In Poetic Revolution’s “Capital and Karma,” lyrics and music meet in a poetry of sound

The music of Poetic Revolution begins in his poetry, but that is only a start. He fuses poet, singer, composer and software engineer.

The single “Capital and Karma,” released this year with its album Induced Illusion, is a perfect illustration. The song, a beautiful, mellow acoustic pop/soft rock meditation on diverging lives, is also on the album in a club mix and a chill mix.

“It starts from a sort of poem about my brother from another mother, my best friend growing up. I was really good friends with his sister, too. Her brother joined the Navy right out of high school and ended up becoming a Navy SEAL.”

His and his friend’s lives separated after high school.

The lyrics begin
To my sister
Where’s your brother now?
I’ve been told
That he has been shot down.
He’s been hurt.
She said I can’t deny.
To my surprise though
He’s still alive

“The reason why there’s several mixes of it is I don’t feel like I have it sounding exactly like I want it to sound.”

He is promoting the pop rock version because it is the “most universal sound.”

“Given that I have an odd, no-genre sound going, I wanted to introduce with the most universal sound and let people discover what they want along the way.”

Which is the way a lot of musical artists and poets explain their work.

In the club mix it means a high-energy electronic sound with a female voice. The chill mix is more piano with a hip-hop drumbeat.

“I’m a software engineer, so I believe in an iterative process where I try different things with different vocal combinations and modulations and end up seeing what I like and then layering from there.”

His genre, he says, is “music.”

He was born in Chicago, where his musical experience began. His career had taken him to various places, Colorado, Indiana, Florida, now Tennessee. When he talks about his travels over the previous couple of decades, he talks about them in terms of the different musical influences he absorbed.

He was in a band years ago and signed up to help with lyrics (“I can write to just about anything”). Then he began singing for them but found being in a band limiting.

“With large groups of artists, you can’t really produce that many genres, but with modern tools, you absolutely can.”

In Chicago, he loved Andy’s Jazz Club. In Colorado, it was a “lo-fi, hip-hop sound, soft vocals and a good beat.” In Orlando, the club sound was dominant. From Tennessee, bluegrass. The music he produces now is a product of him, time and many places.

“The world influences you over time,” he said. “When you ask me where have I been, I don’t think I would have been this 20 years ago, right? So, this is kind of a distillation of time.”

His artist name comes from his process, which began with the song “Poetic Revolution.” It became the first and last track on the album, an intro and an outro.

“I started mainly by writing lyrics, by writing poetry. It was a reflection on self,” he said. “Poetry helped me deal with a lot of things in life by just writing things out. Specifically the intro song was one of the first lyrical compositions that I really worked on, singing and figuring out vocal and breath patterns, too.”

He believes that an album should be, “beginning to end an artistic experience.” For instance, the club mix of “Capital and Karma” and the pop mix are the second and third tracks, respectively. The club version is radically different.

“That’s why I put them right next to each other. I like throwing them back to back, to give that stark contrast, to where you could barely tell they’re even the same songs, even though lyrically identical. I believe in an iterative process, playing with modulation.”

It evolved, he said: “It was like, ‘Let’s see how this sounds with a solid beat,’ and I ended up with more of a house-dubstep style mix. And I just like it.”

In “Arrogant Animal,” track 4, and “Obsolete,” next, he was after a raw vocal sound, but “Obsolete” adds a jazz vibe, while “Arrogant Animal” gets a funk mix in track 8. “Just in Time” and “Little Blonde Fiddle Player” are bluegrass.

“It’s a collection of different sounds from 20 years of writing and then figuring out how to use a collection of digital tools to really produce the different genres that I hear in my head when I write something.”

He has enough material for another album, and he has released two other singles since Induced Illusion, “just for fun”: “Perfect Ordered Pairs” (“like, deep house”) and “What Diddy Did” (“kind of a modern doo-wop”).

He would like to create for himself a career in music, but another motivation is his children. He has two, a 3-year-old and an 18-month-old. He wants to leave his music for them.

“I want them to know the music that was in my head.”

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