After 2 years, my third album is finished. The tone of the tracks was decided in early 2025, while an unelected billionaire headed DOGE as it dismantled our soft power around the world under the guise of efficiency. As the year went on, several high-profile shootings ignited the already heated discourse between increasingly divided political lines: right-wing activist Charlie Kirk was assassinated, and multiple US citizens were shot and killed by their own country's immigration enforcement agency. Many of the world's elite were implicated in what was released of the Epstein files, and the only change in the US has been that Ghislaine Maxwell has been moved to a lower-security prison. All this happened on a backdrop of the so-called “AI Revolution” that started in the late 2010s, where tech oligarchs and loan-acquiring experts leveraged the largest theft of intellectual property of all time to train and sell subscriptions to hallucinating AI token prediction models like GPT, Gemini, and Claude.
The album was nearly finished by the time I woke up in 2026 to find out that we were at war with Iran. Thanks to Youtuber Predictive History's 2024 video, I was not surprised by this but very alarmed due to the topics covered in the video linked above.
The running theme of the past few years seems to be that money talks more than people do. And most of the money is in the hands of the corporate elite: people who, by definition, do not have the interests of common people at heart. So the people need to speak up, and the elite minority need their influence addressed by real change in the laws of our country to keep this a democracy, not an oligarchy.
So the album is angry. Energetic. Accusatory. But there's hope in there too. Because I believe in people. I know we care about each other, and that we can work together to improve this world.
We can demand financial transparency about who funds our politicians and elected officials. We can demand that the corrupt elite are brought to justice. And we can be civil with each other and have real discussions about what's important to each of us. Not what will make billionaires another few dollars.
The album is called 33 because I've been alive for 33 years and I've never seen anything as fucked up as where we are right now.