Donny McArdle sings on the quad.
Courtesy | Donny McArdle
To Donny McArdle, love is a choice. Well, partially.
Sophomore Donald (Donny) McArdle’s single “Love” will be released tomorrow, just a few days after Valentine’s Day. Unlike one of the most controversial holidays of the year, McArdle’s track is absent of any cheap clichès.
“Love is a daily break/ from all of our confusion we find inside ourselves/ Living every moment for each other every day,” McArdle sings.
Although simplistic at first glance, “Love” evolves into a track that explores the idea of love as a choice. What’s more romantic than that?
“To an extent— I don’t think this is true in all cases— love is a choice,” McArdle said. “I think of my grandparents and my parents and how they fight and disagree. At any point, they could’ve said it wasn’t worth it and stepped away. There has to be some choice aspect to it. Like every day thinking ‘I’m choosing to be in this.’”
Recorded in campus bedrooms and home basements with equipment whose user manuals were triumphed by YouTube tutorials, “Love” is a true DIY project– just like love itself. Although he tries to stray away from over-philosophizing in his songwriting, this track is a little different than his past releases.
“I’m not really thinking of how everything is sounding until I’ve started to record it,” McArdle said. “Most of the time, I just have the basic rhythm and bare bones, then I add my lyrics or melody. I was thinking about the idea of choice and love, maybe not necessarily consciously.”
Long-time Beatles fan and Billy Joel enthusiast, McArdle’s influences are noticeable on the first listen. The choral elements and layered instrumentation might portray the illusion of a full band, but it’s just McArdle.
Last September, McArdle released his album “Chasing Lightning,” which was the culmination of an album lost to the pandemic and a few defeats in the distribution department. Since he’s a newbie to the music world and does everything from songwriting to production by himself, McArdle didn’t know the best way to go about releasing music.
“When I switched online distributors, I had to resubmit everything and it’s just been processing since June,” McArdle said. “I can’t cancel it. Someone told me about Bandcamp and that’s what I’m moving forward with right now.”
Bandcamp, a music distribution platform founded in 2007, is most music snobs’ favorite place to buy music. Not only does the artist control how they price their music (users can stream for free and then opt into purchasing the releases), but they can also sell merchandise and link other social media content to the page.
“A lot of the stuff I’ve read says that you can put everything at $0 and people will still give money, which I think is kind of bizarre,” McArdle said. “I think the people who are going to Bandcamp are the type of people who want to support the person and pay for their work. I think that’s very cool.”
On McArdle’s Bandcamp page, you can find releases dating back to 2020. He has priced his singles at $1 and his full-length album at $7. Even though his music is available on most other streaming platforms, “Love” will be out on Bandcamp for a week before being released through other services.
McArdle clearly isn’t in this for the money. The music costs far more to produce than he’ll earn from royalties, even on platforms as democratic as Bandcamp. But much like what his single asserts, life is about the choices we make— whether that’s who we love, how we create, or what platform we release our music on.
