When I started working with The Story So Far, they were local Bay Area kids still figuring out what their band could become.
We made Under Soil and Dirt at The Panda Studios.
That record launched the band into international, full-time touring — approaching main support slots and a real career.
Then we made What You Don't See.
And everything exploded.
The audience grew. The tours got bigger. The expectations got bigger. Today, What You Don't See remains the band's most-streamed studio album.
Then The Curve Started To Flatten
By the third record, The Story So Far was already a major band.
The album debuted at #23 on the Billboard 200, but creatively I felt like we were starting to move sideways.
The timeline was tighter. The band was exhausted from years of touring. The process felt more focused on getting the next record done than discovering what the next record could become.
And years later, the streaming numbers reflect some of what I was feeling at the time.
Album one launched the band. Album two took everything to another level. Album three still succeeded, but the long-term growth had flattened.
That worried me.
Going into album four, I didn't want us to make another record that simply benefited from the momentum we'd already built.
I wanted us to go big again.
Proper Dose
By then, the band was even more burned out.
Management was changing. The band wanted to make the record somewhere remote so everyone could isolate, focus, and force the process forward.
In theory, it sounded perfect.
In reality, gear arrived weeks late, getting everyone fully engaged was difficult, and we left the remote studio with far less finished than we intended.
So we came back to The Panda Studios.
And I decided I wasn't cutting corners.
Proper Dose required me to actually produce.
I had to challenge the band, the label, management, and sometimes the entire process when I believed the songs could be better.
The safe move would have been to recreate the sound that had already made the band successful.
But the band was burned out on that version of itself, and I knew repeating the formula wasn't going to move us forward.
So we pushed.
Arrangements. Performances. Instrumentation. Electronics. Guitar tones. Vocals. Production.
And when it came time to finish the record, I brought in one of my heroes, Eric Valentine, to mix the album.
The Result
Proper Dose reversed the streaming decline from the self-titled record and became one of the strongest-performing albums in the band's catalog.
The Four-Album Curve
The Catalog
| Album | Spotify Streams | Daily Streams |
|---|---|---|
| What You Don't See | 211.2M | 74.5K |
| Proper Dose | 200.9M | 52.1K |
| The Story So Far | 167.4M | 54.9K |
| Under Soil and Dirt | 167.4M | 59.4K |
| I Want to Disappear | 73.9M | 47.0K |
The Run Ended. The Records Didn't.
After Proper Dose, my run with The Story So Far ended and the band continued with a different production team.
Creative relationships change.
But the work we made together kept growing.
Today, the four albums we made remain the band's four most-streamed studio records, and all four are still generating more daily Spotify streams than the studio album that followed.
That's not about rooting against what came next.
It's a testament to the value, longevity, and reach of the work we made together.
Proper Dose had some of the highest highs and lowest lows of my career. There were production problems, disagreements, strained relationships, and real personal costs that came with pushing as hard as I did.
But my responsibility was always to the music and what I believed it could become.
Years later, the numbers don't tell the whole story, but they reinforce something I believed at the time: the record was worth fighting for.
Four records. Seven years. Nearly 750 million streams.
They started as local kids. They became one of the defining bands of modern pop punk and eventually toured with Blink-182.
We helped build the sound that got them there. Then, when that sound started becoming a limitation, we pushed it somewhere new.
Sometimes producing means caring enough about the record to make the difficult call, even when you might not be the person making the next one.