#THE AUDIOS. god the nostalgia man i gotta do some

[sweetheartvalle]

i got into watching vine edit compilations on youtube again recently and icl if dnf were around during that era there’d be so many edits

[d00dt00nz]

Obligatory promo stuff at the top because it sucks and I hate it and let’s get it out of the way! follow me on twitter where I’m active, check me out on spotify for music, or like my facebook for sparse updates on music stuff. Thank you. The Cover art is by Ellie Tison

We're on the homestretch. It's just this song and a last one!

This song is one that I have a lot of feelings about, but it's a little bit hard to put them into words. It is probably the most self consciously “artistic” thing on this album, but I'm not sure how to talk about it so I'll just start off by going back to the beginning (actually a long time before the beginning).

At some point, I knew the album needed a slower, sadder song. I was really into the music of Randy Newman at the time and wanted to write something like something off of Randy Newman's Sail Away. I think that album sounds unlike anything. He just sounds so broken on there. It's got an incredibly minimalist arrangement [here I want you to increment a counter and make a nostalgia critic “bing” noise]. It's just strings and piano, and neither of them is playing anything too busy. It's got Randy Newman's tired voice over the whole thing talking colonialism, slavery, environmental disasters, and eventually how he's started to hate God. It's tremendously powerful and moving. Anyway in my hubris, I tried to do something like that and obviously it didn't work out so well. The arrangement was okay, and the chorus was okay, it just had really really bad lyrics outside of the chorus.

For a while I tolerated it, and it stayed on as an album candidate for a long time. Over time I became more and more unhappy with it. I re-wrote and re-recorded vocals for it a few times but never got a version that I liked. Still, I kept it in because the album needed a song “like that” on it. Things stayed like that for a few years until a few weeks ago.

A few weeks ago I was listening to a Beach Boys podcast at work. They were part way into their 15 hour analysis of Pet Sounds (that number is real). I was lapping up every second. Like many, I consider Pet Sounds to be one of the best albums ever recorded. I have 3 different remasters of it on my computer, and on my birthday I'll usually treat myself by doing a very close listening of the FLAC Super Audio CD version of it using a pair of expensive headphones and my DAW as a soundcard. I encourage you try something like that out. There is such an incredible sense of space and color in that music. It feels like you can move through the sonic ether and see each of the layers upon layers of incredibly dense music. It transports you to a different, much more beautiful, world. It's like heaven.

Obviously I don't really afford myself that luxury while driving around listening to hours and hours of podcasts at work (If I hear the phrase 'I heard this thing on a podcast' escape my mouth one more time I'm going to sew it shut). There's a ton of things to unpack though, so I really gotta recommend it. In this case, they were talking about the Pet Sounds song Don't Talk Put Your Head On My Shoulder. They played Brian Wilson's original piano demo of it and it stopped me right in my tracks. I had just pulled into the work driveway, but I was unable to leave the car listening to it. It was insanely haunting and insanely beautiful. I literally thought about the short clip all day. I don't think that Brian ever actually managed to outdo that demo, even with the recorded version. It's so simple but is filled with so much color and feeling. Every direction it goes is unexpected, but feels so right and natural at the same time. In a much larger sense of hubris than even before, I thought “oh man I want to write something like this”

That thought kind of simmered in my brain for some time. I was probably (very probably)“going through some shit” at the time. I think people get these really doomed lofty ideas when they're going through some shit. I met a guy at a party a few years back. His mom was a lawyer. He was a mess. It was late into the night (early in the morning) and most of the guys there were in the angry/paranoid/passed out stage. Me and him were on exactly the right amount of drugs to have a very friendly and sociable experience. My music was playing on the speakers. He kept telling me that it was fire. I kept talking about... well, I think I just kept talking.  The guy would later send me a text inviting me to what he called an “Andy Warhol's Factory style party”. The guy would later punch somebody's parent and disappear for a while. I don't know. I wasn't really friends with him. Anyway, what I mean to say with all of this is that I think we all get the urge to do something grandiose and insane when we're in a bad place. From my experience, it takes a lot of tempering and compromise to prevent it from becoming an “Andy Warhol's Factory style party”.

In this case I was lucky to be able to channel a lot of what I was feeling into lyrics. It was another instance of lying awake at night, rolling over, grabbing my phone, and just cranking it out (I'm talking about the song, not jacking off). These instances are like gambles. I always spend a while thinking to myself “is this going to be worth it?” because it ends up meaning you lose about an hour of sleep in the time you spend writing it – and ask my girlfriend, my sleep is sacred. In the end I was glad I wrote the lyrics. I ended up tweaking them a little to fit the meter of the song, but they're mostly as I wrote them.

Musically, I had a pretty good idea of how I wanted the song to go as I was writing the lyrics. At some point the next day I sat down and painstakingly pounded out the chord progression. My main goal was to write something that mixes up major and minor chords in a natural, but smart way (like Pet Sounds lol). I intentionally kept the arrangement pretty small (unlike Pet Sounds lol) so that you'd be able to hear the individual chord changes more. Maybe this was an ego driven bad decision. Maybe this was me exercising some kind of restraint. I still don't know. For the chorus section I got kind of lazy, I admit. It's mostly fine, I just think in retrospect it'd be really cool to have a sparse military snare doing little fills in there. I only thought about this after the song was finished, but I still think about it.

The vocals were done late one night when my parents were out (when everyone was out). I'd recorded saxes and backing vocals earlier on another song and was feeling pretty good. It's rare that I get a good recording session in nowadays what with work and adult life. I decided I'd take a shot at doing vocals for this. It was the last thing that needed to be done for my album. I recorded them sitting down, which is actually bad practice and something I don't usually do, but I thought maybe it'd allow for a more intimate sound and some more control over my falsetto. It took many many tries to get things that were on pitch, and I knew this song would be a wash if I wasn't extremely in tune most of the time. I was maybe a little bit more stoked than I should have been at the end of the process, but I'm still pretty happy with the melody. There are a few parts where my doubletracked vocal performances get out of sync and it kills me to hear. I really really hate it. When it works though, it works.

I think writing this song forced me to think in a more musically experimental way, which I've been slacking on for a while. I'm pretty happy with the result, and hopefully this will bring back some kind of drive to be a little more creative with my songwriting.