impulse nine Connects with Fans on New Release ‘NOTHING IS EASY’ and Shares the Journey Behind Nothing Is Easy
- STAFF
- Sep 8
- 14 min read
By: Staff
NOTHING IS EASY’ is a stunning, raw exploration of musical innovation and emotional depth.
In a world where music feels increasingly disconnected from its roots, one artist has defied the odds and crafted an album that’s both a visceral journey and a heartfelt exploration of life’s most complex emotions. We spoke with the enigmatic force behind -Nothing Is Easy, a musician whose name is as mysterious as the soundscapes he creates. A standout track from the album, “It Might Be Fine (But I Just Don’t Know),” is a captivating blend of uncertainty and raw power, a sonic rollercoaster that captures both the dark depths and the flickering light of hope.
As he unpacks his two-decade-long creative process, we dive deep into the personal themes woven into each note, from the profound loss of a loved one to the unexpected shifts that shaped the album's sound. From haunting piano and violin to unrelenting heavy beats and ferocious metal riffs, the music takes listeners on an unpredictable ride. What drove this artist to push through years of revisions? How does his family’s influence echo through every track? And what’s the story behind his cryptic artist name?
Prepare for an intimate look into the mind of a truly unique creator, his vision, his challenges, and the music that emerged from them. Read on for the full conversation.
The album is available on Bandcamp for physical copies and downloads, and hits streaming platforms on Aug 8th.
Keep scrolling to get into it with impulse nine.
Here’s how it went:
Begin Interview:
Hello impulse nine, we’re thrilled to have you here for this interview! We've had an amazing time exploring your music and diving into your creative journey. Now, we’re even more intrigued to get a deeper look into both your brand and your personal and professional inspirations.
Q. After an amazing sounding journey and two decades of demos and experiments, what was the turning point that made you finally decide you were ready to create Nothing Is Easy?
A. There were a few factors, some good, some bad. On a pragmatic level, technology has progressed to where I could create the brass and string sounds I wanted, and after coming into my own in my graphic design career, I could afford those tools. I was a DJ for a few years, which forced me to listen to a lot of music I wouldn’t have otherwise.
But of course, there was the unexpected death of my mother, who died of pancreatic cancer. She was a nurse, and all-around extraordinary person. I can’t help but think she would be busy making the world significantly better right now. It was a reality check: I always thought that I had time to make a great album. I did, but not in time for her to hear it. A few years later, I was still having difficulty getting anywhere with it when my dad got COVID. I managed to finish the final draft of I’m Sorry About Your Everything just before he died. In the meantime, my stepfather, and a close friend, all passed away. My spouse had a very close call.
Despite all that, it still took a solid 7 or 8 years to really nail the thing down. But I’m pleased to say, a few months after it’s been finished and uploaded, that I still listen to it, and there’s nothing I would change.
Q. After hearing this whole album, it’s such a great flow but also a huge variety of sound, and we feel like it’s expressive and has an element of rage and also exuberance. Is this what you set out to do from the outset, or was the project something different that became this?
A. I originally wanted it to have far more variety! My model was Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, including its myriad singles and B-sides spanning pop, rock, folk, metal, and more. But that album gained much of its variety by containing 28 songs; I was struggling to finish 8 songs in 7 years. If it were to ever see a release, I clearly needed to pare that back substantially. It has been a relief to hear people describe the album in these terms; I was initially disappointed in myself for it being too homogenized. I am also glad that the emotions come through. It’s difficult to tell on an instrumental album whether the language of music is translating as well as that of the written and spoken word.
Q. You’ve mentioned your mom was also a huge influence on your music, both as a person and through her support. Can you tell us more about how her passing impacted your sound or the themes of the album?
A. Our household was the result of a pair of music fans; my dad loved stereo systems, and my mom always had music playing. It was always pretty Top 40 stuff—Beatles, Rolling Stones, INXS, U2, David Bowie, The Police, Led Zeppelin, that sort of thing—but it was unceasing. In fact, I spent a long time disliking the Beatles because in my mind it was primarily associated with housecleaning.
My mom’s support was unceasing and unconditional, not even in a lifting sort of way, more like a blowdryer or a solar flare. It was deeply embarrassing when I was a kid, but having seen the effects of an unsupportive household, I wouldn’t trade it, obviously.
She worked her ass off as a nurse from when she was 17 through her early 60s, joined the Navy at 40, became a Lt. Commander, got her Master’s degree. She was a force, and then she got pancreatic cancer a couple months into retirement, and she was dead.
Ever since I was a teenager, I figured I had a decent album in me, if I really tried. So when my mom died, I realized that I had been making little demos that were never finished, thinking this for about 20 years. You can only put something off for 20 years a very small number of times. And I thought that when I did make it, I could show it to my mom, and wouldn’t that be nice? So. I had to decide: Either make the album, or don’t, and be happy making little bits of unfinished music. There’s nothing wrong with the latter, but to stop kidding myself about the album if it was never going to happen.
As a bit of fun/depressing trivia, I had just purchased a Zoom recorder when I was visiting mom on the day that ended up being when she died. It was windy and I was testing it out, recording the windchimes in her back yard. The bells at the end of the song I’m 16… from the Heavy Metal Mama single were recorded around or at the moment of her passing.
Q. We’ve heard that “I’m Sorry About Your Everything” holds a deep significance to your father. Can you share the story behind that connection and how it shaped the song?
A. There were a few years between when my mom died and when my dad got COVID. During that time, I was working on my album, but spent a lot of it spinning my wheels, working on more demos that didn’t go anywhere, finding my DAW of choice (Reaper), figuring out how it worked, that sort of thing. I have a huge amount of admiration for people who are putting out music in a matter of a year or two, because it took me what feels like forever to just learn the basics. But even after her passing, I didn’t feel a burning urgency.
When my dad got COVID, he had been taking the disease seriously, unfortunately but his friends believed the president’s assertions that it wasn’t serious. As a veteran, he had excellent care, but as things got worse and worse, it became clear that neither of my parents were going to hear this album of mine. I became determined to finish at least one song, and that song became I’m Sorry About Your Everything.
The working title was, No Amount of Research Can Fix Bad Critical Thinking, and was aimed at the people I found online (and in positions of power) arguing that COVID was no big deal, and that vaccines don’t work. And here we are, still.
Q. The process of making Nothing Is Easy seems to have been deeply personal and emotional, with grief running through the tracks. How did you balance that heavy emotion with the joy you wanted to find in the music?
A. Purely happy and purely sad art is boring. Real sadness needs joy to hit hard, and vice versa. No one cares about winning without struggle, least of all the winner. I’m devastated because I loved my mom, and I think it’s tragic that she isn’t around to grab this world by its dumbass ear. I’m furious because my dad and I were just beginning to reconnect when he, and a million other people, died of a disease we collectively opted into, and then put the people who were responsible in charge again. I ache for a sane world I can see just over a horizon, even as we are dragged away from it, while taking comfort in the friends and family I have left.
Q. Shadow Over Johnny Ringo's Grave draws heavily on Spaghetti Western influences. How did a visit to the real Johnny Ringo’s grave influence the final version of the song?
A. The absolute tiniest, dumbest possible thing started it. Arizona is an absolutely beautiful state, full of forests and open plains. It does not fit the stereotype that many hold in their minds. One such wooded area is the Chiricahua Mountains, in which his grave is nestled by a creek. I was there with some friends, being big nerds, and didn’t think much more of it, except that it seems he haunted some of my friends. It’s their story to tell; I won’t speak for them. But it became A Thing among us as a group.
I also have a strong love for the song Knights of Cydonia by Muse, but it’s such a unique song. And I thought: “Why aren’t there more songs like this?” That ended up being a real turning point, creatively. It was when I gave myself permission to just make things without worrying about everything being perfectly wholly original, because there’s no such thing. Music is just a language, and we aren’t making up new words when we speak, we’re just rearranging them into new ideas.
So when I created my pastiche of Knights of Cydonia, combined with my own ideas around instrumental rock, it was very natural to bring in our own Johnny Ringo.
Q. We read that you described the music as being influenced by your wife's love for New Orleans jazz and retro soul. Can you point to specific moments in the album where her influence is most prominent? What was her reaction to being a part of this?
A. In her words: “Surprised and amused.” It shows up most in Annie Adversary, which is a B-side for It Might Be Fine (But I Just Don’t Know). It’s a pity it’s one of my least-played songs, because I think it’s so much fun. The horns hold the melody the entire time, and it’s a full arrangement. But we’ve been together nearly as long as we haven’t; it’s inevitable that we would influence each other. Brass is also great just on a pragmatic arranging level, in that it cuts through a mix really well, and when you’re writing instrumentals, it is a fantastic replacement for melodic lines that would normally be taken up by vocals.
Q. Having spent years developing the album, you’ve mentioned that it was a struggle to get everything just right. What kept you motivated to push through the endless revisions and edits? Did you almost not make it through at any point? How did enlisting the help of Christin Burnett turn the tide?
A. The mixing on A Wake and Shadow Over Johnny Ringo’s Grave drove me to despair. I kept 20 different demo versions of A Wake that were unique enough to call different demos; there were probably 60 or 80 versions in between those. Just the first few seconds, the wild arpeggiated synthesizer of A Wake, has 10 tracks on it, and that’s after who-knows-how-many iterations. I should note that this isn’t because I was being meticulous, at least not at first. This is because I didn’t know what I was doing. I was flailing around, playing, making things, seeing what worked. And that’s good! I have no regrets about that. But an enormous part of the reason this album took so long is because so many of the original ideas were hammered together from very rough original ingredients. I have become vastly more efficient, because I am much better at plotting the course from the outset.
But nonetheless, I wanted to finish this album first. I knew it would bother me if I didn’t. These were the songs I had been working on while all of this hard stuff had been going on, and I felt like I needed to finish those songs as a way to put down that hard stuff, too. But if I were ever going to get around to anything else I was working on, I needed Christian’s help to get songs like A Wake and Ringo nailed down. It also helped to have a single pair of ears on the mixing (and Jim Blackwood on mastering) to give the album a more consistent sound.
Q. The song “It Might Be Fine (But I Just Don’t Know)” seems to reflect uncertainty, but we love the tongue-in-cheek title. How do you feel this track encapsulates the challenges you faced both personally and professionally during the album’s creation?
A. I’ve been a professional graphic designer for a long time, and it’s a job that’s subject to corporate whims. But every time I’ve been laid off, or some other bizarre shift of the market has left me looking for new work, I have ended up in a much better place. It has happened many times. The most-recent time, I was in the bizarre state where my previous employer laid off the whole department, but kept me on for 3 months “to be nice” (it was because they needed me but didn’t want to admit it). I knew I had always landed on my feet before, and my skillset had only grown stronger. But: Could I do it again? That was the specific situation I was writing about. But I was also writing about a larger feeling, of the feeling of ridiculousness when doing the small things, like brushing your teeth, making your bed, literally just getting out of the damn bed, when something huge is looming over you. In my case it was the job, but it was also things like politics, or for someone else it could be a wanted pregnancy after several miscarriages, or anything like that. The difficulty of existing when your whole world is one big question that dominates your whole brain, all day, every day.
Q. The idea of “hope” is woven throughout Nothing Is Easy, despite the intense grief. What role does hope play in your music, and how do you define it within the context of this album?
A. We preach what we need to hear, and what I need to hear most right now is that there is hope. For myself, for society, for our futures. And hope is not idle; it is dirty, hard, in the corners, on the streets, with beat-up smiles and dogged determination. It is punk. I give away stickers that say, “HOPE IS PUNK” on them all the time; I guess they’re promotional items technically, but they’re really just me wishing that thought into the world.
I needed to prove to myself that I could make the thing I promised myself I would make. And I did, with an enormous amount of help from others. And I’m trying to help others believe in their own hope, too. I have no idea if that translates with an instrumental album, but maybe it does with some stickers. Or an interview.
Q. After trying to form a live band in 2024, you mentioned that it was an expensive failure but that you learned a lot. What lessons did you take away from that experience, and how do you see collaboration in your future? Did any specific songs originate from this experience?
A. The main lesson was that nobody is ever going to be as enthusiastic about your project as you. The second is that some people are literally never going to show up, even if you pay them. But I also wasn’t ready, because I wasn’t sure what I wanted, yet, either. There was still too much figuring-out to do, and when you’re leading a project, you can’t simultaneously earn trust and pivot constantly.
Q. With Nothing Is Easy, you’ve crafted a highly detailed and meticulous album that rewards careful listening. How do you feel about the tension between fast, consistent output favored by streaming platforms (boo) and your slow, patient process (yay)?
A. Truly, I made this album for myself, and I’m pretty damn happy with it, and I’ll be listening to it for a long time, because it is a bundling and unburdening of tragedies I’ve carried for years. The last thing I want is to listen to it in 10 years and think, “I don’t like the way the guitar was mixed here, and I knew it at the time I published it, and I didn’t fix it.” I don’t think others will be doing the same. Don’t get me wrong, I certainly hope people will like it enough to buy a copy on LP or CD, and listen to it, and I’m going to do the things I can to make that possible. But let’s be honest: There are musicians more talented than I whose albums are not appreciated, either, and I will be pretty shocked to sell more than 30 copies. And that’s fine, my plan is basically to pay for music with other income and make what I want, while still becoming more efficient with that meticulousness.
So, all that to say: I know my own goals. Now, other people will have different goals, and those goals are going to be shaped by factors like whether they care about the streaming platforms’ algorithms. I think it sucks if a musician is forced to churn out music, forced to by commercial interests, but then again that’s how we got lots of contract-obligation songs (California Love and Heard It Through The Grapevine, to pick two wildly different examples).
Q. We’d love to dive deeper into the story behind your artist name, impulse nine. Now that we’ve had a chance to experience your music, it’s clear that your fans will be equally curious about the meaning behind the name that accompanies your sound. How does impulse nine connect to the music you create, what significance does it hold for you personally, and what is the origin or backstory behind the name?
A. It is the cheat code for all the weapons in the video game Quake. That’s it. Well, in the game, you would write, “impulse 9” but I decided long ago that I liked the way “impulse nine” looks better, and it was slightly more unique, so I went with that instead. But, this is the sort of thing you pick up when you choose your online moniker when you’re a teenager.
Q. And finally, what’s next? Can you give us the inside scoop on your upcoming projects and what fans should be excited about? We'd love to be the first to share the news!
A. The strange thing about this release is that the only impulse nine song out right now that was written before 2022 is Call of the Void, which was basically knocked out as a mental health break at the end of 2024. There are two major new projects coming up. The first is a sister album to NOTHING IS EASY, titled The Cure for Loneliness, which is a kind of mirror image: While NOTHING IS EASY was all original songs I wrote and performed alone, it is a collaborative cover album. It should be out before the end of the year.
The second is a soundtrack to an indie game called The Origin of Gravity. It’s being developed by a good friend of mine that I know from that job that inspired It Might Be Fine (But I Just Don’t Know). It’s really wonderful working with her on it in person, in addition to being a dear friend. I’m also really excited about it because it is going to be a real showcase for a massive range of genres and styles. There is ambient, early 90s techno, lofi, 8-bit, rock, post-rock, yacht rock, a tuba oom-pah piece, synthwave, jazz, twee “silly goofster” music, as well as actual traditional soundtrack music.
There’s also dozens of other demos and ideas I have waiting in the wings. I have no shortage of music, that’s never been the problem. With this album finished, I feel very confident you’ll be hearing lots of music from me in the future. And hopefully nobody else will have to die to inspire it.
impulse nine, thank you so much, we appreciate you taking the time to talk to us!
End Interview
We’re happy to have shared impulse nine’s exciting journey with you and uncovered such inspiring insights about their creative process.
