A Brief (Long) History of the Red Sun Rising Album

As I prepare to release this new/old album, it felt worthwhile to give y'all the background on how this project came to be. I think the context is as important as the work itself.

The Birth of The Monarchy

I’ll start with the beginning of “The Monarchy,” my collaboration with Todd Davidson. I was 21, living in College Station, and my buddy Reece Woodruff mentioned he was staying in a house with a legit (also janky) recording studio built by some guy—can’t recall his name—who was supposedly a big music producer around town. This was his early prototype studio: a little recording booth covered in egg-carton foam mattress toppers, totally soundproof (not the best for natural reverb, but super clean and controlled). Reece had a housemate, Todd, who was a super talented drummer and producer.

When Todd and I met, we showed each other demos and it was one of those rare encounters with a College Station musician with actually good taste. Todd had more experience with recording engineering than anyone else I knew, and he was also a sad emo feeler boi like me, so we clicked immediately and spent a bunch of late nights in the studio playing around with music.

The Wake Up the Giant! Album

Around the start of my senior year, Todd and I aligned on a clear vision for a full album called Wake up the Giant! We busted ass through my last semester at A&M to finish the album in time for a release before finals. The recording is rough, but anyone who heard it knows it was fucking fire. Nothing else in that era of College Station music touched what we did.

Sidenote—some people ask where “The Monarchy” band name came from. I honestly can’t fully remember. There might’ve been some nod to our monotheism at the time, or maybe it was one of the rare names that nobody else on iTunes had claimed (yes iTunes was the thing back then). Bottom line, there was a point where we had to order CDs and upload our music to the internet, and we had to choose a name whether we loved it or not. We’re just glad we didn’t have to settle for something like Sh0rt5l33v3s like all the monikers the zoomers got left with.

We booked our release concert at Muldoons, a once-popular now-shuttered coffeeshop with a decent stage. I scored sponsorships from a local fro-yo place and Chick-fil-A for free food. I’d barely slept for weeks finalizing the album, printing CDs, and rehearsing with the band. Then I woke up the morning of the show and could not fucking speak. My voice was completely gone—never had that happen before or since. No amount of raw garlic, ginger tea, or random throat remedies could fix it. Showtime came and I still couldn’t sing for shit. It didn’t really matter. I scrame into that mic, it sounded ridiculous, but some people liked it and recommended I keep that as my signature sound. That show was basically the extent of promoting that record. We played a handful more gigs, but life happened in a way we could never lean into any sort of music career from it.

Move to Austin

In 2010 I moved to Austin to start a film company with my friends Alex Carroll and Will Bakke. We did the movie thing for a few years. I also recorded another album with my friend John Churchill (Home, Not Where I Left It as Pojat). But in the background, a second Monarchy album was brewing around the same time Todd was thinking about moving to Austin.

When he moved here, he crashed in my spare room for a while, and I pitched the follow-up album idea (that was nearly a decade ago now). Todd was willing enough. We converted my spare room into a little studio and started recording again, this time with better gear and sharper instincts. We spent 2016-17 tracking the album, but right as we were finishing, my life collapsed.

Death + Resurrection

I won’t rehash all the details - I’ve already done enough of that in other arenas - but to summarize I got severely depressed, lost my faith, had an affair that led to my divorce, lost my business, money, house, most of my friends, and began my 30s in total scorched earth. I shelved the album and tried to forget about it. I figured even if I ever had the time or energy to work on music, it would be too painful to dig up this thing I made as my life was starting to spiral out of control.

But in the subsequent years, I bounced back. From 2017-2020, I did a lot of healing. I made new friends, leaned into fatherhood, built a new partnership with Mel, and most importantly, rediscovered my creativity. I’d convinced myself I wasn’t an artist anymore without the faith that had fueled me in the first part of life, but then I found a new spark with my Somebody album.

I released Somebody in 2021. It was my most vulnerable (and most depression-fueled) work yet, but it proved I still had something to say. I learned I didn’t need the drive of serving some external authority figure — I could generate purpose and passion from within.

Dusting Off Red Sun Rising

In the wake of that renewed energy, around late 2023, I was cleaning out a drawer and found my old hard drive with The Monarchy album on it. I listened through our sessions and felt certain we needed to finally finish it. I wrangled Todd and we spent the next year mixing it (shoutout to Richard Carpenter and John Churchill for helping with final touches, and to Harold Larue for mastering).

Returning to album after so many years of hiatus, I realized my understanding of its themes had grown, and I wanted to build more of a world around it. I got this idea for an astronomical storyline of a planet losing its solar system and drifting through wild cosmic encounters until its core becomes part of a new sun and solar system. I thought AI could whip that idea up real quick. I was wrong about the "real quick" part... Hundreds of hours later, I've created a pretty cutting-edge companion to the album - not exactly “popcorn viewing,” but an hour-long human-imagined/AI-generated film that’s maybe the first of its kind, definitely something new I’m excited to show off.

So that brings us to now, nearly a decade after convincing Todd to create this album, finally ready to show it to my friends.

What This Means to Me

There’s a lot of meaning I can project onto this moment, but more than anything it feels like an act of love for my past self. After I'd gone down a destructive road, I felt the need to demonize or discount the me from that period of life. It felt safer to throw out everything from my past as a mistake, a regret, a failure. My decision to honor late-20s-Michael-B-Allen by completing his vision has helped pull me into a sense of synchronicity and peace with my whole self, my full journey. In the end, I’m deeply grateful it’s all played out this way.

Letting go of perfection to make way for redemption is the ultimate creative act.

That’s the spirit I’m bringing to this album release, and it’s what I’ll be celebrating with this party. I hope something in my story resonates with you. and you bring your own energy to the event. I’ll say more on the vision I have for the event soon. But for now please for the love of god just buy a ticket. This stuff is fucking expensive.

Love y’all.

PS I have posted two song videos on YouTube to preview the album visual and posted the single, "Enjoy the Show" to DSPs. Please listen on repeat so I can earn the quarter penny royalty Spotify doles out so benevolently.