Introduction
Hey, everyone! This is Cort – welcome to Cortland Runyon Music, the official website for all of my music projects. I essentially built it to be a comprehensive portfolio containing every music-related venture I’ve ever done. As a musician who has been making music for about 13 years now, the list has gotten pretty long, and so I needed a central hub for all my musical goings-on. After all, I can only manage so many websites, emails, social media profiles, YouTube channels, and everything else before I fall behind on a few things – which leads to incomplete information, contradictions, and inconsistencies across said platforms.
If you’d like to explore all my projects – big and small, old and new – look no further than the music page. If you’d like to read my posts from the old websites or get caught up on the latest information regarding my music, check out the blog. And of course, if you need to get in touch with me, be sure to fill out the form on the contact page. If you’re at all familiar with my older websites for Northsong and Ebon Arcanum, you’ll find that I consolidated a lot of the information by taking out a lot of inactive links and purging unnecessary information. You may not find the Orchestral Edition of Northsong’s “Winter’s Dominion” or be able to read every single review written for Ebon Arcanum’s “Awakening”, but everything you need to know is all here for your viewing pleasure.
Essential Listening
Biography – The Story So Far
For all of my young life I lived in Streator, Illinois. My grandpa got me my first guitar in 2007 when I was 14 years old. It was a black acoustic, and I played it every day. I taught myself how to play all my favorite Dragonforce songs through internet tabs – the rhythm parts at least. That was pretty much when I decided I really liked the instrument. The year after, I upgraded to a basic electric guitar starter set and I even tried to write my own songs with the help of Guitar Pro.
That’s when I started exploring other power metal bands like Hammerfall and Sonata Arctica at first, then gradually looking more and more into heavier melodic bands like Wintersun, Kalmah, and Amon Amarth – which is how I was introduced to melodic death metal. I didn’t actually like the growling and screaming vocals at first, but I warmed up to them in time because I thought the music was good and I wanted to listen to it over and over. During this time, I learned how to play heavier music on guitar and even tried experimenting with an old Casio keyboard because I wanted to try a second instrument.
Eventually through Pandora I found Ensiferum, which was really my first foray into folk metal. I thought the catchy melodies of the unique folky instruments combined with the sounds of various heavy metal subgenres I’ve been exploring for the last 5 years was captivating. For the longest time, Ensiferum was my favorite band, but I also discovered plenty of other folk metal bands like Turisas and Korpiklaani too. This got me heavily into Viking culture and mythology, since a lot of folk metal bands sing about such things. I also won an auction for a used 7-string guitar on eBay during this time, which allowed me to play even heavier music. I fell in love with that thing, and I still own it today.
In 2010, I dedicated a lot of my time to finding underground folk metal bands after listening to all of the more well-known ones ad nauseam. That was when I stumbled upon Windrider, a folk/Viking metal solo project ran by Elliot Vernon, who at the time just had Windrider and a few other small solo projects and bands, but is now the keyboardist in Alestorm. I really loved the powerful keyboards that gave Windrider’s music a strong, epic, heroic tone. After discovering it was all done by one man, I decided to form my own similar solo project – which is how Northsong first came to be.
I had already been writing Guitar Pro songs for awhile at this point, but this was the first time I tried to write epic metal songs. The first I managed to finish writing was “Mountains of Madness”, which, as you can hear, was very heavily inspired by Windrider’s “To New Lands“. I started writing a few other songs in a similar style, too, but they wouldn’t be finished for awhile. After getting a lot of brand new recording equipment from my parents that year for Christmas, I reached out to Elliot who helped me a lot with what programs to use and how to use them to get the best out of my recordings.
After familiarizing myself with my new equipment and learning the absolute basics of home recording, I recorded a demo of “Mountains of Madness” – without drums or bass. Even then, I was so proud of it I immediately uploaded it to YouTube to show my friends, family, and the world what I had accomplished. It was fairly well received! After Elliot heard it, he offered to add a drum track to the song for me, and coached me on how to do it myself in the future. This demo version of the song, complete with Elliot’s drum track, appears on “Winter’s Dominion: 5th Anniversary” After getting a lot of positive feedback for the Mountains of Madness demo, I was inspired to complete enough songs for a debut EP.
During the first half of 2011, I helped start a local rock band in Streator, called The Deafening Silence, with a couple of friends from school. As for Northsong, I finished writing and recorded four more folk metal-style tracks, and re-recorded Mountains of Madness with the new wealth of recording skills I had gathered in the meantime. To pay homage to Windrider, I arranged and recorded a cover of his song, “Let Death Be Our Pride”. Of course, I was still missing bass tracks for all the songs, but that was an oversight – I was so eager to release my first EP, something was bound to be overlooked. After listening to my recordings for the Northsong EP for two straight weeks over and over again, making sure the mix was perfect and I didn’t screw anything up, I unleashed my first ever release for the world to hear – “Winter’s Dominion”.
The EP got me interviews, positive reviews, and a logo-designing friend who gave the Northsong logo a much needed fresh new look. All of this inspired me even further to continue with Northsong – this time with a full-length album. I believe it was also around this time that I first started Shadowforge – though my memory is foggy about its inception and I didn’t leave much of an online record of the “old” Shadowforge after I discontinued it a year or two later. So, during the second half of 2011 and the first half of 2012, I was writing new Northsong material for a follow-up to Winter’s Dominion, as well as trying to get enough material together for Shadowforge. I was also inspired to create my third project, Ebon Arcanum, (originally named Nocturnium) around this time after listening to a lot of black metal, and I also left The Deafening Silence to join another local band as a vocalist, Chains of Tyranny. But before the release of the next Northsong album, life had other plans that took me on a bit of a detour.
To begin with, I traveled to Venezuela to meet my then-girlfriend (now my wife) who I actually met through a Facebook page about Finnish metal bands. I still wrote songs for the next Northsong album while there for three months, but not very often. When I came back to the States, I was actually able to meet Elliot in person for the first time, since by now he was in Alestorm and I went to their Joliet, IL concert during their 2012 US tour. He even got my friends and I in for free! The day after the concert though, I decided to move to Bloomington, Illinois to live with my dad.
Bloomington is a much bigger city than Streator, which makes it better for finding work, and it also has a few community colleges there, one of which I planned to attend. I don’t know what it was about that exact time, but the realization that high school was over and the beginning of the rest of my life was just beginning had finally set in, and I felt like I had to kick my ass in gear to prepare for my future. After settling in Bloomington, getting a new job, and signing up for college (and backing out the day before the semester began), I was adjusted enough to continue writing material for the next Northsong album. However, with my bandmates in Chains of Tyranny an hour and a half away now, I had to leave the band – though at the same time everyone else agreed to put it on hiatus, and to this day it lies dormant.
For the rest of 2012 and early 2013, I was finishing up the nine songs I had written for my next release. After recording everything in my new bedroom ‘studio’ and tidying up the mixing, “The Final Journey“, was released on April 9th, 2013. It had a much more diverse sound than Winter’s Dominion because I used a wider range of influences when writing it. It was still mostly folk metal, but there were also some black metal and power metal-inspired sections in it as well. After the release of The Final Journey, I started writing several songs for another Northsong album while focusing a bit more on new material for an Ebon Arcanum release at the same time. By focusing on two projects and not enough on a third, I thought it appropriate to dissolve Shadowforge since during the last two years I barely touched it, aside from releasing one song in 2011. 2013-2015 is where things start to get a little convoluted again, though.
Toward the end of 2013, I already had three new Northsong tracks written, but I was planning to go back to Venezuela soon. So my solution was to record and release these three songs before leaving, which is how “Forgotten Tales” came to be. After I released it in August, I went back to Venezuela in and married my girlfriend there in September. This time I stayed for six months instead of three, and in that time I had my laptop with me and continued to write songs for Northsong and Ebon Arcanum. I actually managed to finish writing enough material for both a new Northsong full-length (later to be “Northern Winds & Winter Hymns” much further down the road) and an Ebon Arcanum EP while I was there.
After I returned to the States in February 2014, I had trouble managing time between Northsong, Ebon Arcanum, finding work, and filling out all the immigration forms required for my wife to move to the States with me. A few months later, after finding steady work and getting all the necessary immigration paperwork filed, I began recording an EP for Ebon Arcanum. By then I was living in my dad’s unfinished basement instead of the cozy room I was staying in before I left for Venezuela, where the cold darkness gave the EP a certain black metal authenticity. My 7-string guitar – by now my only guitar – needed to be repaired too, and without the money to fix it, I resorted to using an old knockoff Stratocaster from a “beginner’s electric guitar set” my dad kept in the basement. Although this was actually preferable in the long run because, as anyone familiar to the genre knows, the cheap guitar used together with the growing age of my laptop and the cold, dark environment was the perfect setup for recording black metal.
So after I got over the fact that the EP wouldn’t have a very high-quality sound with my makeshift setup, I began recording it over the next few weeks. When all was said and done, I put the six tracks together, made my own album art from scratch for the very first time (with a logo also provided by Wappenschmied) and released “Awakening” under the Ebon Arcanum name on May 27th, 2014. The EP was a great introduction to the scene for Ebon Arcanum, and it even got the project a barebones record deal with Torn Flesh Records, which in turn got Awakening on all major streaming platforms like Spotify and iTunes. To this day I still consider Awakening my favorite release across any project of mine, because it has a certain charm that I know I’ll never be able to recreate.
Post-Awakening is when I sort of took my first break from music. I had my first full-time job and what free time I had I was playing a lot of video games on my first ever gaming PC I built with the money I earned from said job. I could have used the powerful computer to record the next Northsong album, or used the money to get better equipment, but I never did. I wanted to start a Tolkien-themed dungeon synth project titled “Haradwaith” around this time, and even wrote a few tracks for it, but to this day it hasn’t materialized, despite having a logo made. I was a bit burnt out on music at this point, and I would be for quite some time after.
It wasn’t until mid-2015 when I would start recording again, this time going back to Northsong. As my musical tastes and recording and mixing knowledge expanded, I noticed the quality of my first EP, Winter’s Dominion, didn’t quite hold up to my newer material. So I planned to re-record the whole thing and add bonus tracks for a 5th Anniversary Edition in 2016. Back to 2015 though, I visited my wife in Venezuela for a third time, and the same day I came back to the States, she moved to Argentina.
A few weeks after I got stateside, we both agreed that we’d forget about her immigration to the US and instead I would move to Buenos Aires, Argentina to live with her and her family. So once I knew I’d be in Argentina in 2016, most likely without any instruments, I knew I had to record my re-release of Winter’s Dominion before I left. Luckily I finished everything in time before the big move, mixing and all. When I officially moved to Buenos Aires in November 2015, I couldn’t bring any of my instruments or my gaming PC (which I used to record the finished songs for Winter’s Dominion: 5th Anniversary), and I sold my old laptop earlier in the year – but at least I had the finished recordings in the cloud somewhere. In 2016 I got an acoustic guitar and wrote a song for Ebon Arcanum with it, but I would not record music again for quite some time.
I held onto the finished recordings for over half a year, and finally when June 24th, 2016 rolled around, I released “Winter’s Dominion: 5th Anniversary“. It included re-recorded versions of the six songs on the original EP, the demo version of “Mountains of Madness” previously mentioned several paragraphs ago, an acoustic version of “Northern Blood”, and a brand new song, “Titan”, that would later be re-recorded and put on “Northern Winds & Winter Hymns” four years later. However, this re-release didn’t seem to gain the same amount of traction that the original did. Perhaps the three years since the last Northsong release caused many people to lose interest. Winter’s Dominion: 5th Anniversary would be the last thing I released until four years later.
During those four years in Argentina, I had hit a wall musically. I quickly lost interest in playing my acoustic guitar and ended up selling it the same year I got it. Because I had no instruments or computer to record or even write music, I spent the next few years focusing on my other hobbies. My wife had a small pink laptop I would sometimes use to write songs with Guitar Pro, but none of those were ever finished. I really thought all my projects had been officially and permanently abandoned. The only thing that happened during those four years that’s relevant to this story is that I went to another Alestorm concert in November 2017 and met up with Elliot again.
Shortly after, when we found out my wife was pregnant with my first child, I went back to the States in March 2018 to work and save a lot of money for when the baby comes. Dollars go a long way in Argentina, after all. While I was there, I repaired my old 7-string and used my brother’s guitar amp to start playing electric guitar again – at least for the time being. I bought Guitar Pro 7 and tried to get serious with writing music again, and even managed to finish a song that I started back in 2015 – later to be Shadowforge‘s “Breathe”. I also started listening to a lot of classic country music, and then graduated to more modern country artists while I was still in the States. Before heading back to Argentina in July 2018, I got myself a laptop and continued to write a few songs in Guitar Pro with it even after I got back to Buenos Aires.
Of course, becoming a father forces you to sacrifice a lot of time for your child, so after my son Michael was born in September 2018, I stopped writing music again after a brief resurgence. But this time, I at least had a laptop with Guitar Pro to quickly jot down any ideas I got. I started a few melodic death metal songs during the next year, and even finished a couple, but I didn’t have a project to release them under – not that I was recording any metal songs at the time, anyway. In 2019 I bought another acoustic guitar after gaining more and more interest in country music. I learned a lot of country songs and I had an idea to release some “low budget” covers of some of my favorites. It wasn’t until I, along with the rest of the world, was granted a lot of free time because of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 when I got a strong itch to continue to work on my metal projects again.
So, a couple of months after Buenos Aires had entered a period of mandatory lockdowns, I finally began recording the next Northsong album, six whole years after I had finished writing the songs for it. I still only had the one Ebon Arcanum track I wrote in 2016 for a new release under that project, but I did still really enjoy Awakening and thought it might be worthwhile to re-record it – not as an improvement on the original, but more as a “reimagining” of it. And then since I already had a few melodeath songs written, I figured if I keep the spark, I could revive Shadowforge. As it turned out, that’s exactly what happened. But I didn’t want to create yet another website, email address, and a bunch of social media profiles for a third project, which is how I got the idea for this website to consolidate all my projects into one platform.
By the time I launched the website, I had already finished most of the instrumentals and mixing for everything I had planned at the time. I continued to focus on my three projects equally with some sparse vocal recordings, but I received an offer from Jake, a friend from my old band Chains of Tyranny, to collaborate with him on a new project called Gravelord. I made the logo and artwork for our debut EP myself, and Jake did most of the instrument recordings, mixing, and mastering. Musically, I contributed a few ideas to the songwriting process, but my duties were mostly providing vocals and some lyrics for the tracks. This EP included a couple of re-recorded Chains of Tyranny songs, but the rest of them were started after we began collaborating for Gravelord.
While I recorded vocals for Gravelord, I would sometimes record some for the Shadowforge EP too. Unfortunately, I found that it was hard to find quiet time and a space to do that while living with 14 people in one apartment. But, after finishing the vocals for the Gravelord EP, I gave the debut Shadowforge EP priority over my other projects, and a couple of months later I finished the vocal performances and tweaked the previous mixes a bit. With everything ready to go, I started promoting the EP by premiering two songs a few weeks apart, and it was released shortly after on November 13th, 2020. Jake finished mixing the Gravelord EP shortly after that, and it was released a month and half later on December 31st, 2020.
While I still worked on some more parts of the next Northsong album after releasing those two EPs, I shifted my focus to Reawakening, the re-recording of Awakening. I spent three months finding time to record vocals and learning a lot of new techniques for mixing and mastering my music. By the time those three months were over, I finished the vocal recordings and I remixed the original mixes I had for Reawakening. The album was finally released on March 13th, 2021, just one week after I finished the recording process.
With three out of four albums from this release cycle out of the way, I began to focus my full attention on the next Northsong album, Northern Winds & Winter Hymns. After moving back to the States with my wife and son in April 2021, I ordered a lot of brand new recording equipment to assist me with finishing the new Northsong album, including a new mic setup and USB audio interface. Over several months I chipped away at recording the remaining vocal tracks, and so NW&WH was finally released on October 2nd, 2021.
Once that was out, phase one of my release schedule was completed, and I am now currently working on phase two, which will include content for all three of my main projects.
Cortland Runyon Music 