METACOGNATE - BEHIND THE ALBUM

Allie Malecki got to sit down with Nate from the Chicago progressive metal band Metacognate to discuss their newest album!

Allie- What is your favorite track on the album?

Nate- My favorite track on the album is Awaiting Dawn, and it’s the most important to the overall meaning and aesthetic of my personal interpretation of the album. The song also just sounds really nice without knowing the words, which is something I try to achieve with every song I write. I like it so much, actually, that I was considering making it the title track through a subtitle. So it would have been “Awaiting Dawn (In The Wake Of Insomnia)”. But that would have just been messy. I also just wanted each listener to be able to decide which song was the most important to them, and I didn’t want to make that choice for anybody. That being said, I of course love every song on the album. The ones that I find myself reacting to most viscerally other than Awaiting Dawn are Waver, Structure, and On Top Of It.

Allie- How did you come up with the album title?

Nate- Honestly, when I first came up with the title “In The Wake Of Insomnia”, I just thought it was a clever play on words. The phrase itself was initially an extrapolation on the title of King Crimson’s “In The Wake Of Poseidon”, but other than the wordplay related to the phrasing itself, I intended no relation between the two albums. As I sat with the title, though, it evolved to match what I wanted for the album really well, and by that point I’d forgotten about the King Crimson reference. I struggled with insomnia for my entire childhood, which caused me a lot of nights spent lying awake, alone with my thoughts. The resulting habit for constant actual metacognitive self-reflection became the main creative force behind a lot of the music of the album. The album also could only be written after a significant shift in my life which, among many things, involved me learning to sleep normally. So the album was actually written in the wake of insomnia.

Allie- What was your favorite part of making this album?

Nate-My favorite part of making this album was definitely writing the songs. I loved every part of the process, from working with my older sibling on the CD case design to actually playing the album live with the band, but none of that would have happened if I didn’t just love writing songs in general. The first song I wrote for the album was Kudgel, which I wrote in 2019, and that was the first song I ever wrote all of the parts and sections for myself. It kind of opened the songwriting floodgates for me. By the time I decided I wanted to professionally record an album, I had well over 30 songs at varying levels of completeness on my computer, and I started by choosing my favorite ideas that I thought I could develop into something cohesive. I love writing songs. Even during the process of creating In The Wake Of Insomnia, I was still writing new, unrelated songs, some of which will definitely end up on a future project.

I do also want to point out how fun it was to work with Vince (Lohnes), Gabe (Kuchan), Richard (Heller), and Eliza (Lampert). They’re all incredible musicians, of course, but I wouldn’t have chosen them if they weren’t also incredible people. The positivity, energy, and musicality that they all brought to the project were a big part of shaping the album into what it ultimately became. And the bonds that we all formed during the process are invaluable, both to each of us personally and to the sound of the finished product. I always think music sounds better on recording and looks better on stage when you can tell that each member of the band truly cares about all of the others, and with this group, I never had any doubt that that was the case. I cannot overstate how proud I am of everybody, and how hard they worked for this project. I made a point of arranging and directing the mixing for each song in such a way that each person could always be heard clearly and authentically with their own musical voice, and the result would have been very different if I had entrusted anyone but them with that responsibility.

Allie- Did you learn anything while creating your first album?

Nate- I learned a ton while creating this album, but it wasn’t actually my first. The first album I worked on was actually called 24 Hours, which is easiest to find under Gabe (Kuchan)’s name. That was our experiment of booking a rehearsal space and writing and recording an album in 24 hours with just the three of us. The third musician on that project was Ben Fremin, who also produced it. But In The Wake Of Insomnia is the first album on which I personally wrote every instrument’s parts for the entire album (other than where soloists improvised), and my first experience recording a full album of my original music in a professional recording studio (Rax Trax Recording). So yes, I learned a ton about the process of teaching a band my music, promoting my work at live shows, recording a full album professionally in a studio, really every aspect of it. Not to mention all that I learned about myself as a person from the entire process, including the initial creation of the songs. I really have to shout out our producer, Noam Wallenberg, for being so willing and able to mentor me during the tracking/mixing/mastering processes, even as I was giving him direction and feedback. Through the whole process, both Noam and our other engineer, Sean McKenzie, were committed to staying true to my vision, and I cannot thank them enough for lending their expertise toward that goal.

Allie- Is there anything you think people should know about the album?

Nate- Thank you for this question, because I love talking about this. This is a concept album. It’s meant to be the experience of an insomniac’s night and day, starting with a sleepless night going all the way through when the sun comes up (Awaiting Dawn) until the sun goes down the next day (Awaiting Dusk). So, the first half of the album takes place at night, and the second half takes place during the day. To me, that’s very important to the feeling of each song. It does also justify a valid alternative listening to the album that I envision, that being starting halfway through (at Shattered Foundations) and looping back around to the beginning (Kudgel after Awaiting Dusk), so that the album begins at the beginning of the day and ends at the end of the night. For me personally, though, it makes sense to go through the night first. In addition, the album is meant to be generally chronologically correlated to my personal journey over the course of the years that I wrote the album, relaying the cycles of hardship, self-reflection, and growth that I experienced during that time in my life. I’m being purposefully vague here, because the specific struggles and moments of progress that I wrote the songs about are much less relevant than the individual struggles and moments of progress that the listener is drawn to reflect upon within themselves when listening to the album.

Some of the songs were initially envisioned as being related to each other, as different “parts” of the same song, but as everything developed, they just stopped being as clearly related. I also wouldn’t want to force anyone to think about the songs as part of the same piece if it doesn’t feel that way to them. But for the record, On Top Of It and Presence were going to be related in that way; they were going to be parts one and two of “A Heavy Boredom”. Generally, if two songs are paired next to each other on the album, that almost always means that they relate to similar experiences in my life; this goes for Kudgel and Black Cat Blues, On Top Of It and Wax, and Structure and Presence. 

If you can’t tell, my philosophy when speaking about (and writing) my music is that my interpretation of it is just one of many interpretations that I believe would be “correct”. Because of that, I don’t want to bias my audience by telling them what, specifically, each song is about. I feel that would be doing a disservice to the music. The album’s meaning is whatever the audience understands and feels while listening to it. I find that concept much more fulfilling and profound than providing a single objectively correct interpretation of any song, which is why I haven’t done that in this interview.

You can check out In the Wake of Insomnia here!