Ferocious Designs, the music project of central New Jersey-based songwriter Brian Kelley, has released a 5-song EP, Open Your Eyes, following the title track's 11th-place (tie) finish in last month's global FediVision Song Contest that included a field of 72 entries. A music video for the track "Beyond Forever" has also been released.
The Open Your Eyes EP is available now for streaming and download at FerociousDesigns.com. However, Kelley has opted out of Spotify distribution at this time.
The other tracks on the EP include “Life’s in the Balance (Pensive Version),” a more acoustic and reflective take on Kelley’s 2023 FediVision entry, and “Why Is It So Hard?” — an update of a song Kelley wrote when he was a teenager in the late 1980s about “stupid high school stuff.”
“Beyond Forever” and the EP’s closing track, “Summer’s Not My Thing,” were both written and recorded over separate 24-hour periods within the past month. “I challenged myself by signing up for WXPN’s Song Challenge, so ‘Beyond Forever’ came out of a 24-hour writing and recording session I did in mid-May to prepare for the actual WXPN contest, which took place a couple of weeks later.”
“Summer’s Not My Thing,” was entirely written, performed and recorded between noon EDT on June 1 and noon EDT on June 2 for the WXPN Song Challenge. “The prompt was ‘summertime’ and my first reaction was that it is my least favorite time of year except for maybe baseball, concerts and storms,” said Kelley. “But I knew I wanted the music to have a summery, driving feel to it so eventually the two ideas came together and I think I produced a summer banger about hating summer.”
“But I managed to get in some spoken word and a few notes on my trumpet, which I haven’t played in decades, so it got a little weird,” added Kelley. The WXPN Song Challenge required participants to submit a video of the artist performing the song. The video submitted for “Summer’s Not My Thing” can be seen here.
The EP kicks off with “Open Your Eyes,” which received 24 of the 911 votes submitted from around the world during the week-long FediVision voting period May 19-26, which left it (and at least one other song) just a vote or two outside the top 10 finishers. FediVision is a Eurovision-inspired song contest for indie musicians who have social media accounts connected to the fediverse, a network of decentralized, federated social media platforms that can interact with one another. Most of these accounts are on the Mastodon platform, where Ferocious Designs has an online home.
Next up for Ferocious Designs is the often-teased, long-delayed power-pop EP Kelley has been working on since late 2023.
“The problem is that since I’m not even close to being a proficient guitarist, recording all these songs in a power-pop format is very time-consuming for me,” added Kelley. “In addition, just as that project was gaining momentum earlier this year, my father passed away and my household was hit with a second go-around with COVID — on the same day.”
“But I am definitely ready to get back into power-pop mode,” said Kelley, who still hopes to release it later this year.
Ferocious Designs is the DIY music project of central New Jersey-based songwriter Brian Kelley. Although he has spent most of the past 30-plus years as a songwriting hobbyist, Kelley is not a complete stranger to the New Jersey music scene. He is a longtime collaborator with singer-songwriter Christian Beach, spending time with him during the late 1980s and early 90s in a band that played the much-loved and long-gone Green Parrot Rock Club in Neptune, NJ, multiple times. Kelley has played keyboards, accordion and percussion in Beach's backing band since 2007, and has recorded with him as well. The project name is borrowed from the lyrics of “Cover My Eyes (Pain and Heaven)” by Marillion. The debut, five-song EP from Ferocious Designs, A Matter of Time, was released on July 16, 2021. That same day, the project’s debut single, “Lay It on the Line,” was named Makin Waves Song of the Week by longtime New Jersey music journalist Bob Makin. Looking for the Light, the debut album from Ferocious Designs, was released March 10, 2023.
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