

➔ Read the full uncut interview in the Song Ritual blog here.
➔ Learn more about the Song Ritual app here.

P.S. Have an album or music you would like featured on the Sound + Creativity newsletter? Get in touch with and let me know how Song Ritual helped you in your creative process.