Album: Hometown Heroes: Town Themes Arranged

In the early weeks of pandemic isolation, at a time when I felt stressed, I thought to myself, "I'll listen to this town theme album I've never actually listened to before. It seems chill." I was right! It's a great bunch of tracks.

It also unexpectedly made me Feel Things. The South Figaro theme turned into a lullaby absolutely destroyed me. The day I listened to it, I had found out that my grandmother passed away early that day, and even though the song is a mother singing to her baby, I heard the lyric "Our day was short / somehow time flew by / I know it's hard to say good-bye" and I thought about my grandma, because no matter how long someone lives it always feels like the day was short when they're gone, and that hit me with the waterworks. On the other end of life, I have a little niece and nephew who I was spending time with every week and now I have seen them once in six months, so I heard "Tomorrow will come / and we'll start a new day / and see what adventures await" and I thought about all the growing up they're doing and adventures they're having without me and that shredded me pretty well too.

It's a beautiful piece of music. Salute especially for that one and to everyone else involved in this album too.

• Preview Hometown Heroes: Town Themes Arranged: http://youtu.be/bZk1OmdBt3Q
• Download Hometown Heroes: Town Themes Arranged: http://hometown.ocremix.org
• Torrent: http://bt.ocremix.org/torrents/Hometown_Heroes_-_Town_Themes_Arranged.torrent

Once again, I was very lucky to work with the talented and passionate members of the OCR community. Hometown Heroes offers a neat little package of emotions, most of which are nice and warm and comforting. Being home, missing home, and returning home are recurring themes that create a nice range of feelings as explored by the different contributors to this project. Even though the concept of the project is restrictive to town themes, the multiple interpretations still make it a nice, varied experience. Every individual piece brings something different to the table.

As a contributor, which is how I started with this project, Hometown Heroes has been an interesting change of pace for me. Usually, my music-making tendencies are a bit on the crazy side of things, with occasional exceptions. This is one of those exceptions, and it's good to take a deep breath and to make things with a BPM slower than 160 once in a while.

- Emery Monzerol (DaMonz)