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. 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.
“The initial groove of ‘Beyond Forever’ was greatly influenced by the Guster’s ‘Keep Moving’ from their new album, Ooh La La,” said Kelley. “But lyrically, it’s all about my love for my amazing wife, Alison, since I was writing the song around our wedding anniversary.”
“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 groove to it so eventually the two ideas came together and I think I produced a summer banger about hating summer.
“The bridge of the song features some spoken word and a splash of trumpet — an instrument I haven’t played in at least 40 years — so, yeah, it got a little weird,” added Kelley. The WXPN Song Challenge required participants to submit a video of the artist performing the song since the grand prize includes a spot to perform the winning song at the XPoNential Music Festival in September. The video submitted for “Summer’s Not My Thing” can be watched 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.
The new “pensive version” of “Life’s in the Balance,” inspired by a potentially life-threatening medical crisis in May 2023, was prepared for a BlowUpRadio.com benefit compilation earlier this year. “The original version of ‘Life’s in the Balance’ is heavier because I wrote most of it in my head while I was in the emergency room not knowing how it would go, so there was some anger and anxiety,” said Kelley. “This is a more acoustic, reflective take on the song that came from being nearly a year removed from that situation.”
“Why Is It So Hard?” is a song Kelley originally wrote about 36 years ago. “I was cleaning up my hard drive and found an MP3 from an attempt to update the song that I did just last year and had completely forgotten it,” said Kelley. “And despite its immature, bubble-gum content, I couldn’t bring myself to let it go because I loved the overall vibe of the song.”
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.
The power-pop release is tentatively titled Off You Pop and is expected to be available at some point in 2024.
Ferocious Designs 