In 30 days, sophomore CJ Schrieber raised $1,261 through kickstarter.com to fund his first extended play (EP.) With 37 backers, Schrieber created his first album titled “Reflections” which is now available on iTunes.

“My parents first found kickstarter and told me what it was, and at first I was confused about how it worked,” Schrieber said.

The program, founded as a non-profit organization in 2009, helps independent artists, musicians, film makers and more fund creative projects by matching creators with backers to raise the funds they need.

“About half of the backers I actually knew, the others were scattered all over the US,” Schrieber said.

The album consists of four tracks: “Cheater,” “Safe Haven,” “The Undisclosed” and “Reflections.”

“For ‘Cheater’ and ‘Safe Haven,’ the songwriting process was pretty much just waking up in the middle of the night with ideas. ‘Reflections’ was also a spur of the moment song I wrote. On the other hand, ‘The Undisclosed’ took my entire freshman year to write,” Schrieber said.

The experience started in March of 2013 when Schrieber created a demo, but Schrieber had been writing songs for the EP all throughout his freshman year, beginning with the song “Cheater.”

“The lyrics of ‘Cheater’ are about someone who is unfaithful in a relationship, but that was based on other’s experiences rather than mine,” Shrieber said.

Last year in study hall, Schrieber came up with the idea for Safe Haven, then went home and elaborated on it.

“The name came from an older song with similar riffs that I called Safe Haven, but it also came from the feeling that the tone and texture of the song evokes,” Schrieber said.

By January of last year, all Schrieber had written for the track “The Undisclosed” was a chord progression.

“When I was first writing it, I came up with this nice chord progression. Later, I wrote lyrics, but I took them out and just played the vocal pattern on guitar and layer the tracks,” Schrieber said.

The final song, the EP’s namesake, is an instrumental metal song composed of Schrieber’s earlier songwriting material.

“It was a synthesis of all of my songs over the years. Anyone who has a clear understanding of music can hear the lack of repetition, I changed time signature once every fifteen seconds,” Schrieber said.

After the experience was finished and the EP was uploaded, Schrieber went back to songwriting and now plans to create another album in the future.

“Looking back, I feel like it would’ve been a lot better if I had gone into a recording studio prior to actually recording. It was a lot different than what I normally put together in my basement. But overall, the experience was informative and helpful. I feel like I know a lot more than I did and look forward to another album,” Schrieber said.

The album was released to the public August 31 and is available for download on iTunes at https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/reflections-ep/id694235012.