The State of The Project | 2026

The State of the Project | 2026

Workflow, New Music, and Building Mission Control

Hello, everyone, and welcome. Whether you’ve been following my musical journey for years or you’re completely new here, I wanted to sit down and do a bit of a "brain dump" on the state of my music project, The Second Messenger.

If you’ve been around for a while, it might look like I’ve completely disappeared. My last release, Interstellar Love Song, came out in December 2025, and since then, things have been quiet on the surface. Historically, I’ve managed about one single release a year. Going from an initial idea to a fully produced, distributed track is a slow, grueling process when you're doing it all yourself.

Lately, I’ve been working quietly behind the scenes to change that. I've been completely restructuring my workflow, automating the boring business elements, and setting up a foundational baseline so I can finally step into a phase where I can focus purely on creating music and engaging content.

Here is exactly where things stand, what I’ve been up to, and where we are headed next.

Shifting Gears: School, Intentional Practice, and Creative Growth

For a long time, I operated under a classic freelance and music teacher schedule. But as life evolved, I realized I needed a recalibration of how I approached my career and my music. With the encouragement of my wife, I made the decision to return to school full-time.

I chose to attend Chaffey College to study Business Administration and Computer Information Systems. It might sound completely random for a musician, but to me, it makes perfect sense. Ever since my teenage years in the late 2000s, I’ve embraced a strict DIY entrepreneurial mentality. Back then, if your indie project needed a website or a landing page, you didn't hire someone — you learned to code and design it yourself. Blending that structural, logical mindset with creative art is something I’ve done for over a decade.

When I went back to school full-time, I had to quit my job as a music teacher and scale back my web design business, A2Zeta Creative Design. Initially, I was terrified that walking away from teaching music every day would cause my skills to rust. When you teach all day, you constantly have an instrument in your hand, drilling fundamentals with students.

To my pleasant surprise, the exact opposite happened. When I was teaching, I would come home so mentally exhausted from guiding everyone else's musical journeys that I had zero energy left for my own. Now, even though I spend fewer total hours holding a guitar each day, the time I do spend is entirely focused and intentional. I’ve made massive strides in my technical skills, drilling fast shredder techniques I never had the bandwidth to master before, and my songwriting has completely opened up.

School has also given me some amazing, unexpected creative outlets. I recently wrapped up a semester in choir, took a fantastic music theory class, and even performed in a sci-fi, alien-punk theater production called Punk Rock Girl last fall. Playing live on stage as an actor-musician completely pushed me out of my comfort zone and breathed new life into my perspective on performance.

Building Mission Control

During spring break this year, I finally found a clear week to tackle a passion project I’ve been mapping out in notebooks for years: building a dedicated website for The Second Messenger.

What started as a fun break project to test out some cutting-edge web design frameworks quickly snowballed into something massive. Even when classes resumed, I spent every spare second developing it. Today, thesecondmessenger.com is officially live in a soft-launch beta phase.

This site is designed to be the central hub — the "Mission Control" — for this entire project. Instead of relying solely on third-party algorithms, this platform is a direct portal to my audience. It’s built to handle early content access, exclusive behind-the-scenes deep dives, member profiles, and interactive community polls. Even without a single dime spent on promotion, the organic traffic metrics are already growing steadily, which is incredibly motivating.

The Hard Truth: Navigating My Creative Hurdles

While the infrastructure is coming together, being a solo DIY creator means hitting massive bottlenecks. I want to be transparent about what I’m currently struggling with:

• The Video Pipeline: I am a musician, not a filmmaker or video editor. Right now, I'm capturing video using my Galaxy tablet routed into OBS on my PC, or occasionally trying to use my phone. Filming yourself while trying to remain in a deeply focused, creative audio engineering headspace is incredibly jarring. Going back to watch two hours of b-roll just to find a usable 30-second clip takes hours I simply don't have.
• Single-by-Single Artwork: Because albums take so long to pull together, I focus on releasing singles. But every single streaming release requires dedicated artwork. I don’t like using AI art—it usually turns out terrible—and I want a human touch. Ideally, I want different visual artists to interpret the specific vibe of each song, whether it’s a gritty rock track or a vibrant pop-punk anthem. Outsourcing and managing that process takes a massive amount of time and energy.
• The Social Media Grind: Industry experts constantly tell independent artists that they have to live on TikTok and Instagram. To be entirely honest, I absolutely hate it. I don’t doom scroll, I rarely find value in it, and the endless cycling of recycled trends feels deeply inauthentic to me. I want my focus to be on writing great songs, not trying to fit myself into a 10-second algorithmic box.

Expanding the Team: Looking for Collaborators

Recognizing these weaknesses has made me realize that to make The Second Messenger sustainable for the long run, I can't keep doing everything entirely on my own. My unique advantage lies in combining my music with my computer programming skills to build the platform. But for the rest — the video editing, the social media management, the visual aesthetics — I am entirely open to building a team.

I’m also actively looking for a musical collaboration partner. Some of my biggest influences are iconic songwriting duos: John Lennon and Paul McCartney, or Mark Hoppus and Tom DeLonge. There is a specific creative energy that comes from having a partner to bounce ideas off of, trade vocals with, and share the songwriting burden. If you're a creator, editor, or musician who aligns with this vision, my ears are completely open.

On the Horizon: New Tunes and Virtual Stages

Despite the hurdles, the momentum is real, and the future lineup of music is incredibly exciting.

Next up on the release schedule is a track called Lost in Space. This song is completely finished, mixed, and ready for distribution. It is an epic project of monumental proportions that completely shifts gears at the end, bringing in a full orchestra for a wild, cinematic finish.

Following that, I am working on a definitive Second Messenger version of Chemistry — a song originally tracked with my old group, Action at a Distance. It’s a track incredibly close to my heart, and this new version sounds unbelievable; I just have a few guitar parts to tighten up and re-record.

I’m also laying the groundwork for several brand-new tracks, and my goal is to completely document their creation from the initial scratch lyrics all the way through tracking, mixing, mastering, and the final public release.

Finally, I’m bringing live performance back into the fold. Because I drive a compact Camaro, packing up a massive PA system, drum kits, and heavy tube amps isn't realistic. Instead, I’ve been designing a highly portable, tech-forward, one-man-band live rig. I'm currently saving up for an in-ear monitor system, a reliable wireless guitar setup, and a dedicated live vocal microphone. Once this rig is ready, I will be leveraging the new website to host interactive, high-quality virtual live streams where I can play sets, take song requests, host Q&As, and hang out with you all in real time.

A Heartfelt Thank You

Right now, The Second Messenger's audience is small — if you are reading this post, you are likely one of fewer than a thousand people. And honestly? That is completely fine by me.

Success for me has never been about chasing massive wealth or superficial fame. It’s about keeping the project alive, creating art, and seeing it resonate. When someone messages me to say they connected with a lyric, or when I see that someone has added one of my tracks to their personal music library to listen to again, that is the ultimate victory. That single interaction makes a whole year of behind-the-scenes struggle completely worth it.

Thank you for bearing with my learning curves, my video editing experiments, and my quiet periods. The foundation is built, "Mission Control" is live, and the best music I have ever written is right around the corner.

Thank you for visiting thesecondmessenger.com. Please feel free to create an account, check out the beta, and sign up for the mailing list to get early access to Lost in Space before it hits streaming platforms.

Let's see where this ride takes us. I'll see you in the next one.

— Michael Zeta