Sitting in Someone Else's Chair (Ann Xiety EP)

Sitting in Someone Else's Chair is an upcoming album by Matthew Little under his stage name Ann Xiety.

Background
Little begun the project just days before the release of his second album, Dry Hit. Since the release of his first album with his friend Eli, in their group Plot Holes, Little had been suffering from a musical block which made it hard to come up with anything for their follow-up release, Smoking wit Sylvia Plath. Little, during this time, was suffering from bouts of severe depression and anxiety, which made it almost impossible to create anything, let alone music, so he set the project aside and instead self-medicated himself with marijuana and occasionally Xanax.

Inspiration
The idea for the album came about after listening to a cover of George Harrison's "My Sweet Lord" by Yim Yames. Also, one morning while his boyfriend drove him to work, Little heard a song on the radio that reminded him of one featured in the 1969 film Easy Rider that Little had loved back in high school. This brought back memories of when Little used to listen to predominantly 1960's music during that time, and how he used to practice singing popular singles from that era. It had been a dream of Little's to someday cover those songs, so finally in 2017 he decided to try and unblock his mental creativity by going forward with their coverings.

Style and recording
The songs that are featured on Sitting in Someone Else's Chair are all songs Little had either obsessed over when he was younger, or ones that he discovered later on that he would listen to obsessively. The songs Little chose for the album range from 1960's folk/psychedelic rock to songs released sometime within the past few years. Little spoke about the songs he used:


 * These are songs that more or less shaped me. I was going through a little hippie phase back in 2007 when I was a freshman and only listened to Pink Floyd, The Doors, Jefferson Airplane, and whatever else. So after school I'd play them and would spend hours just singing and singing, practicing as much as I could. I would even take their melodies and write songs of my own because I was both unoriginal and jealous that they weren't mine to begin with. My friend Kevin and I had started a band and were gonna actually cover some of them, but that didn't get to happen. Now that I'm older and my voice is deeper I figured now would be a good time to at least try it and see what they come out to.

The instrumentals used on the album were downloaded from YouTube. With the little experience Little had he knew he wouldn't be able to recreate songs of that magnitude. He searched for instrumental covers uploaded by people on YouTube, and would then download them and chop and screw them. Little layered them with stretches and various reverb effects, which make them sound loud but could retain a constant mesh of hazes. Little preferred this method as, given the quality of the recording, it gave the album a studio polish. He has stated that when the album is finished and released, he will give credit to his "internet band" and name each person either by real or user name.

Little recorded his vocals using his iPhone 4. Most of the songs contain multiple vocal takes that were each processed differently and sung at higher or lower octaves. Little recorded each song one at a time, only occasionally leaving one to sit while working on another.

Cover
Sitting in Someone Else's Chair's cover art consists of a cropped self-portrait of Little taken in late 2011; it was conceived in his room while Little was high on Xanax. The original edit had a blue filter eclipsing the whole image; Little edited it to a light black and white tone, and then blurred the image that faded out around his eye and the corner of his head. To him, the cover enjoyed an aesthetic shared with other album covers from the 1950's and the 1960's.