#it's literally three chords why can i still not easily find songs that use them in that order

[eggmeralda]

thinking about my favourite chord progressionnnnn

[lazywonderlvnd]

Imagine Harry learning to play the guitar after the war and Draco finds out when they start dating and is obv a slut for it. Anyway what I'm here to beg for is sexy-guitar-player-Harry smut please and thank

first of all nonners I’m so sorry this took me lit rally 59 years to answer!!!! when I saw it in my inbox last week I was abt to answer n be like yes. this. And then realized it needed to be written and got sidetracked w the first himbo harry installment but here it is now and let me just SAY this trope is my new FAVORITE thing in the world oh my goddddd when I tell u the way I’ve been yelling to glows and cielia abt it 👁👄👁

highly recommend listening to wonderwall when it comes up to Complete the Experience. hope u enjoy ❤️

“I’m sorry, he what?”

“Yeah, he’s really good,” said Weasley. He nodded towards the acoustic guitar hanging on the wall; Draco had taken notice of it the first time he’d seen Harry’s flat but never paid it much mind after that, taking it for decoration, or perhaps an unused gift. “He’ll play if you ask him. He doesn’t like showing off.”

“Which is silly,” Granger said, rolling her eyes. “I’ve told him, just because he’s good at it doesn’t make it showing off. I wish he’d play for people more often.”

“He has literally never mentioned this to me.” He felt utterly stunned and completely cheated. He tried to picture it and couldn’t. “How long’s he been playing?”

“Picked it up after the war. It was kind of funny, actually  --” Weasley started saying, but Harry came back into the room -- still pulling his shirt on -- and he broke off, giving Draco a significant look that told him to bring it up.

“Harry,” said Draco imperiously, to which he received two raised eyebrows as Harry fell into his favourite armchair and pushed a hand through his still-damp curls. Draco matched his expression and glanced at the guitar. Harry followed his gaze, looking genuinely confused.

“What, what is it?”

“When were you going to tell me you play?”

“What, guitar?”

“Yes, guitar.”

He shrugged and grabbed for one of the beers on the table, wandlessly magicking the cap off. “I dunno. When it came up, I guess.”

“The way your friends tell it you’re quite good.”

Harry gave Weasley and then Granger a sour look; both of them gave it right back to him, which was, admittedly, amusing.

“I can play all right,” he said vaguely, and took a swig of his drink. It did make some sort of sense, now Draco thought about it -- the tips of Harry’s fingers were far, far too calloused to have been just from casual Quidditch and Auror training. 

“You know, Harry, it actually comes off as more pretentious when you act like this,” said Granger. Weasley snorted. Harry glared at her. “Just play for him, won’t you? And us too -- it’s been ages.”

“Yeah, what’s that Muggle song you play sometimes that I like?” said Weasley.

“I dunno, I’ve played a lot of Muggle songs.”

“He means Wonderwall, Harry,” said Granger, grinning. Harry finally smiled too, and although their little Muggle joke was lost on Weasley and himself he was glad to see that it had apparently been the prodding Harry needed to give in. He set his beer back down and went to get the guitar; something about the way he threw the thin and fraying strap over his head, the way his hands went effortlessly to their places, was unexpectedly attractive. The left one curled easily around the neck of the instrument, heavily-roughened fingers finding their odd positions on the strings, something Draco had always thought looked very painful.

He plucked a few chords and then began fiddling with the knobs at the head of the guitar, tuning it in what was clearly the Muggle fashion, which against his will left Draco completely fascinated. Having no musical inclination himself, he could make nothing of the process except that Harry apparently heard the discordant notes in there well enough to be able to fix them, and finally when he brought his thumb down across all six strings it sounded as sweet and clear as if it had been done by magic.

“Course he likes Wonderwall,” Harry said to Granger even as he began playing, fingers shifting and moving and contorting to create the notes while he strummed softly, effortlessly, and the music crawled over Draco’s skin and inside of him. “I remember Dudley listening to it, like, what … summer before sixth year? On the radio constantly.”

“Sounds about right,” said Granger. 

 Draco had stopped paying attention to what they were saying, though. Either because the music itself had something haunting about its melody or because it was Harry playing it, or perhaps a combination of both, Draco felt a pit of emotion form in his chest to round off the edges of his growing arousal.

And then he started singing, and Draco swallowed very hard. Granger dropped a head onto Weasley’s shoulder and watched with a tender expression, Weasley similarly enamored. Harry had his eyes on his hands for the most part, closing them a few times throughout, looking as comfortable now as he did on a broomstick.

Only three months of official dating had not prepared Draco for the flood of emotions he now felt, yet the most pressing matter had become the semi trapped uncomfortably in his trousers. He wanted those talented fingers in his mouth, to feel the callouses on his tongue and taste Harry on them; he wanted to feel them on the sensitive skin of his inner thighs and hip bones, to have them buried so deeply in his arse that he forgot where he ended and Harry began. 

Of course, he had to keep this to himself for the next hour, until he was able to get Granger and Weasley out of the flat. And once he did, he didn’t bother dragging Harry to his bedroom -- Draco pushed him up against the front door that had just closed behind his friends and hauled him into a kiss that he felt Harry grinning into.

“I thought you seemed tetchy,” he muttered, hands dropping to Draco’s hips. “Oasis really does it for you, huh?”

“What the hell is oasis?”

“The band who does the song.”

“Yeah, I don’t think it’s the band who does it for me.” He kissed Harry again, maybe a little too hungrily, and dug a fist into his side when he started laughing. “Shut up, why the hell didn’t you ever tell me you played?”

Harry pulled his head back, looking at Draco with an arched brow and an infuriating smirk. 

“What do you mean, ever? We’ve only been together three months, it didn’t come up.”

“God,” Draco muttered, and now he reached down and pressed his palm against Harry’s cock, pleased to feel how hard he was in spite of his ruthless teasing. “You’re so annoying.”

“Well if I’d known how randy it would make you I might’ve played for you a long time ago.”

Having had quite enough of Harry’s particularly sarcastic brand of wit, he ignored this last and reached for one of his hands, removing it from his own hip and bringing it to his lips. It was extremely satisfying to watch the smirk disappear from Harry’s face when he sucked one of his fingers into his mouth. 

“Bit fetish-y, isn’t this?” Harry said breathily, eyes wide as he watched, looking half amused and half awed. In retaliation, Draco took another finger into his mouth and slid his tongue between them, tasting soap and salt, feeling the callouses on the tips of his fingers and letting that sensation grip his insides like an iron fist. “Jesus Christ,” Harry groaned; his free hand went to Draco’s jaw, holding him steady, and with a truly outstanding audacity began fucking Draco’s mouth with his fingers.

They dipped bluntly past his uvula, scraping the back of his throat so he gagged around their intrusion. Saliva built with an excessive speed that had it drooling out of the corners of his lips and coating Harry’s knuckles. Draco closed his eyes and let it happen, opening his throat against the relentless assault and curling his hands in Harry’s shirt just to steady himself. 

They were gone too soon and Harry’s mouth replaced them, much gentler but still with a tangible sense of urgency about it.

When he broke away, he said against Draco’s lips, “Like my fingers, do you?”

Draco merely nodded, feeling their wetness against his cheek. 

“Then turn around,” said Harry, “and I’ll fuck you with them.”

Draco let out a soft, embarrassing whimper and let Harry spin them around and press him against the door, cheek-first. He undid his flies himself and Harry tugged them down his legs and off his feet, allowing Draco to spread them slightly. Harry’s fingers were there immediately, sliding slick between his cheeks and over his hole. The memory of Harry’s hands on the guitar was still so fresh, his fingers changing chords effortlessly, sacrificing them to blisters and callouses and roughened skin for the music they created, and Draco closed his eyes against a fresh wave of arousal and another pang of emotion.

“You really are incredible,” said Draco, biting back a moan as two of those dexterous fingers slipped inside of him. Harry fucked him with them slowly, carefully, seeking out his prostate and angling for it each time once he’d found it. Draco turned his face to press his forehead against the door, eyes still closed, nails scraping wood. “And I like that song.”

“It’s a good one,” Harry agreed. His hot breath caressed the back of Draco’s neck, fingers pumping, his other hand back at Draco’s waist. “I have a million more I’d love to show you.”

Draco didn’t bother trying to find his voice again: instead he pushed back against Harry’s driving fingers, everything that wasn’t the relentless stabbing against his prostate driven from his mind. His neglected cock slapped against the door with every thrust, the red and irritated head dripping pre-come against the wood. Only half conscious of the decision to do so, he wrapped his hand around it and pulled and squeezed and zeroed in on the bursts of pleasure radiating outwards from inside his body until it all spilled over and he came in great pulses, gasping for breath while Harry kept at it. 

The fingers slowed as he reached his peak and began coming down but they didn’t stop, nor was his prostate given much of a break. Harry reinforced his grip on Draco’s waist and kept pumping, a steadier rhythm that nevertheless rubbed and prodded at that little bundle, making his nerves tingle and fizzle and scream out their overstimulation.

“Harry,” he said weakly, knees buckling. “Please …”

It could have been comical the way Harry followed his movement as he slid down the door to the ground, except it wasn’t. It was infuriating, actually, and felt at once like more than he could possibly handle and exactly what he needed. His forehead and his hands went back to the wood, bracing himself as Harry, kneeling behind him, continued fucking his beautiful, merciless fingers and stimulating Draco’s overworked prostate. 

He pushed a third one in alongside the other two and Draco was shocked to feel a hot tear leak out of the corner of his eye. Harry crooked them expertly, with all the confidence and surety of someone who had done this a million times, could do it in their sleep, as if it was not the guitar strings but Draco’s body he was strumming now, an instrument fine-tuned to his own particular cadence and rhythm, which he and no one else could play quite right.

Lips parted, hot breath echoing off the door and back into his face, Draco allowed himself to be taken apart with the same ferocious intensity he’d seen Harry use on the guitar. Each stroke brought him back to full hardness, each stab against his prostate made his nerves sing a tormented chorus, drowning out the pain of the wooden floor against his bare knees. 

“Shit,” Draco choked out, “I’m gonna come again …”

“Well that’s the idea,” said Harry. His voice was full of that same witty and well-meaning sarcasm Draco liked so much, even when it made him feel like punching him. Snatches of the song came back to him, Harry’s voice when he sang it, the expert shifting of his fingers where they pressed and plucked at the strings like he was making love to them. It was all so very much. 

He came a second time without even bothering to touch his cock, because he just didn’t fucking need it. His body thrummed and vibrated like a snapped rubber band while Harry coaxed him along his high and back down again. When he finally pulled his fingers out he leant forward over Draco’s back and kissed the side of his neck, then the corner of his jaw. 

“You know you make much lovelier sounds than the guitar, just so we’re clear,” he said, and Draco, with what strength he had left, shoved Harry and watched him fall sideways laughing. 

[worldsover]

Dal Segno ft. Chuu

length ✦ 3570

genres ✧ music making; oral fixation; facefuck; subby!Chuu

✦✧✦✧✦✧

Composition is only fifty percent of the process, you've heard, but it's closer to ten for you. For the importance of a solid melody and chord progression with the right instruments and singer, a song becomes less than the sum of its parts with bad mixing because all that effort goes to waste when you can’t hear something, or when something is too loud, or when a certain je ne sais quoi is wrong. But you do know. You don't have to be a chef to be a food critic but it certainly helps. Avoid muddling the lows as it waters down the soup. Carve space in the highs to prevent too much salt from killing the taste buds. Have at most five sounds at a time or else the flavors clash. Focus on these basic techniques to guide you as repetition wears down your mind. Funny. Repetition legitimizes especially in music yet here you are fatigued by repetition as though you weren't down four cups of black coffee. Repetition legitimizes. “From the sign,” the translation reads. Notation, simply instructing a musician to return to a certain point in a piece. You recognize it as an intro song you wrote years ago.

Glass and foam separate the undersized room. Cheap ramen and dampness in the hot air contribute to the odor. You would keep the fan on, if it were worth the extra time filtering out faint noise from recordings. The only scent that keeps you sane is a slight strawberry flavor lingering in the room. Jiwoo. Your muse. A large clock holds both of its hands near one with the lack of natural light muddling whether it’s AM or PM. Studios were always underground man-caves whether they were discount rooms or the signature workspace of the biggest producers. Here you are in the former. Look down at the Macbook and all the wires, sliders, and knobs. Deep breath. “Take 63,” you say into the cheap control room microphone.

“Not good enough.”

“Again.”

“One more.”

Look up. Jiwoo sucks on a grape lollipop. You stare. Watching her fixated on getting all flavor out of the purple sweet derails your flow state. See, work had a rhythm. Listen, volume up, hotkey to copy this clip, volume down. The obvious innuendo sends you offbeat. That perky butt bending over to get a notebook filled with lyrics entrenches the folds of your brain. She didn’t have to wear that skirt. You’ve seen that skirt already and you wish she weren’t wearing it. Oh, you really wish she weren’t wearing that skirt. Guilt sets in. You’re a trusted coworker, she, a naive girl. It takes a while to find your groove again. Your stare has yet to cease until she finally returns the eye contact with candy still in mouth. Her pink tongue laps to secure all the sugar and red pillows engulf the ever-shrinking circle. Pop. Anyone else and it would be calculated action.

“Oppa." Her voice resounds in your monitor headphones. "I don’t know if these harmonies really make sense. Why did you write the second voice to cross down below the main line? Plus it goes so low."

“To be fair, you wrote both of those melodies and you said you wanted them in the same song. Tell me anywhere else they’d work.”

“Ugh, let’s figure this out later. Next song.“

Dozens of takes later and Jiwoo’s frustration causes her to make mistakes. Sometimes she even tries to start singing with the sucker in her mouth. For the character she plays, you know she’s a professional and that she can be better. Yet hours later, she still could not get the vocal runs right. Incomplete songs bloat your project folder: "Jiwoo - Mania", "Jiwoo - Look Closer", "Jiwoo - Untitled Idea 21". Just a small side project that the company approved during another ample period of break time between comebacks. That’s why the director didn’t even let you use the company’s facilities, instead opting to rent out this cheap closet of a studio. At least no one would be mad about the amount of time you spent recording together.

You shift seats from the leather office chair to the white lovechair, the only two pieces of furniture that fit comfortably in the room. Jiwoo follows suit and leaves the recording booth, really more of a phone booth in square footage, while she huffs and puffs on her candy.

“I’m tired, oppa,” she says.

“Me too, Jiwoo. May I remind you that I’m not getting paid extra for this. Are you gonna focus or what?” your voice just a few cents down, just a bit harsher.

“I, I’m sorry.” A lick anyway. Her meek tone disappears, “Ya! You know how good your royalties are gonna be. Sole producer and all that. Plus, here you are still doing all this work for me." Why were you working so hard on this? "You know, if you just taught me how to use Ableton-”

“Then I’d be out of a job.”

Jiwoo frowns, “Wow, selfish much? You could’ve joined me as a trainee.”

“Nah, no way. Fish dance better.”

“Shut up, oppa. You would’ve easily made it with your, um, musical talent.” She clamps down on the lollipop with her mouth.

“You good? What was that?”

“Let’s," she stands promptly, "get back to recording.”

Crack. Jiwoo bites down on the lollipop and throws the stick in the trash. In ten minutes, she nails the verse she spent hours trying to get right. It'd be really nice to know what catalyzed that rally. You'd ask but driving Jiwoo back to her dorm is quiet as usual.

✦✧✦✧✦✧

Make a good impression on someone, anyone, on your first day as a mixing engineer. That’s why you returned to the Blockberry Creative building with an extra bar of Melona in hand. A simple bribery. Light beamed down between two skyscrapers on a short girl with long hair and strands of bangs adorning her forehead. She stood outside the lobby, introducing herself to every passerby. You had to pinch her cheeks, the intrusive thought screamed.

She scurried up to you. “Hi! I’m Kim Jiwoo and I’m going to become an idol!”

Ah, a trainee. You already knew she was destined to become one. Well, not literally, you weren’t in charge of that. But her overflowing charm was impossible to ignore. You had to tease her though, “Are you sure?”

“Hey! What would you know about that, mister?” she said.

You bit down on your mango. “Mister? First of all, I’m only a high school senior,” her lips rounded in surprise, “And second, I’m your new audio guy, and I know for a fact they’re debuting you girls in order of talent.”

“Woooow. Well, I’ll have you know, I have a great voice!” She certainly spoke lyrically.  “Wait a minute, I didn’t know they hired people that young.” You pointed at her. “Okay, I’m in high school too. But that’s different, idols start this age.”

“I guess. I’ve been making music ever since I was a kid, and they liked what I had,” you said and Jiwoo nodded in understanding.

She fluttered her eyebrows. “Sooo, is that mango ice cream for me? Oppa?” A little surprised she already called you that, but it sounded right.

“No, I have this unopened strawberry-” Jiwoo snatched the half-eaten cold treat from your hand, and started licking it. Trouble she would be.

You spent many recording sessions together, alone after all the other members left. She cozied up to you because her little musical snippets had to become full-fledged tracks and you helped her out every time.

Something changed over the years however. Your interactions became colder. It felt like you were the only one who she would respond to in a deeper voice. Jiwoo wouldn't pepper you with silly acts or mess around. Maybe she took you more seriously which is how you managed to make more songs together regardless. Then, you stood idly by and watched her debut. Who didn't love her? But when she was with you, you missed the playfulness, the ice cream and her riffing over your playful guitar strums. It turned less of a hobby and more of a job though you never regretted any second with Jiwoo regardless.

Under the Earth's largest natural satellite, you shared a simple meal in black bean noodles. She was still in her hippie outfit from the comeback, and you handed her your jacket since it was cold. You realized, there was something else there that you were too inexperienced to notice. Your bodies' radiation replace the chill in the air, a bubble with just the two of you eating on the grass in a park near your dorm. A cliche slurping on one noodle and Jiwoo pulled away. In embarrassment, like a damn anime character, she hiccuped. Good thing you didn't close your eyes when you leaned in.

“Wanna make an album together?” Jiwoo says.

“Sure.”

You threw away the noodles’ package and escorted her home. That was all you expected anyway. Fine.

✦✧✦✧✦✧

“That’s enough!”

Three goddamn weeks. It's been three goddamn weeks and you've barely made any progress.

Barge into the booth, slam the door shut and raise your tone, just below a shout, “I've had it up to here! You know how many of my songs have been mashed together in some unholy quest for your perfection? Just one unknown something is missing and either you start complaining or we move on to the next."

She backs up from the mic to the insulated wall but you continue, paying no heed to her, as you spout your piece to the artificially cold air, "You know how much time I’ve spent outside working on these songs? These are songs I’ve saved up over years. And you trash them like they’re nothing. How do you even manage to record LOONA tracks?”

Regret sinks in. This was your passion project as much as hers. Was it frustration from the recordings? Weeks of the same routine and it took until now for you to give in to your temper.

"It wouldn't even be that bad! If you could just one time, you could be cute or cheerful again with me, or,” Fuck. So stupid. You don’t have to take your friendships for granted like this. You’re lucky enough she treats you as much. “Hold on. Wait, I'm-"

Examine her face. It’s not sour and she hasn’t stormed out or even slapped you.

“No, no. You don’t have to say it. I’m. I’m sorry oppa.” She looks down. “I'm the one messing up after all." Her heartbeat a harsh snare drum. "And you. You're. Different. Looking at you always made me feel some, something funny. Not funny but? Ugh. I wish I could explain it.”

You hold in your confusion.

She blabbers on, “Like, are. Are you mad? I promise you, I,” A nervous breath, ”I like you. Okay?"

Your confusion grows like the length of your silence.

"I’m just acting how I really am with you. Do you want to maybe, I don't know, like," her voice decrescendos, "Um. Punish me?”

Your heart, your brain are deprived of blood as it all rushes down. Did you hear that right? Not an apology, not retribution, but a call to punishment? Misinterpreting her, the consequences would be dire but that damned demure tone for such an erotic request. Was Jiwoo the exact type of slut constructed in your mind? The one that made you feel sinful for even imagining. No, no, there's no way.

Too late. Jiwoo must have noticed the absurd bulge now. It had to be these Adidas pants today. Fuck it. Life can’t be lived fully without risk. Hopefully, the same switch turned in her mind. You remove all ire from your face and say in earnest, “Do you like games?"

She lights up a little. You sigh relieved.

"Let’s try…”, you say, ”Strip recording.” She lights up a little more, so you go on, ”If I mess up anything, the mix, the composition, the arrangement, I’ll take off a piece of clothing. Your choice. And every time you mess up-”

Jiwoo unbuttons her denim shorts and brings them down her tight legs.

“D- did I say now?”

However, with her resolve steeled, she continues pulling them. "So what? I did mess up, right?" she says coquettish. Deliberate the turn she makes when she bows down to remove the shorts from her legs, Jiwoo reveals a hint of her innie pussy on that same little ass that ran through your mind earlier. A small trace of her thighs glistens, the only thing reflecting the single lightbulb’s glow in the microphone’s abode. She turns back to face you. "Please. Punish me."

Step closer until Jiwoo backs up to the soundproofing. She’s an eighth note away from your face, flashing her beady eyes and a coy smile, ”Where's your underwear?" A little drop spills out onto the floor, "And why are you so wet, Jiwoo-ah?”

Red on her cheeks, like she only now realized her dishevelment in front of you. “You just… Something about you snapping at me. I don’t get it either. I knew you'd do it, some day, I wanted you to," she mumbles in her best efforts to answer you.

“Have you ever worn underwear to the recordings?”

Those efforts continue to fail.

"Oh, Kim Jiwoo. What do I do with you?" One of your hands grabs her cheek. The other crawls down her back to grab her cheek.

“Oppa… Do I have to say it?”

“I want to hear every." Smack. "Word." Smack. She slips a moan.

“Can you," she says, "can you use my mouth?”

You disguise your long pause as thought, teasing the bare skin of her ass with your exploratory fingers to bide time, but it's an expression of your shock. The interruption helps you come up with a more suitable punishment however.

“How about this then. Every time you mess up, you have to give me a blowjob. Call?”

“Call!” Once more, unprompted, she kneels down in front of you and claws away your track pants. You roll with the punches.

"Oppaa," with an pronounced pop and in a sing-songy rhythm, "I've always wanted to know, if your dick-" It certainly didn't need Jiwoo's dainty hands pulling on your boxers, as it would've sprang out on its own with how like diamond your cock is getting.

"Fuuuck," the first profanity you ever hear her utter, she lilts. "Please. Oppa. Fuck my face?"

After all she said, she could still surprise you. Bring your hips forward and just as you would've her pussy, tease Jiwoo’s lips with the head of your dick. She parts them open, starved, anxious.

Hold her by the chin. "Wait."

She freezes at the command. Again, like foreplay, rub her lips with that head making them turn redder and more plump. You sweep aside her bangs to see her begging eyes. More importantly, slide your dick up to her nude forehead to slap as a first act of retribution. “A-ah!” Jiwoo stutters as you slap her face with your manhood again and again. Bring your cock back down and she's already a mess without you even having entered her mouth. A little drool from her shut lips gently massages your balls while a bit of precum drools from your slit to meet those lips.

Jiwoo mumbles as best as she can with you holding her jaw shut and your dick on her lips, "Please. Please. Shove your dick in me. I need you in my mouth."

You squint your rough eyes to command her.

Muffled still, "Oppa. Please. I. I need to taste you. You just, you're so thick and you're so long and cock is perfect and please I just-"  Loosen the grip on her chin to let her envelop the entire tip with her warm lips. "Mmmmm..." the moan resonates a saw wave and your stern resolve fades away on your first entrance into her face but it returns as her teeth rub against you. She quickly readjusts her jaw but it takes multiple attempts of you pulling out and her sucking you back until only silken lips hold your cock's head. Finally. A focused glint in her eyes. She endeavours to keep your tip in her mouth as long as possible.

You were mad at her earlier, weren't you?

Recall this anger and press yourself into her with all your hips' strength, working against the force of her lip's airtight suction. Saliva leaks to betray the seal. Jiwoo's prying tongue explores the underside of your cock but you reach an impasse while she's not even halfway down the shaft. You shove your dick deeper but to no avail and tears roll down her eyes joining the fluids coating her lips. Thus you exit back out. And back in you go to repeat and repeat and slowly increase your rate, becoming rough sex with her diligent mouth. All the positions you’ve imagined fucking her little pussy, you picture using her throat instead. Even in this compact studio, the couch, chair and desk would provide ample support for you to use her in many ways. The dirty thoughts inspire your speed right now. She slurps and gulps at every quick plunge but you realize her moans and rumbles aren't just incoherent reactions. You decelerate.

“Ah, ahhh, ahhhhhh… Ah’ve ahways- Hmph.” She slurs as she tries her hardest to communicate while her airway is blocked.

She slides up your cock to catch some air, “Thought about it- Mmm.”

“Your dick in my mouth and it’s just so pew, fect- Ahhh.” Jiwoo's lips let go gently then her tongue sticks out to lick up your cock and she shows off a trail of spit leading to your tip. A less patient man would’ve jerked himself off right there to grant her eyes and open mouth's unison request to feed on your cum.

Instead you retort, “You think you’ve earned it? Not even halfway down. Going nowhere, just like our recording sessions, huh?”

“Shut up!”

“Oof.” You’re already weak in the knees so Jiwoo's one handed shove sends your tailbone to the floor. Since you’re still dazed by her confounding strength, she takes initiative and kowtows her head into your lap to crawl down your cock with her tiny lips. Fondling your balls, Jiwoo starts from the furthest point she could muster on your shaft up to your cock head. Her tongue follows back and she starts playing under your tip to swirl that tongue around the most sensitive parts until it explores your slit. You buckle and groan. Jiwoo sucks and spits and sucks while she circles only the most minimal twisting motion of her lips on your head. This is the Jiwoo you know. Relentless. Only now your load is her magnus opus.

Her right hand strays downwards and her face on your dick blocks a full view but you can tell that hand is working as intensely as her mouth. As she strokes herself with more vigor, she starts humming a satisfied melody on your tip. In kind, your subtle grunts turn into full-bodied moans. You're a single measure away from your coda so you reach down and pull her off your cock by grabbing her neck.

You glare into her. “Desperate little girl, aren't you?”

Her breath is stilted and she's nearly shaking. “Please…” she sobs, ”You, you want it as bad as I do right?” Of course. “Won't you just cum for me?” Not now. Not when you have putty in your hands.

“You're making a mess. You can't take me all the way down. And I see that it’s not just your saliva coating the floor.” Point to the spot where she kneels, her drool joins a stain growing ever larger with a strand of juice from her pussy flowing as you continue to berate her. Then you point to her hand. Ha. “Were you playing with yourself using my pencil?”

“No… Wait!”

You back off. “Your top’s a mess too. Anyone can tell I just fucked your face.” You take off your black hoodie and give it to her. “I’ll see you tomorrow for our next session.”

“Wait, we didn’t book tomorrow, did we? Also, you can’t just leave me like this! Oppa!”

"I said, I'll see you tomorrow. I have to go,“ you remind her, ”Ha Rin’s picking you up. And give me back that pencil.”

She hands it to you, unable to meet your eyes despite hers lusting over your cock. You'll definitely use the alluring musk on it for later to save you from your self-induced blue balls. Exit the booth. Of course she barely waits to use your hoodie the same way since she doesn’t notice you lingering in the room. Instead of hiding the grey long sleeve that soaks her neck, your used sweatshirt covers Jiwoo’s face as her fingers make the mess on the floor larger.

✦✧✦✧✦✧

AFF, AO3

Swear to god I’m not just writing the cutest idols to write for. I mean maybe I am but also this answer from @nsfwtwicecatcher​ and all the subsequent pictures that I found of Chuu pouting inspired me. Also, this was a longer piece but I kept spinning my tires on it and decided to split it up, so look out for more.

✦✧✦✧✦✧

Fermata, the aforementioned sequel

[junquisite]

Friendzoned

WORD COUNT : 2.2K

WARNING : none~

GENRE : Fluff

NOTE : The song I use the lyrics of is ‘Knocking on your heart’ by Maggie Lindemann. Also fight me but Junhee is the kind of person to save people’s contact as cheesy nicknames. Thank you for coming to my ted talk.

 Seonmi took a deep breath. It was now or never. She went on the stage with her guitar in her hands. She cleared her throat on the mic and suddenly all the eyes of the small bar were on her and she felt her nerves rising. Until she met the pair of eyes she had come to adore - Park Junhee's. When she found his eyes and saw him giving her that soft smile of his, her breath caught in her throat and she felt herself smile. She felt like she could do anything as long as he would be smiling at her like that and it scared her sometimes. But not now, now wasn't the time.

"Hi everyone. This is my first time here and I'm both excited and nervous. But I hope you'll like the song I'm going to play. It's a self-composed and self-written song and it's called 'knocking on your heart'. And it's not dedicated to anybody before any one of you hollers." 

Her last comment got a few chuckles out of the people and with a few claps of encouragement, she strummed the first note.

Nothing makes it hard to breathe like being in your company

When you've got someone new around your arms

I thought'd I'd be over it

To see you lock with other lips

I guess I'm just no good at moving on

I always tried to tell myself that

I'd fall in love with someone else

But oh my stubborn heart is set on you

And every night I fall asleep just so I can see you in my dreams

And now I think you ought to know the truth

Are you listenin'?

I'm knocking on your heart, could you let me in?

Tell me I'm the one and I've always been

'Cause I don't wanna wonder if we'll ever meet again

I'm knocking on your heart, could you let me in?

She finally strummed the last chord and the whole room came to life with loud sounds of applause. She hadn't realised she had closed her eyes while singing and when she opened them, Junhee was not there where she first saw him.

She frantically scanned the crowd when she heard her name being shouted. Loudly. She turned towards the voice and saw him near the stage cheering her name and waving his hands like crazy to get her attention. A laugh escaped her lips and she thanked everyone and went down the stage.

To him.

He hugged her as soon as she was in his range and a sigh escaped her lips. He was chattering away while she was getting lost in his smell, the cologne she had come to love.

"..and that was so good Seonmi! I know I was mad that you didn't let me hear it before and I kind of still am but you did so great and I'm so proud!"

She just laughed and tried to compose her face into something less sickly-in-love since he was pulling back to look at her. It was short lived though since as soon as he had her in arms length, he squished her cheeks and laughed - happiness clear on his face.

She smiled and pushed his hands away from her face which he nonchalantly kept on her shoulder and she rolled her eyes. The concept of Personal space was alien to Park Junhee, not that she was complaining.

He pulled her towards a table slightly to the back of the bar and left her to get them drinks. A few minutes later he came back with beer for both of them. The next person after her was singing but they were busy talking to each other. 

Her eyes have always been for him anyway.

"You know that guy at the bar? The blond one with the black jacket? He is interested in you. He has been looking at you and also asked me about you when I went there." Junhee told her and she shrugged.

"For a smart person, you're really dense in these matters." He said, staring at her hard.

She stared back at him, expressionless and said, "it's alright. Happens to the best of us." 

Although internally she was rolling her eyes at his stupidity and cursing at him for being dumb himself.

Suddenly his phone rang and she saw it said 'Babe'. He just silenced the phone and she raised her eyebrow at him.

"You know your phone has been buzzing for a while now. What's wrong. Why are you ignoring her?" She asked and he sighed, rubbing his bridge of nose slightly.

By her, Seonmi meant Junhee's girlfriend of 5 months now. Lim Nari. 

"She's mad at me. I had promised her to accompany her to some party tonight but your show suddenly came up and..well I am here aren't I?" 

"You should have gone with her. You promised her first." She tried to make him understand. Nari was his girlfriend, not her.

"And what? Leave you alone when you perform on a stage for the first time? What sort of a best friend would I be?" He said and when she tried to argue more, made a sign for her to shut up. And she did. 

His phone rang again. And he silenced it again.

"Pick up next time. Don't let this go on for too long." She said and he nodded, running his hands through his hair.

"But Junhee.." she started and he looked up at her.

"Babe? Seriously?" She asked and he shrugged.

"She insisted on it." He said and she nodded.

"So what's my name saved as?"  She asked and she saw his face slightly turn read. Perks of having a friend who not only gets flustered easily but also shows it on his face.

"What is it?" She insisted and he just ignored her. So she called him since his phone was on the table only.

His phone rang.

It read 'Life ❤️'.

He ended the call as soon as it appeared, his face completely red now and she couldn't help but coo at him. 

Still red, he looked her in the eyes and with all seriousness, said, "well you are."

Her heart quite literally stopped.

Was..was he saying what she thinks he was?

Was there more to what he just said?

"You're my best friend after all."

And she sighed. She knew it was too good to be true. And even though she felt a slight pain in her chest, she managed to cover it up with a smile.

And then his phone was ringing again and she was shooing him out to talk to her.

To Nari, his girlfriend.

Because she was his best friend. And that was all, wasn't it?

~

The bell rang and a half asleep Seonmi sat up in her bed to make sure it was actually her bell.

Another bell made her get out of bed, groaning of course and trudge to the door to find a tipsy and tired Chan carrying a totally drunk Junhee on with an arm around his waist.

"Sorry we woke you up noona but he just won't come home. He wanted to see you." Chan said and dragged Junhee inside, making him sit on the couch where he quickly laid down.

"Sorry noona." He said and she waved him off.

"What happened? Why is he so drunk?" She asked.

Chan ran a hand through his hair. "His girlfriend broke up with him."

She nodded and looked at the drunk man on her couch, shifting to find a comfortable position and sighed.

"I hope he figures out who he really likes now Noona." Chan said and when she gave him a surprised look, he just chuckled and left.

Locking her door after Chan left she came back to see Junhee sitting up on the couch and he gave her a huge drunk smile when he saw her.

"What is it?" She asked.

He waved at her to come close and when she did, he pulled her down on the couch and before she could protest, she had his head in her lap and she couldn't help the chuckle that passed her lips.

She started running her hand through his hair and he smiled, snuggling in her stomach and she laughed because it was ticklish.

A while passed when she finally asked,"What happened. Why did you break up?"

"I didn't. She did."

"Why?" 

"She said she deserved better. Better than someone crazily in love with his best friend."

She froze at the answer until he pushed his head in hand and she started running her hands through his hair again, his words going around in her head.

~

The next morning found Junhee up with a killer headache and sight of Seonmi as soon as he opened his eyes because apparently, drunk him likes sleeping in her lap and she lets him. He got up and fetched a glass of water for himself and took an Advil from her kitchen. He was trying to think of what all happened the day before when he saw her stir awake.

And then it clicked.

He told her he was in love with her.

"Oh you're up. How are you feeling?" She asked while stretching slightly and the slight skin that peeked out from where her top lifted up made him look away.

"I should get going. I have an important class." He said when she called her name.

"Do you remember anything that happened yesterday?" She asked.

She wanted to know. He knew.

"Not really. I must have drank too much." He lied through his teeth and saw how her face fell slightly. But he was scared.

"Why did you drink so much?" She asked.

"We broke up. Me and Nari."

"Why?" 

"Things just didn't work out between us."

~

"No noona. He left an hour ago. But you can wait for him here?" Chan said from the door and she said no adding how she'll look for him elsewhere and left.

"You need to talk to her. At Least answer her call. It's been three days hyung. I can't keep Lying to her." Chan said to Junhee who was laying on their couch with his face down and he saw him nod slightly.

But he also knew he wouldn't do anything.

He had to take the matter in his own hand now.

~

"Can you bring over the notebook hyung please? I'll meet you at the cafe at 1! Thanks!" 

Junhee sighed over the one sided phone call that happened with him and then he went to Chan's room and after picking up the notebook, left their house.

~

"Noona, I'll meet you at the cafe at 1:10. I know your class gets over at 1. See ya!"

She heard the voicemail left on her phone and sighing, picked up her books to go to the cafe across from their university.

She entered the cafe and as if automatically, her eyes zeroed in on Junhee sitting alone at a table and suddenly everything clicked in her head.

It was all Chan's plan!

She went and sat in front of him and saw how his eyes widened when he registered who it was. Before any of them could say anything though, a tray with two coffees was placed on the table and they looked up to see Chan grinning at them.

"Talk stuff out like adults now okay? Hyung, stop avoiding noona. Noona, hyung remembers everything he said to you when drunk. Talk now! And hyung don't you dare come home without her being your girlfriend!" He said Quickly and left while Junhee was about to curse at him but then he just looked at his coffee when he saw her eyes on him.

"Why didn't you talk to me for the past 3 days?"

~

It had been two hours since Chan had come back home from setting them up. When he heard the PIN being entered of the apartment he shared with Junhee, he looked at it excitedly until a visibly upset Junhee entered. When he directly started to go to his room, Chan stopped him to ask what happened.

"Well you said to not come home without making Seonmi my girlfriend so I'm gonna pack and leave okay?" And Junhee kept walking until Chan called him again.

"What do you mean? Did she say no? But why?" Chan looked so close to crying that Junhee just started laughing and Chan heard the main door open and a grinning Seonmi entered with a box in hand.

"Couldn't you have held it in longer?" She yelled at Junhee who just pointed at Chan's face which looked really confused now.

"You were right, he looked so lost." Junhee said among tears and Chan finally figured what happened and yelled loudly.

"I HATE BOTH OF YOU SO MUCH!" And the couple in question just laughed.

"Don't hate us, we got cake!" Seonmi said with Junhee's arm wrapped around her waist and even Chan couldn't stay mad for long.

[eusuntgratie]

1, 2, 7, 8, 15, 16, 23, 28, 30!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

bi asks | ask me

1. who was your childhood male crush? who your female crush? 

i had it bad for brad pitt a la Legends of the Fall. I still REALLY love long haired men, but I was pretty much exclusively attracted to long haired men in my youth. and apparently my weakness for pretty men crying started LONG AGO. I’ve had a crush on Salma Hayek since forever <3

2. when and how did you realize you were not straight? 

heh. so i’m a bit of a weirdo i guess.  or maybe my story is just the result of growing up in a heteronormative society and being able to pass as straight. i’ve always been attracted to women and gender non-conforming folk, and i’ve always been drawn to, felt supported by, and felt protective of the queer community. i never had a lightbulb moment, but in the last couple of years, i actually spent some time thinking critically about and claiming an identity. i usually use pan but i’m good with bi too :)

7. what is the most stereotypical bi thing about you/that you do?

i feel like there’s this perception that bi/pan people are attracted to everyone (like literally every human), and i’m not, but i do crush on people easily, i don’t have a type and am attracted to a really wide range of humans, and almost always find a person i enjoy ogling in nearly every scenario (shows, movies, bars, whatever). my lovely husband is VERY used to me lusting after AT LEAST one character in nearly everything we watch and listening to me ramble about why they’re pretty. we watched SNL last night and during kate mckinnon’s cast intro i was like “i LOVE her” and you could HEAR the heart eyes in my voice and he was just like “babe i know you tell me literally every time we watch SNL”.

8. describe your style

what style? i never leave my house anymore 😂

typical day if i’m not dressed for work & plan to work out - high waisted workout leggings, a strappy sports bra, and a cropped shirt if its warm or a sweatshirt or something if its cold. baggy sweats and a hoodie in the evenings if its cold enough.  jean shorts and tshirts in the summer, leggings or jeans and sweaters or flannel and boots in the winter. I’m almost always barefoot. I dress up infrequently but I do love to wear fancy dresses or jeans and cute tops with heels and lots of bright makeup and eyeliner. so basically, zero effort (sweats or workout clothes and no makeup) or a nice outfit and full face of makeup. no in between, except for work, but zoom life means i don’t really wear my work clothes right now.

15.   your favorite queer novel?

probably call me by your name. i’ve read it a lot and i really love the aggressively first-person-ness of it...being totally immersed in every thought that pops into elio’s head because it reminds me of when I was his age and how i thought about love and attraction then. obviously i love the movie too. I haven’t read enough queer fiction, though. i have a bunch of bi books on my list for my next bookshop order that i’ve been meaning to make for like six weeks. if y’all have recommendations, send them my way.

16. your favorite queer movie? 

brokeback mountain. i love the movie, but i also have such strong memories around it that i think that’s what makes it my favorite. it came out when i was in college, and i went to school in a small college town, so me and my friends drove a couple of hours to see it. we had planned to make a night of it, go out to eat after, and i just remember us all staring at each other at dinner, still sobbing. once we stopped crying, we talked about the movie all through dinner, through the drive home... i had a bunch of really great conversations with people in college because of that movie. one night in our dorm lounge in the basement a group of us stayed up all night talking about queerness and masculinity and attraction. i watch it every year or two, and it always rips my heart out. if i’m in the right mood, just the chords from the theme song will make me start crying.

23. what’s something that makes you fall for a person immediately? 

i’m an actions speak louder than words kinda person. i need to see that somebody will do what they say they will, that they’ll take care of me, that they can deal with the shitty stuff. watching someone competently do something they are good at is just... oof. i’m also super duper tactile, so i’m a big fan of lots of flirty touching and dancing and touching for no reason and hand holding and hugging etc. etc. etc. y’all get three guesses why I love bucky so much.

28. what is a dating/relationship deal-breaker for you?

not doing the fucking work. i don’t expect my partner to be good at everything, but i damn sure expect him to try and to work as hard for us as I do.

and smoking. being around cigarette smoke makes me want to cut out my own lungs. i can’t with that.

30. what childhood moment makes you think “I should’ve known I wasn’t straight back then”? 

i don’t know. i might not have one, which is lame. i never hid my attraction, i just let my relationships dictate my identity, i guess. so i never had this aha moment of like “oh shit i’m not just into men!”; i’ve always known that. and I don’t know that ever really thought of myself as straight when I was young, just like I didn’t really examine or think about my whiteness until I started doing racial justice work. i don’t know. I dated men and ended up marrying a cis man and I didn’t really critically think about my own identity beyond that. that sounds so utterly ridiculous and lame, but its true. I think if I hadn’t been raised Catholic I probably would’ve dated other genders, but its also not as if there was a girl I wanted to date and didn’t because i was scared; i think it was a lot more layered and complex than that. well that’s not an answer at all, but there you go!

💗💜💙

💗💛💙

[anthonynealsparkman-blog]

Anthony neal sparkman | How to Play Guitar - Tips For Beginners

Anthony sparkman | The guitar is one of the most popular instruments around, and it's easy to see why. Firstly, it's quite easy to get started, and once you've learnt a few basic chords, you can play literally hundreds of popular songs. Secondly, it's a great instrument for accompanying a singer, as even one guitar on its own gives a good backing sound to a song. Finally, although it may be relatively easy to get started with simple chords, it has almost limitless potential for advanced players - you literally never stop learning, and there are many impressive pieces you can learn to play in time.

So if you want to learn how to play guitar, here are 5 tips to help you get started.

1) Get A Decent Guitar

Obviously, the first thing you need is a guitar, or at least be able to borrow one to learn on. My first tip is that for learning, you should invest in a reasonable quality guitar. Really cheap guitars are usually a false economy. They can often have problems with their setup or tuning, and these can end up putting you off playing for good. Probably, more beginners are discouraged after trying to learn on a bad guitar than any other factor.

This doesn't mean that you should go out and buy the most expensive guitar you can possibly afford either.  It should be possible to find a reasonably priced quality model that will be good for learning on. The most important thing is it should stay in tune, and its 'action' (that means the height of the strings above the fretboard) should not be too high, otherwise it will feel difficult to hold down the strings properly.

Anthony neal sparkman | The other consideration is whether to get an acoustic or electric guitar. Acoustic guitars are generally good for learning, tend overall to be cheaper than electrics, and you don't have to worry about an amplifier. However, it really depends on the style of music you want to play. If you really want to play rock or metal guitar styles, you would be better off starting out with an electric guitar from the outset.

There are many places to buy a guitar, and you can get some great deals on secondhand ones. A good place to start looking would be your local musical instrument store. They may stock second hand as well as new models, and can give you advice about tuning and caring for your guitar. If you know someone who can already play, take them along to help you choose.

2) Learn To Tune It

Once you've got a reasonable quality guitar for learning on, one of the first things to do is learn how to tune the strings correctly. The most basic guitar chords will still sound good on a guitar if the strings are in tune. Played with the strings out of tune though, and they can sound awful, even if you're holding down all the right notes.

The first step is to tune the topmost string (the top 'E' string). This can be set to the same note as a piano or keyboard (the note 'E' just above middle 'C'), an 'E' tuning fork, or the high note on a set of 'pitch pipes'. Play the tuning fork or piano note, then sound the top string on the guitar. If the notes sound different, use the tuning peg on the guitar for that top string to adjust the note up or down, as needed.

Then, tune the second string ('B') to match the top one. Do this by playing the second string at the 5th fret, and then sounding the top string. Adjust the tuning peg for the second string until the notes sound the same (don't touch the tuning peg for the first string).

The third string, 'G' is tuned by playing the note at the 4th fret on this string, which should match the note sounded by the second string.

The remaining strings are tuned in the same way, by playing the note at the 5th fret on those strings, which should match the note sounded by the string above.

Electronic tuners are also a real help when tuning, they show you exactly when a particular string is in tune. It's still worth learning the method above though, so you'll know how to tune your guitar if an electronic tuner isn't available.

3) Commit Time To Practising

It would be great if you could buy a guitar, then immediately start playing complex chords and solos on it. Unfortunately, that's not going to happen, as when you learn to play guitar, you have to put in some practise time regularly, first to learn the basics, then more complex techniques.

When you first begin learning the guitar, it can all seem a bit overwhelming, and training your fingers to make the shape of a particular chord may seem difficult at first. However, by having several regular practise sessions each week, you will start to acquire the 'finger memory' needed to play chords without thinking, it will become automatic.

4) Learn A Few Basic Open Chords Well

There are a few basic 'open' chords that you will learn when starting out. These are pretty much all formed within the first three frets on the guitar neck, and usually consist of the major chords E, A, D, C G, and maybe a couple of minor chords, like Am, Dm.

If you spend the time learning to play these basic chords well, so that you can form the chord pattern quickly and easily with your left hand, and switch between them smoothly, then you will be able to play a large range of different songs with just these few chords. Even with just the 3 chords G, C and D, a lot of songs can be adapted to use just these chords.

When learning, this is a great point to reach in your guitar playing. Most people I think, would give their reason for wanting to learn how to play guitar as 'to be able to play along with songs'. If you get to the point where you can play a few of these open chords in a regular rhythm, and switch between them reasonably quickly, you'll get a real buzz out of being able to play a few 'real' tunes, and will be motivated to carry on learning.

You may find when learning that it takes a while to get to this point. For example, your fingers don't seem to form the chord patterns quickly enough, or you can play on one chord easily, but changing chords takes a while, and doesn't sound smooth.

Don't despair! The key to overcoming this is regular practice, and slowing things right down until you can change chords at that speed. Then slowly increase the speed, and you'll find that the chord changes come a lot easier. A metronome is a good tool to use when practising like this, as it will keep ticking out the beat that you need to maintain when playing.

5) Use Video Lessons To Boost Your Progress

Anthony sparkman | The final tip here when learning how to play guitar, is to make the most of the wide range of video based guitar lessons that are out there these days. Nothing beats one-to-one lessons with your own personal instructor, but if that's not available to you, then video guitar lessons are the next best thing. And you can watch them over and over, making sure you understand each part.

Anthony Neal Sparkman is an American musician, composer, songwriter, and guitar teacher. Early in his career, Satriani worked as a guitar instructor, with many of his former students achieving fame.

[artificialqueens]

Cause I give you all -Pt2- (Trixya) - Pichitinha

A/N: part two is up and even though it’s faster it should’ve been faster but I missed last queue :( anyway things develop a bit further on this part and set the floor for the wrap-up on the next (and last) part! Hope you enjoy, as you usual it’s on AO3 and I’m here as @pichitinha

It’s been six days since their night together - which lasted well into the following afternoon due to brunch -, Trixie’s already been in two different cities and is heading for the third, and she and Katya have exchanged messages everyday. It’s not obsessive or a lot at all, Katya’s work days are usually from early morning to mid afternoon and Trixie’s are the opposite, so they’re never quite free at the same time and their texting consists of blocks of text from Trixie at noon, and then blocks of response from Katya at sunset.

They’re also slowly heading towards the opposite coasts, they’d met in the middle with Katya having left from Boston and Trixie from LA and now Trixie’s going east and Katya’s going west. They’d been a perfect star alignment, Trixie thinks, right in the middle of the country, never to meet again.

Except they keep talking. And it’s easy, so easy to talk to Katya. It’s easy to talk about things she didn’t even think bothered her anymore because they’d happen so long ago and she’d never talked them through. And she likes listening to Katya too, her weird habits and ideas, how she talks about the places she’s at with such admiration. Trixie’s taken it upon herself to notice at least one nice thing about where she is so she can tell Katya about it, be it how yellow the trees are or how the birds sing louder. Katya seems to love it.

Trixie doesn’t do one night stands because she gets attached too easily. Sex and feelings are too mixed for her to be able to fully separate and enjoy them apart. She thinks that having spent more than half - much more than half, actually - of their time together effectively talking and not fucking had done nothing more than aggravate things. Trixie likes her, she thinks. Not like like, there hadn’t been enough time, but she likes her, as a person, as a friend, as someone she slept with and enjoyed it very much.

And they are absolutely in no position to have that. Not with their lives the way they are. Not while literally heading to opposite sides of the country

Trixie wakes up in the middle of the night when they are halfway through to their next stop when the bus comes to a halt to quickly learn that it broke down. They are in the middle of nowhere and will have to wait until morning to call for rescue. This will limit their time getting ready, so the instruction is to go back to sleep now because the following day is gonna be busy.

She’s too alert, though, needs time for her brain to settle down again, so she picks up her phone.

Katya is online.

She’s already replied to all of Trixie’s messages and added several things of her own and Trixie marvels at how early she wakes up - she does yoga every morning, she’d said, and that explains a lot of things Trixie learned while in her bed and also increases Trixie’s curiosity.

She skims through the texts, too tired to actually read them through and strike a conversation by replying, but she’s curious as to what she said. Her last messages started in reply to something Trixie had said about Dolly Parton and guitar playing.

Katya: hey you’re the country gal not me

Katya: i mean sure i like dolly parton but who doesn’t like dolly parton

Katya: that’s like not liking abba

Katya: wait you like abba right

Katya: you gotta like abba or we can no longer be friends

At first Trixie laughs, tries to be quiet in her bunk because she knows everyone else must be sleeping again already, but soon her eyes focus on the last bit. We can no longer be friends. They are friends, right? They talk more than Trixie talks to most of her friends apart from the very best ones like Kim or Shea, and Katya does know a lot about her, if she thinks about it.

But they’ve slept together. And Trixie doesn’t sleep with her friends. She definitely doesn’t think about sleeping with them, like she does with Katya.

Trixie sighs and locks her phone, turns to the side so she can try to sleep. Her brain is still wide awake and she knows she’ll be up for at least half an hour. She picks up her headphones and plugs into her phone, hits shuffle on all of her songs and hopes that the god of music will send a calming one her way.

She falls asleep minutes after, It’s All Wrong But It’s All Right by Dolly Parton playing quietly in her right ear.

*

Trixie loves music. She studied it in college, she sings for a living, she’s bought the phone with the biggest storage because she wanted to download every single song she could think of. College had taught her to appreciate all sorts of music, even the ones she used to turn her nose up at. Now she knows way more songs than she thinks a regular person should, and she can pretty much always choose one to associate with how she’s feeling.

So Trixie loves making playlists. Some days she’ll just create “random playlist #223” and add songs through the day as things happen and end up with over thirty. She shares them with her friends, sometimes, makes them special ones for their birthdays and they all love it - or they say they do, anyway. Trixie loves using music to communicate, loves expressing how much someone means to her or what she’s feeling through the chords and the voices she knows so well.

The week following the bus breakdown is a busy one that has Trixie really tired while she also thinks she’s getting a cold. She gets frustrated with her runny nose and gets scared about losing her voice so she spends the whole day worrying and trying not to think of Katya - she shouldn’t be thinking about her this much, in fact, maybe they should cut contact altogether so Trixie can go back to normal.

But she doesn’t because she likes it, at the end of the day, and suddenly she finds herself with a playlist titled “Katya” on her phone. The first two songs she put there were I Put A Spell On You and It’s All Wrong But It’s All Right, but since then she’s also added Smile by Avril Lavigne because she thinks that’s the kind of music Katya would laugh at while secretly dancing to when she’s by herself.

She thinks she knows Katya a bit too much for such a short time. She also thinks she thinks about her too much.

She’s back to her bunk bed after a particularly tiring show and she plans on replying to Katya’s messages from the previous night before going to sleep. It’s the first she’d looked at her phone that day and is surprised when there’s only one text waiting for her. Her stomach plummets a bit, worries about what happened, but when she opens their chat the text says “text me when you’re free, i want to call you. don’t worry about the time”.

A rush runs through her entire body at the words. What does she want? What could that mean? Is she gonna tell Trixie they can’t talk anymore? Is she gonna try to have phone-sex? Is she in jail?

No, of course not. The last one is stupid.

Instead of texting, she just calls. It rings once, twice, then three times. Trixie’s nervous and worried she might wake her up.

Katya picks up on the fifth ring and greets her by saying, “Pat Benatar!”

“What?” Katya is weird, sure, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t surprise Trixie constantly still.

“My favorite singer, you asked who my favorite singer is. It’s Pat Benatar.”

“That’s why you wanted to call?” Trixie laughs, amazed by Katya once again. “Also I’d sort of established in my head that it was Annie Lennox, now I feel betrayed.”

“Holy fuck, Annie! Yeah, no, it’s definitely Annie.”

“You forgot your favorite singer?”

“Not all of us walk around cosplaying our favorite artist, Miss Parton.”

Trixie shouts a laugh and then immediately covers her mouth, remembers it’s late and they just came back from a show and everyone wants to sleep.

“I don’t imitate Dolly Parton, I was just very lucky to be born with similar genes.”

Katya snorts and Trixie feels a soft smile setting on her lips. She’s tired and her whole body is sagging against her pillows, but she feels nice.

“Where are you right now?”

“Somewhere in Missouri? I think? I’m not too sure.”

Katya sighs audibly. “I’m in Colorado.”

Trixie gulps at the information, understands immediately what Katya’s saying. They’d met in Kansas. Now they’re each one state over. They’re three states apart.

It isn’t much, if Trixie logically thinks about it. Shea is in LA, several states away. Pearl is in New York, also several states away. But those facts don’t leave a sour taste in her mouth like Katya being in Colorado does.

“That sucks. For Colorado, I mean.”

Katya laughs her breathless laughter and it tugs somewhere deep into Trixie’s chest. They’ve known each other for less than a month, they’ve only seen each other once. This is their first phone call.

Trixie likes her.

“Tell me other bands you like,” Trixie asks, her mind on her playlist. She wants to connect with who Katya is and there’s no better way for Trixie than through music. She wants to add songs to it that match both of them. She shouldn’t, it’s too far and she’s too deep into it, but she knows there’s no stopping now.

So Katya lists several artists, talks about Lana Del Rey and Madonna and T.a.T.u. And Cindy Lauper all of which she claims to be her actual favorite now that she thinks about it. And also a bunch of others that Trixie makes a mental note about and they discuss lesbian singers for longer than Trixie should have allowed herself to stay awake.

Her tiredness defeats her, eventually, and she tells Katya she needs to sleep. They bid each other goodnight and the line goes silent and Trixie is still not sure why Katya wanted to call tonight.

She falls asleep with True Colors looping in her head, and she makes a mental note to add it to her playlist the following day.

*

Trixie’s having a really bad day. They’re changing the show a little bit to better fit the audiences they’re approaching and it involves a new song with a part Trixie has to carry by herself as the lead singer holds a fermata.

And Trixie simply can’t hit the fucking note they need her to. They’re all supportive and trying their best to help but she’s immensely frustrated and she can see that they are worried. She won’t be invited back if she can’t carry the tunes they need her to carry.

Could they fire her mid tour?

She’s overreacting, maybe, but her heart’s racing and her stomach is uncomfortably tight as they wrap rehearsals for the day with a promise that tomorrow will be better, comforting hands on Trixie’s shoulders. She nods and tries to force a smile, but then immediately goes back to her bunk, closes her curtain and urges herself not to cry.

She can’t lose this opportunity. Another one like this is never going to come by - especially if she fucks it up.

She grabs her phone and opens her contacts. Usually she’d search for Shea or Kim or Trannika, but instead she goes straight to her last calls and hits dial again on Katya’s name. Her stomach churns a bit, but she doesn’t have time to mull over what that means, what immediately going to Katya means. She’s on the verge of breaking and she needs someone to calm her down.

Katya always calms her down.

“Trixie! I’m glad you called, I saw a tree that looked just like Britney Spe- Trixie? Trixie, are you okay?”

Trixie hadn’t even noticed she was crying, trying to hold in her sobs, until Katya asked.

“Trixie? Hey, talk to me. Are you hurt?”

She tries to take deep breaths and feels herself whispering, “No.”

“Ok, good. So now take a deep breath. Then another. And then another one. Ok?”

Trixie nods, knows Katya can’t see it but can’t find her voice to reply vocally. She breathes as deep as she can, slower and slower as Katya instructs her to. Her voice is soothing and warm and Trixie wonders briefly, in the middle of her turmoil, how Katya feels about her.

“Ok, good, you stopped crying. You okay, mama?”

Trixie snorts a bit at the question, the answer being more than obvious, and the sound actually mixes with a sob in such a funny way that Katya bursts into giggles for a few seconds. It pulls a smile over Trixie’s lips - she feels like she hasn’t smiled in forever.

“I have never been better,” Trixie deadpans, finally, and it sets Katya off again. This time she doesn’t force herself to stop though, she knows that if Trixie is throwing jokes, then she’s feeling better.

“Ok, serious now. What happened?”

Trixie sighs, cleans a few paths of tears on her face as she thinks of what to say.

She wishes Katya was there.

“I’m fucking it up. They want me to sing this song and I just- I just can’t. They’re gonna let me go, I’m sure.”

It’s funny but Trixie thinks she can hear Katya rolling her eyes.

“They’re not gonna fire you over one song after half of the tour, Trixie.”

“You didn’t hear me singing it. I’ve butchered the song.” She’s being irrational, she knows - she may not have sang it the way she knew the song was supposed to be sung but she has a good voice and she knows how to use it. But this isn’t a high school choir, this is real life, real performances by a really famous singer in front of an audience of thousands. Any mistake is an issue.

“Right. Ok. I want you to listen to this, but I need to really listen, ok? Full attention.”

Trixie gulps, Katya is rarely this serious. “Ok.”

And Trixie almost drops her phone when Katya bursts into a very melodramatic Lana song, the sound a lot more similar to a black board being scratched by nails than an actual human voice, and Trixie tries really hard not to laugh, but it’s difficult.

Katya sings bad. Like, really really bad.

“Oh my god.”

Katya stops singing then, laughs alongside Trixie and waits in silence for both their laughter to die down.

“Did you butcher it like that? ‘Cause if so you’re right, you’re screwed.”

Trixie still has a few laughs dying down in her throat, simply can’t stop smiling as she snuggles back into her comforter.

She really likes Katya.

“I mean, not that badly.”

Katya is smiling. Trixie’s sure. “Then you’ll be fine.”

Yeah, she thinks. She’ll be fine.

*

It’s been almost a month and a half since she got that one night off in Kansas and she’s getting another one now.

There’s nothing actually holding her back, keeping her from going out again and getting drunk and finding someone. Except there is. She feels wrong, doing that to Katya. Not that she owes Katya anything. Not that Katya would even care.

Not that there even is anything for Katya to be in any way part of her decision process.

But she is. Trixie doesn’t want to be this involved with someone she’s literally only seen once, but since when does she get to decide on that and also since when does her heart make good decisions?

Since never, that’s when.

So she’s in a hotel room, has time off to herself to do whatever she wants, and she settles for the relaxing night she’d forgone last time. She considers if things would be too different had she decided to relax last time and go out now. She wouldn’t have met Katya, and part of her wonders if that’d been easier.

She has a bathtub in her room so she fills it with warm water and some oils that she always carries with her for skin care and sinks into it, her phone playing quiet country music from where it sits on the sink, far away from her reach so she won’t be tempted to go over social media. This is supposed to be a relaxing time and being on her phone would mean the opposite of that.

When she steps out, hours later, her whole body is sagging and she feels ready to sleep for at least 24 hours. Her mind is hazy and she thinks she might have fallen into a quick nap a few times. Her extremities are wrinkled and the playlist she had on has ended already.

And then she sees that Katya texted her, and it’s like her mind is awake again.

Katya: ok ok ok ok! you win!

Katya: show me your country singers or whatever

Katya: but like give me the best songs only

Katya: i’ll try not to hate them

Katya: and if i do i’ll lie

Trixie smiles, feels a warm feeling spreading at the notion that Katya is genuinely interested in learning what she likes. Even if they’re just friends and have never discussed this, Trixie doesn’t invest herself like that in all of her friends, just some, the closest, the ones she cares about the most.

She doesn’t even reply, moves to the bed in only the robe she’d been wearing, set on making a perfect playlist. She overthinks it, of course, doesn’t want it to be a romantic declaration but doesn’t want to avoid romantic songs either because that might look suspicious. It’s like every song she chooses brings in a connotation and she’s worried about how Katya will read this.

But Katya is a friend. Apart from that night when they met, that’s all they’d been. They never even discussed the fact that it happened, they never acknowledged that they had slept together. And maybe it means a lot more to Trixie than it does to Katya, maybe to Katya they really are just good friends, maybe Katya doesn’t have a policy about sleeping with friends like Trixie does.

And Trixie doesn’t want to make things awkward, especially not with a country playlist, so she thinks about the songs that her friends like and mixes all types of voices and topics and maybe she spends over an hour in it, but at the end she’s satisfied with the result and doesn’t feel nervous as she copies the spotify link and pastes it into a text to Katya.

She goes to sleep soon after that, Silver Lining from Kacey Musgraves which she’d added at the last minute running through her mind, and she feels good.

*

Katya: i quite like slow burn

This is the message Trixie wakes up to the next day, feeling well-rested and light and good. It’s the only message from Katya, received around three hours after Trixie went to sleep, which wasn’t as late for Katya as it was for her, but still late nonetheless.

Trixie: what?

She can’t figure out what Katya means by that, finds it very vague without a context - she likes slow burn in regards to what? - but she’s not gonna focus on that because being cryptic is just something that Katya does and Trixie is used to it - Trixie likes it.

So she gets up, gets dressed in a comfortable yet cute pink dress that she doesn’t get to wear a lot when they’re always on the shaky bus, and heads down to have breakfast. She leaves her phone in her room, tells herself it’ll do her good to not be glued to it all the time, and uses the time she has to catch up with a few of the band members having breakfast with her, people she sees every day but feels like she hasn’t properly spoken to in forever.

When she gets back to her room, Katya has replied.

Katya: the song slow burn. it’s good

Trixie is glad she likes it, but she isn’t sure where Katya heard it. Had she searched for Kacey songs late in the night?

Trixie: where’d you hear it?

Trixie: i’m glad though, good song

Katya: your playlist

Trixie is confused, she’d added three Kacey songs to the country playlist she made for Katya, but slow burn isn’t one of them. She opens her spotify to check, is absolutely positive she hadn’t added any songs from her new album, and when she opens her playlists her heart drops to her stomach.

The last playlist before the country one is the one named Katya. And it has slow burn in it. And it’s public.

Katya must have decided to snoop around on her profile after she got the playlist and Trixie is an idiot because she never even thought about Katya finding this playlist. This playlist has all sorts of songs with the feelings she has about Katya all the time. There’re songs about falling in love, there’re songs about chemistry, there’re songs about wanting what you can’t have.

This might as well be Trixie declaring herself to Katya, and she isn’t sure what to do with herself now.

She goes back to her messages, stares at the empty typing box for minutes on end. She starts typing. Oh, deletes it. Katya, deletes it. I’m sorry, deletes it. I love you.

Definitely deletes it.

And then there’s an incoming facetime call from Katya. Trixie wants to throw her phone into a fire.

“Katya-”

“You have a very eclectic taste, huh?”

Trixie goes silent, analyses Katya’s voice tone and her face, even if the video quality isn’t great. She seems… okay? It’s like she’s having fun. Trixie’s a bit offended, actually. But she takes it, finds it better than Katya closing off or cutting her out of her life. Even if Katya thinks it’s funny, even if she’s gonna laugh at her for being in love, Trixie supposes she can deal. It seems better than the alternative.

“I- yeah.” She gulps. “Yeah, I do.”

She searches her brain for a joke, for a way to make this situation funny or light, but she can’t. Her chest is heavy still, even with Katya reacting better than she’d have expected. She just wants to erase this from history. She wants to go back to normal, to pining on her own on the other side of the country.

“Trixie, hey,” Katya says with a quiet voice, calming even, and Trixie realizes she hadn’t been looking at the camera, but rather had her eyes unfocused on the wall behind her. She focuses back on Katya, her eyes are earnest and open. “It’s okay.”

She stares at Katya, tries to figure what okay means. She sighs audibly.

“I’m sorry.”

Her whisper is so low she isn’t sure Katya will hear over the crappy connection, but she does because her eyebrows raise.

“For what?”

“For… this mess. This whole mess.”

Katya actually chuckles and Trixie is still lost as to how this will end.

“Trixie, there’s no mess. It’s a really good playlist. You obviously know how to handle music.”

For a moment Trixie considers that maybe Katya didn’t necessarily get it, but she knows Katya isn’t stupid. Right?

“It isn’t.. It isn’t just-”

“Trixie, oh my god, I know.” She blinks, smiles softly. “How do you think I feel about you?”

Trixie licks her lips, takes a deep breath. She doesn’t know how to answer.

Katya rolls her eyes. “I made you a playlist, actually.”

“Oh?”

“I made it after listening to yours so it’s smaller and rushed, but yeah. Let me send you the link, hold on.”

She exits the facetime app, her voice still there but her image now gone. Her phone beeps a few seconds later and her heart is hammering as she opens it and her eyes go through the songs, tries to figure out what Katya wants to say.

For a few moments she is confused, finds the music disconnected and isn’t sure what the song Dumb by Nirvana means in the context at all, and then she realizes. The titles form a sentence.

You are really dumb, I haven’t stopped thinking about you since that first time.

“Oh,” she says again, her vocabulary apparently consisting only of that now.

“You’re halfway across the country, Trixie. But I really like you.”

Trixie swallows down the lump in her throat, goes back to the facetime app and meets Katya’s eyes once again.

“I really like you, too.”

*

Trixie’s sleeping schedule is a mess, now. She’s always liked her sleep and sleeping in and all that, but now she makes an active effort to be awake at certain hours she knows Katya will be free so they can talk. It’s alright because Katya does the same for her - more, even, because Katya is too restless to sleep much anyway.

They are not… anything, per se. They never addressed the issue further than the few lines of conversation in that hotel room. But they’ve shifted. Trixie is still too afraid to ask, too afraid to try to label this in whichever way just to find out she’s asking for too much, wants too much. The reality hasn’t changed that their lives don’t align in any way at all. They’re still set to travel for months, each to their side. They’re not in Kansas anymore.

Or least she thinks so, until one day she comes back from a show and there are seven missed calls from Katya and several texts, lots of them saying “i’m fine but CALL ME”.

She’s fumbling with the screen, doesn’t trust Katya’s “i’m fine” all that well - she could have a broken leg, nose and hips sitting on an old police station behind bars and Trixie truly thinks she’d claim to be fine - and walks outside to get some privacy from the tour members that were already on the bus. They should have half an hour before leaving, that gives her enough time to figure out what’s happening with Katya, what the fuck is going on.

“Trixie!! Trixie, listen. Oh my god. Trixie!”

She sounds positively gleeful and it calms Trixie instantly but it also increases her curiosity by a thousand percent.

“Oh my god, what Katya? What is it, tell me?!”

“I have the best news. Like, the best. Or for me at least, they’re the best. I think you’ll find them the best, too. Or I hop-”

“Katya!” She tries to reign her back, can feel her getting lost already. Katya just laughs and it warms Trixie down to her core. “What?”

“I’m going to Indiana.”

“What?” Trixie isn’t sure she heard her properly.

“Indiana! I’m going to Indiana! Like, I’m on my way to the airport right now.”

“Oh my- why? How?”

“It’s a long story that involves a model with a bruised eye and another with a broken toe which I’ll be happy to stage to you once I see you in person in Indiana!”

Trixie’s heart is hammering on her chest, she’s still not sure she isn’t imagining this conversation. They’re just about to cross the border, a two hour drive and she’d be there, in Indiana. Her mind is a bit hazy, Katya is supposed to be in Arizona right now. But she’s going to Indiana. She’s coming towards Trixie.

“I- Katya, Indiana is small but not that small-”

“I have a day off. It was my day off anyway and we’ll be there and I’ll go anywhere. Tell me where you’ll be and I’m going to see you. Just- I know it’s not easy but if you could get the day off, too. Spend it with me, I’ll make it worthwhile.”

Trixie doesn’t need her to promise anything, there’s nothing she wants more than that, so much so that it scares her a bit. But it also thrills her in a way that nothing has in a long time, she’s excited, happy, anxious.

She feels all the words bubbling inside her chest, she wants to tell Katya how happy she is and how she can’t wait and how happy it makes her that Katya seems so happy about it. Instead she takes a deep breath, listens to how rapidly she’s been breathing, and nods once before opening her mouth. “Yeah. Yes, of course. I can’t wait.”

She really can’t.

*

She couldn’t get the night off. She figures that if she really begged she would’ve, but when she tells Katya that, she’s told not to do it. Your job has to be a priority, Trixie, don’t jeopardize it over me. The words sting, a little, because Trixie has been thinking about what would happen to them once both their tours are over - maybe she’d say no to a next one, if they asked. If Katya was willing to stay too. Somewhere, anywhere.

But it’s okay, because Katya will actually be in the same city as her for two days, not only her day off. It’s fate once again working with them and maybe they weren’t star crossed lovers destined to be together for one night only. Maybe they are destined for more.

Or maybe they’re not destined for anything but Trixie’s in love. That’s a very plausible possibility.

Trixie’s jittery every hour, every minute leading to the moment when she’ll see Katya again. She’s rented a car, apparently, and she’ll pick up Trixie and her bag of clothes and make-up from the venue where she’s performing and they’ll drive around and Katya will let her stay in her hotel for the night and take her to her next location the following day before heading to her own work. She has to go to the shows, but she’s gotten off rehearsals, just for one day, and it’s more than she could have expected.

She’s in the dressing room with the band after the show, she’s finished changing and packing her things and she’s ready, buzzing in her seat as she unlocks her phone every ten seconds waiting for it to vibrate with a new message from Katya that’ll hopefully say I’m here.

Trixie remembers it all so well, the sparkle of her eyes, the smoothness of her skin, the sharpness of her bones, the whiteness of her teeth. They’d really only seen each other once and sometimes Trixie can’t fully believe that, it doesn’t make sense to her that they’d known each other for such a short period of time and that Katya already matters so much.

But she does and Trixie’s certainty about it is what clears her head on the days of doubt or worry. She can’t predict what will happen at the end of their tours and she doesn’t know the intensity of Katya’s feelings, her reciprocating doesn’t mean she reciprocates just as much, but none of this matters because Trixie knows what she wants. She’s so sure of it and the hammering of her heart at the thought of seeing Katya in mere minutes only grounds her further.

She’s gonna talk about it and she’s praying that Katya will want the same but if she doesn’t it’s good she knows now. She wants this too much to lead herself on.

Katya: your uber driver (katya) is here (ASS666)

She snorts loudly at how ridiculous Katya is and her stomach gives a full somersault at the notion that she’ll step outside and be met with her sparkling green eyes. The thought is the impulse she needs to grab her bag and dash out as she mutters a half-hearted bye to everyone. She doesn’t even reply to the text, just leaves in search of Katya.

She’s easy to spot, has the car parked in the back where Trixie told her to go, and she’s leaning against it, some old vehicle that is dark blue but looks black in the night sky. She has her hands in the pockets of her jeans, she’s dressed casually and as her jeans are a bit down with the weight of her hand Trixie can see the corner of the bright red kiss tattoo she has on her left hip bone.

Her feet speed up against her own will. She’s not running but she’s walking fast and as she gets closer and closer she wonders what the protocol is here. Should she kiss her? Should they hug tightly? How much is too much?

She doesn’t have to worry, though, because when she’s a few steps away Katya pulls away from the car and strides towards her. Her arms wrap around her entire figure, one hand up to her neck and the other down to her waist and the last thing Trixie sees before she’s kissed - or before she kisses Katya, she can’t tell who did what - is how bright Katya’s face is, from her eyes to her smile.

Their lips meet and if there was even a tiny bit of doubt left in Trixie’s mind, it’s gone. This is it. This is right.

Finally.

[bwbeedubs]

Clouded

She didn’t want to be here.

Fingers reached up to massage her temple, her head pounding like war drums as Nightwing carried on with their weekly briefings. Sum up of their week, current operations in house and in others, various criminals to look out for and possible events to shadow in case something should happen. Cyborg mentioning new tech or new upgrades in their equipment. Changeling sharing an inappropriate and/or ill timed joke. Starfire listening intently with a shocked gasp or two, maybe a hearty Tamaranean “huzzah” of some kind in celebration of good news.

Same song and dance as it was the week before and the week before that and the week before that and for all the weeks to come.

She closed her eyes, willing the literal mind-numbing pain away. A vacation was starting to sound good right about now…

“Last order of business,” Nightwing announced, and those words sounded damn near close to a chorus of angels. She opened her eyes to the screen ahead of her revealing some man’s portrait photo. “John Donoway.”

He looked ordinary enough: plain, Caucasian male, brown hair, blue eyes, straight, white teeth. No distinctive markings or tattoos or piercings. Not even a spark of something malicious in his eyes. Just a smiling, friendly-looking standard white American male that you would expect to find in a Whole Foods grocery line or a country club golf course. Upper middle class ordinary.

If he was on their radar, Raven already knew that he must be the worst of the worst.

“We have reason to believe that this man is part of a very large sex trafficking ring in Jump City.” Called it. “More specifically, one involving children.”

Her eyes narrowed and her hands balled in a fist. Oh, he was that sort of evil.

“The police and the Feds have been after him for years and they haven’t been able to pin him yet. They have now turned to us to, not only get this guy, but to figure out how deep this chain goes and shut it down.”

“So what’s the plan?” Cyborg asked, crossing his arms over his chest.

“Undercover,” Nightwing said, simply. “Deep undercover. We need two operatives to portray a loving, newlywed couple. Move into the neighborhood where he lives, live civilian lives, gather intel, and report back to me. Possible extremely covert side missions but mostly undercover intel.”

“Very well. I shall go!” Starfire volunteered with her usual blast of enthusiasm.

He shook his head. “Sorry, Star. We need people that the public won’t notice. That can blend in people easily. If you were to go undercover, the public will miss you and ask a lot of questions. We don’t need that.”

There’s was a certain type of tone to his voice that was pointed, and Raven did not like which way that tone was pointing. She closed her eyes and rubbed her temples even more.

“Alright, so I’ll go,” Changeling chimed with a shrug. “I’m the entire animal kingdom. I can blend in easily.”

Raven sighed. “You’re green and very outspoken. The public will miss you, and we need someone that can easily be explained away. Someone no one would bat an eyelash at and dare look for.”

He paused. “So… who would that be?”

“Why don’t you ask our fearless leader?” Raven said, turning her attention to the man standing at the front of the room. Her eyebrow perked as she crossed her arms over her chest and leaned back in her chair, an irritated expression gracing her features. “Seems like you know exactly who you want on this mission already.”

He pressed his lips together and nodded solemnly. “I don’t mean it that way but in terms of media popularity-.”

“Understood,” Raven pointedly said. Between her blistering headache and this new assignment, she just needed this meeting to be done and over with.

Some “vacation”…

“And I assume I’m going to be her spouse?” Cyborg chimed.

“No.” The word gave her pause.

A sense of unease emitted from Nightwing. He was hiding something. Something… deep. Something… not good…

Clearing his throat, he turned to the screen as it changed from the photo of the humdrum man to….

What the fuck.

There, on the screen was a picture of a man skull face mask with a red X. No, this has to be a mistake. A glitch in the presentation or something, right?… Right?

“Red-X has been enlisted as the other person for this mission.”

Fuck.

Closing her eyes again, Raven willed her increasing painful headache away as her teammates shouted incredulous remarks to the announcement in protest. She just had to think of the word vacation, didn’t she?

“Dude, why the hell would you put Red-X on this mission? He’s one of the bad guys!”

“His skills to go undercover and investigative technique makes him qualified for the job. No one knows his face, making coming up with a fake ID easy. He knows the business of Wayne Enterprises. And we have the ability to control him,” Nightwing answered. A vague sort of feeling continued to dance around their leader.

There was something else…

“How?” Cyborg asked, “I mean, Raven is tough and all that to keep him in line but I don’t think she’s enough to control him all night and day for who knows how long.”

Nightwing sighed. “I made him an offer. A clean record, if he helps us.”

“WHAT!” her three teammates chimed before blasting off into fits of anger, arguing with their leader’s decision.

Taking a deep breath, Raven opened her eyes to look at him. The way he stood… tall but yet burdened. The vague feeling continued to plague around him as if there was something more. Something deeper. Something that made him hesitate. Something he was trying to hide… What is he hiding? Raven searched and searched until she found her answer.

“You know who he is.” Her words cut through the room, silencing all of her other teammates loud voices with the soft calm of hers. Pressing his lips together, Nightwing looked down at his feet, the weight of his secret finally getting to him. She wasn’t going to let him off so easy though.

“Dick…” she addressed him by his civilian name to capture his attention from off the ground. “Who is he?”

A second slipped by. Two. Three. Four.

“Dick, who-.”

“Jason,” he admitted, lifting his head and steeling himself into the fearless leader persona he normally donned. He cleared his throat. “Jason Todd is Red-X.”

The picture on the screen turned to one of a young once fallen hero in the ever classic Robin costume. The room acted as a vacuum, sucking all the air out and leaving them stripped down and bare. Frozen in time. Frozen in their thoughts. While they barely knew the young boy, his loss was a chord that struck all of them, especially Nightwing.

Raven knew of the countless nights he had spent awake blaming himself. If he could’ve prevented it. Even travelled back to Gotham to fight by his reluctant and grieving former mentor for some time after the incident - something he was never fully keen on doing.

She, on the other hand, had met the boy only a handful of times. For what she could tell of him, he was smart and clever. Knew his way in and out of a situation. He was brave… foolishly so it seemed. Talented, by way of crime fighting. Better than Nightwing at that age back when he was Robin. So good that they were vetting him for candidacy in the Titans program before his untimely death. He was… sensitive… like he was never sure of where he stood or permanent. Like the ground was going to give way beneath him and he was just waiting for it to crack. And angry. He was so, so very angry…

Nightwing’s voice called them out of their thoughts. “I made a deal with him, and we all know he takes deals very seriously.”

“You can’t be serious,” Cyborg responded, breathing back life into the room. “You’re going to give Red-X…”

“I know how this looks.”

“A clean record all because…”

“He is the best person for the job…”

“You found out he’s Jason.”

“He has the skill set that we need…”

“He’s a criminal!”

“If there was another Titan who could do this, I would-.”

“Your judgment is clouded.”

“My judgment is sound. If you would just let me-.”

“No, Night!” Cyborg’s voice raised, slamming his fist down on the table in frustration. “You are talking about giving a known criminal, a notorious high profile thief, who we have fought a multitude of times. Who has worked with some of our worst enemies! He worked with Slade!”

“I know what he’s done, Cyborg! I know him better than anyone in this room!” Nightwing shouted back, “I know who he has worked for since he’s taken on the mantle of Red-X. I know his way of thinking, his way of moving, his skill set, I know him. And more importantly, I know that he’s is the best person for this mission, besides me.”

“Surely that is not the case. Perhaps you have overlooked someone,” Starfire offered. “Perhaps one of the Titan Nomads?”

“Yeah, dude. I mean, I get that he’s kinda your little brother come back to life but that doesn’t, like, erase the years he spent as a criminal,” Changeling added, albeit a bit timid.

Nightwing sighed. “I know it doesn’t erase the years he’s spent as a criminal. I know it doesn’t wash the bad blood between us and him. But trust me, as your leader I did not come to this decision lightly. I looked at everyone we know in the Titans program. Even looked at a few in the Justice League that might be willing to do us a favor. There is no one better suited for the job than him.”

“And what if he decides to go rogue and turn on us?” Cyborg questioned, his guard not giving any slack against the young leader.

“He won’t.”

“But what if?”

“If there’s one thing I know about Red-X, he looks out for number one, always. And if I know one thing about Jason is that he’s still that street kid trying to find his way out of the gutter. He’s not going to pass it up,” Nightwing answered, his voice hard and final. I understand if you don’t like the plan but it’s the only one we’ve got.”

Cyborgs jaw clicked and his eyes narrowed at the man before turning to look at Raven. “You’ve been awfully quiet.”

A second passed before she shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t see a point in fighting this. Nightwing is right. We need someone with his ability and with his mind - his detective skills. He can’t go himself because, as we discussed earlier, the press would notice. Speedy is a close candidate but he also has a bit of an affair with the press as well. All of the nomads may be covert but they don’t play well with others for long periods of time which this mission promises to be. Red-X is the perfect person for the job, and we have the proper amount leverage against him to prevent him from turning on us. It’s a logical choice.”

Cyborg stared at her for a long time, studying her as if she were a book he was trying to decipher through. But she did not budge - did not give one single inch that she thought the plan was flawed and clouded with Nightwing’s guilt and his need to redeem and restore his long lost brother-in-arms back to the right side. No, she couldn’t let them know. His mind was made up, and she had a headache.

“… Very well,” Cyborg resigned with a reluctant nod. “As long as she’s okay with it, I’ll go along. I’ll look at houses nearby. See if I can make the proper adjustments for our needs.”

“Keep me posted. and in that case, meeting adjourned,” said Nightwing, and no words have ever sounded so sweet. “Can I speak with you a moment, Raven?”

Fuck!

“Sure,” she uttered, begrudgingly, setting her files back down on the table as her other teammates cast her looks of sympathy. She rested her elbow on the table and pinched the bridge of her nose again, hoping whatever he had to say wasn’t going to take long. Her bed was calling, after all.

Once everybody left, Raven heard Nightwing sit in the seat beside her, sighing heavily like a deflating balloon. “That went over well.”

“How did you think it was going to go?” She replied.

“Worse,” he chuckled. Raven let a small smile grace her lips before falling under the weight of her headache. “Did you really mean that stuff earlier?”

“About Jason AKA Red-X being the best person suited for the job?” Opening her eyes, Raven rested her face in her hand and gave Nightwing a look that told him just how stupid he actually was.

“I figured…” He laughed again, his voice trailing to some far off place. “You know, I wouldn’t put you on if I thought you couldn’t handle him.”

Raven sat back in her chair with a heavy sigh, nodding her head. “That doesn’t mean I don’t think your judgement isn’t clouded. It’s Jason. I know exactly how torn up you were about his death.”

“I know, I know…” he sighed, his head bowing as his hand came up to rub at his forehead. “Maybe my judgement is clouded… but I need someone who thinks as I do on this mission. And he… as much as I hate to admit it- he’s better than me. And we need that in order to get the truth and get justice for those kids.”

“You fully believe that?”

Letting out another reluctant sigh, he nodded his head. “I fully believe he’s the best person for the job.”

“So be it,” Raven renounced. “But if he pisses me off, I’ll put him right back in the ground.”

Nightwing barked a laugh. “I wouldn’t blame you. He was a pain in the ass then, and he’s a pain in the ass now.”

[grimelords]

My august playlist is finished and I would like to extend my sincerest apologies for writing 3000 words about it. It’s mostly for my own amusement so please feel free to scroll right past this. There’s a lot in here, from Grateful Dead covers to Sunn 0))) and everything in between so please enjoy.

The New Stone Age - Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark: This is the perfect album opener because almost every other song on this album is Orchestral Maneouvers In The Dark’s normal fare of great downbeat synthpop but this song is like a nightmare come to life and it really sets the rest of the album in a different light. The otherreason I love this song is that ‘oh my god what have I done this time’ is a constant thought so it’s nice to sing along to. Buffalo Stance (12" Version) - Neneh Cherry: This song is an absolute masterpiece, the production is amazing, the synth riff is magic and this extended version is even better than the original because it has a lot more 80s scratching and also a bit in the middle where she says 'WOT IS 'E LIKE??’ Wakin On A Pretty Day - Kurt Vile: This is a great example of why Kurt Vile is good because this song goes for 9 minutes and you don’t even notice. It just keeps cruising on and on and you don’t mind a bit Turn Out The Stars - The Danish Radio Jazz Orchestra & Jim McNeely: This is another ABC Jazz find, its a very beautiful piece of music but what I like most is the ending where it stretches out a long long note into a big mysterious chord for no discernable reason. Downtown - Destroyer: I have yet to look up a picture of what Destroyer looks like but I from his music I imagine him to be a sort of mineral deficient vampire type of man who has just been wandering around New York for a hundred years. I had a big moment with this album this month, it’s really just perfect start to finish. Wow I just looked up a picture of him and I’m not far off. Song For America - Destroyer: I caught myself singing the part of this song where it goes 'winter spring summer and fall, animals crawl, towards death’s embrace’ while I was walking around town a couple of weeks ago which was good. Hoping For - Bad//Dreems: Bad//Dreems are maybe the best Australian band around right now. This is the first song I ever heard from them a couple of years ago and I listened to it probably 20 times in a row while I rode my bike around the school I used to live next too one afternoon until a cleaning guy yelled at me. Mirrors - Justin Timberlake: My girlfriend called me a '20/20 Experience apologist’ once and I’ve never gotten over it. It’s a good album! And Mirrors is the best song on it! It does the classic Timberlake/Timbaland thing of finishing up a perfectly servicable pop song after 4ish minutes and then starting up on some bullshit for another 4 and I love it the whole time. Speaking In Tongues - Eagles Of Death Metal: The guitar sound in this sounds like someone in honking the horn of their car in the studio. Eagles Of Death Metal are a wildly patchy band but their first album is a classic front to back and this song especially is a standout. Pain - The War On Drugs: I cannot get over how straight up beautiful this album is. I’ve listened to it more than anything else this month and I think every time I have a new favourite song. It turns out I love this one a lot though because as I was putting together this post I realised it was on here twice. Simulation - Tkay Maidza: This album was kind of unfocused and I really hope Tkay figures it out for her next album because when she’s on she absolutely kills it and this song is a great example of that. Countdown - Beyonce: I’m not a huge Beyonce fan (don’t @ me) but Countdown is easily her best song (don’t @ me). It’s just so dense and agile and busy in every aspect it’s absolutely hypercolour. New Dorp, New York (feat. Ezra Koenig) - SBTRKT: This is still such a flooring song, it doesn’t sound like anything else and it’s so left-field while still being incredibly cool the while time. Also about a year after this song came out I found out that New Dorp is a real place in New York further confirming my theory that America is a cartoon. Three Mantras Of Bon - Phurpa: Sorry, sorry, I’m trying to remove it. I accidentally had a big moment with a few different drone things this month and I fell asleep listening to Phurpa for about a week which I don’t recommend because it is literally just Russian men groaning at you fifteen minutes at a time and it feels like death has come to take your bones away. This song is good because they stop groaning halfway in and start making interminable vuvuzela noises instead. Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains) - Arcade Fire: When @grumsal came to visit us this month he was quite drunk one night and explaining to me that Neon Bible is Arcade Fire’s most underrated album and Sprawl II is their best song, opinions that I’m quickly warming to. Boys - Britney Spears: This song made me burst out laughing while I was alone because the bass in it sounds so funny. It’s like a straight up standard MIDI bass sound in this professional pop song and it sounds so, so dumb. This song alse features in the Beyonce film, Austin Powers: Goldmember so that’s how you know it’s good. Notwo - Autechre: I wish Autechre has more straight up ambient songs like this because they’re very very good at it. This and Outh9X which comes after it make a good pair because Quaristice is almost exhausting by the time you get to the end of it so it’s nice to have 15 minutes of wind-down that you can still get into like this. Hundred Syllable Mantra - Phurpa: Sorry, sorry, they are back and they have more groaning to do. I got deeply into this song this month and even now listening back to it I just want to lay on the floor and fucking die because of it. That’s how you know it’s a good song: it wants to kill you and you want to let it. Melody 5 - Tera Melos: Tera Melos��� Untitled album is a masterpiece. It’s just pure creative energy, before they figured out you can sing on a song without itjust being yelling in the background. This song especially ecapsulates the spirit of the whole thing because it twists and turns forever without ever feeling forced or boring, it just goes on and on and on with new idea after new idea but still feels like a complete work as well. The sample at the end where she says “lucas[?] you are as beautiful as [?] and [?] [???]” makes me very emotional even though I have no idea what’s going on. Good song. Guide Me O Thou Great Jehovah - House And Land: I found out about this duo because I’m a huge fan of the guitarist Sarah Louise but I didn’t even know she was a singer as well. This is great appalachian folk music without the watered down bullshit and WITH the sensibilities of modern composition. The calustophobically close vocal harmonies in this are just shocking. The Day Is Past And Gone - House And Land: I saw someone on their bandcamp page saying they’d never fully appreciated the function of the drone in this sort of folk music before they heard this album and they’re absolutely right. Everything pivots around the guitar drone in this song for the first half, then when the guitar takes over the violin steps in and everything weaves around it. Intro/Keep It Healthy - Warpaint: This is a great song but the intro especially made me think a lot about recording and the identity of albums and as inconsequential as it sounds I think the drummer fucking up and apologising at the very start benefits this album hugely because it immediately puts a very human face on music that could easily be quite aloof and distant to the point of alienation without it. Vaseline Machine Gun (Live) - Leo Kottke: I love Leo Kottke so much and this is maybe the first song I ever heard of his and it absolutely blew my mind but this live version is very funny. This is solo acoustic guitar music, american primitivism from the bluegrass tradition, it’s not cool guy music by any stretch but Leo Kottke has somehow packed out an auditorium full of folks who are absolutely hanging on his every note and when the central slide melody of this song starts you can hear one guy in the crowd just absolutely losing his mind over it in a couple of long, distant “woooooooo"s and I like to imagine that that man is me. Cavity - Hundred Waters: This song is so beautiful and so considered in every aspect. The frailty of her voice makes it feel like it could break at any second and the whole thing could collapse, the oscillating two note refrain that ties it together is so strong when it comes back and the percussion is so detailed in a way you wouldn’t expect from any other band but Hundred waters. Metastaseis - Iannis Xenakis: Thankyou to @thoughtportrait for introducing me to the nightmare music of true oddball Iannis Xanakis, I was reading about him for a few hours while I listened through his music and Metasaseis is a good example of a piece of music that has a lot of context around it, and the concept of the composition being individually scored for every single player in the orchestra is interesting and innovative and everything like that but it’s not essential knowledge to understand this: you just listen to it and get overwhelmed. For Organ And Brass - Ellen Arkbro: I am obsessed with this piece of music. It is absolutely transcedental but the first time I listened to it I heard a train horn honk in the distance outside our flat and thought it was part of the music, so it’s also that kind of music. It is twenty minutes of long, loud, organ and brass notes and I cannot get enough of it. Bogan Pride - Bad//Dreems: "big muscles pumping in my sweatshirt/ big muscles pumping in my dreams”. Almost every Bad//Dreems song is about The Boys and either being one of the boys or how much you fucking hate the boys or how much you fucking hate that you are one of the boys and it’s so good. Alice - Sunn 0))): The last part of my Drone Month was listening to this song a lot. This is my favourite from Monoliths And Dimensions because without any vocals or the choir of the others it feels very stripped back, the guitar moves in big waves and the brass follows. Also, I used this song to diagnose exactly which part of my car door was rattling when I played particularly bassy music this month, so it’s functional too. Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown) - Budddy Rich: I can’t believe I only found out this was a Beatles song this month when I was searching for this Buddy Rich version on Spotify. How embarrassing. I’ve listened to this album for years and this song is so melodically rich I wish it went for three times longer. Obedear - Purity Ring: I watched Search Party this month and aside from being an absolutely amazing show that somehow balances incredible characters, violence and mystery while still being hilarious it reminded me how good of a song Obedear is. I wish it had a proper opening credits sequence because this song never goes for long enough in the show. Out Of Line - Gesaffelstein: This song starts menacing and just gets more menacing the whole time. “a bitter sunken love in a bleach blonde submarine” is such a great line, and the voices barking on the offbeat near the end is so propulsive it makes me wish this song was longer. Every Time The Sun Comes Up - Sharon Van Etten: This song gets stuck in my head whenever I wake up and have a news alert about whatever the newest calamity is, but it also makes me smile because having a line like 'I washed your dishes but I shitted in your bathroom’ in such a downbeat and serious song is so funny. “I shitted.” Atomic Number - case/lang/veirs: This song feels like a folk song from another dimension where everyone worships the atom and the overlapping vocals in the verse are so nice. This whole album is just full of beautiful layered songs like this I really recommend it. Black Gold Blues - Laura Veirs: the case/lang/veirs album reminded me how much I like Laura Veirs and how much of a moment this sort of Kaki King/Tegan And Sara genre was for a while. The karate noises in the background of this song really make it. Golden Brown - The Stranglers: Will a song about heroin in alternating 6/8 and 7/8 featuring a harpsichord ever again be such a bop? Unlikely. Aquarian - Grizzly Bear: I’m still working out how I feel about the new Grizzly Bear album. It’s so dense and it always takes me a while to work through their albums but I like it so far and this song has really stood out to me so far. The drums especially make it, in the second half the dragged snare becomes the centrepiece that the rest centres around. Leak -Truth, yesnotesnotes- - Boris: If you’re still reading reply to this post and tell me whether you think of Heavy Rocks meaning Heavy as a concept Rocks like it’s good, or Heavy Rocks like big boulders. Because I’ve always thought of it as the former and I don’t know why. Speak In Rounds - Grizzly Bear: Here’s an easier Grizzly Bear song. I had it stuck in my head intermittently all month and would just sing it to myself constantly, to the point where I looked up the lyrics and it’s literally about drawing a picture upside down to distract yourself from tinnitus. The Obvious Child - Paul Simon: It’s crazy that Paul Simon put out the Rhythm Of The Saints right after Graceland because it’s like the expanded weirdo version of an already out-there album. Like a sequel from a different universe. Acetate - Metz: I was listening to Death From Above 1979 and then I realised I should stop fucking around and just listen to Metz instead. I love the loping rhythm of the bass that drives everything in this song and how absolutely noisy every single part of it is, it’s pure frustrated energy. Talkin’ World War III Blues - Bob Dylan: I’ve been reading a book about the Cuban Missile Crisis called One Minute To Midnight by Michael Dobbs and it reminded me how much of a bullshitter Bob Dylan is cause he said he wrote A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall about the Cuban Missle Crisis but there’s recorded evidence of him playing it like a year beforehand. Anyway this is a far better song and the best kind of Dylan song where he just rambles on about a bunch of bullshit that happened in a dream for 6 minutes. If I Had A Heart - Fever Ray: I’ve always sort of preferred Fever Ray over any of The Knife’s albums and as far as album openers go there really isn’t a better tone setter than this song and the huge throbbing synth that just sits there manacingly throughout while the organ builds walls over it. Dust Bowl Children - Alison Krauss & Union Station: A few weeks ago we saw a double feature of Hail, Cesar and O Brother Where Art Thou at The Astor and I learned that Hail, Cesar is  masterpiece that I didn’t fully appreciate when I first saw it and I remembered how much I love Dan Tyminski’s voice. Incredibly good song from a huge voice about my personal passion: soil erosion and how we are all going to die because we haven’t learned from the sins of agriculture past. Give The Mule What He Wants - Queens Of The Stone Age: I’ve listened to the new Queens Of The Stone age maybe 5 times through and it’s just not doing it for me, which is pretty disapointing. There is a bright side, however, and it’s that their first album has been re-added to spotify after disappearing for about a year. This is a song I regularly get obsessed with and have to listen to over and over and over but I can’t pin down what it is that I love about it. A huge part of it is definitely the propulsive groove of the verses and the way the drums and bass just roll forwards so heavily. Thinking Of A Place - The War On Drugs: I’m so glad this song made it onto the album because when it was initially released I thought it was just going to be a Record Store Day exclusive single but it works so perfectly as a centrepiece to this album. It’s expansive and beautiful and it makes me so emotional! Two Trucks - Lemon Demon: Two pickup trucks making love. American made, built Ford tough. Atomic Bomb - William Onyeabor: This was another song that kept getting stuck in my head reading the Cuban Missile Crisis book, and also because of the news over the last month but probably mostly just because it’s a great song. There’s something about the vocal phrasing and the drum groove that makes this song feel really structurally strong for the jam that it is and I really can’t get enough of it. The Scene Between - The Go! Team: The Go! Team are the most underrated band in the world and I’m dedicating my life to getting them the respect they deserve. For some reason their newest album has been removed from Spotify except for this single which I’m thankful for because it’s a great song. The Werewolf - Paul Simon: Paul Simon is fucking 75 years old and he put out one of the best songs of his career last year! Who’s gonna stop him! Tilt Shift - Mosca: “I never lost a fight [to camera: I have lost a few fights] but I will fucking shoot you bruv” Tilt Shift (Julio Bashmore Remix) - Mosca: Tilt Shift is an incredible song and somehow I only found out that Julio Bashmore had done a remix of it last month. It’s a great remix because it sort of sounds like he’s just done a mashup of Tilt Shift and the Wii Shop Channel Theme, which is fine by me. Spit You Out - Metz: The riff in this feels like Queens Of The Stone Age’s first album if they were incredibly upset. I love how long this song is, they really wring every last drop out of it. The Deadly Rhythm - Refused: It’s been years and the drums in this song still kick my ass. It’s crazy that an album whose first lyrics are 'I’ve got a bone to pick with capitalism, and a few to break!’ can be so legitimately cool. Over Everything - Kurt Vile & Courtney Barnett: I am so excited for this album. The two most relaxed songwriters alive finally collaborating to be incredible relaxed together. I wasn’t a hundred percent on this song when I first heard it because Kurt sounds like he almost can’t keep up with the song, but after listening to it a lot I’ve decided that makes it even better. Also a good 60% of this song is just them jamming out and I really hope the album follows the same formula. The City - The Drones: There’s a great part in this song where the tape runs out during the recording and there’s a long break while they change it which as far as accidents go is an incredibly musically effective one. Drive - Ainslie Wills: This song should have been a huge hit, I’ve been obsessed with it for two years now and it’s still incredible every time. Somebody sponsor Ainslie Wills and force her to make a new album already. Me And My Uncle - The Lone Bellow: It’s truly crazy how much time I spent listening to a 5.5 hour Grateful Dead tribute album last year but it’s just that good. Please set aside half a day to listen to Day Of The Dead in full and have a massive Grateful Dead phase for six months after like I did.

listen here

[sinceileftyoublog]

Whitney Rose Interview: The Story Thief

BY JORDAN MAINZER

In our interview conducted a couple months ago and since on Twitter, Austin-via-Canada country singer-songwriter Whitney Rose has joked about the ill timing of an album called We Still Go To Rodeos, released on her own artist/management-run label MCG Recordings back in April. The joke’s on us, though: As is par for the course for Rose, throughout the record, she uses the symbol of the rodeo, and first-person narratives of interpersonal devotion and depression, as metaphors for and tributes to the twists and turns of the human condition rather than literal autobiography. A woman ruins her life for a man on rollicking, jangly opener “Just Circumstance”; a different woman ruins a man’s car after he cheats on her on “Believe Me, Angela”. Someone ironically uses the excuse of a breakup to finally get a king-sized bed on “Through The Cracks”. There are songs devoted to life’s simple pleasures--companionship and sex on the breezy “Home With You”, snow cones on the harmonica-laden, swaying title track. We’re not going anywhere, but we need stories more than ever.

Read my interview with Rose below, during which we talk about the writing and recording of the record, Forensic Files, live streams, and how she saved a baby blue jay during quarantine.

Since I Left You: Do you feel especially fortunate to have been able to release We Still Go To Rodeos, given the current economic climate, on your own label?

Whitney Rose: Yeah, absolutely. The biggest reason for that is I didn’t have to have a conversation with anybody. It was completely up to me. I have friends on record labels who for various reasons ended up having to have very long discussions slash arguments figuring out whether or not to release it on the date and when to release it. We don’t know when we’re gonna have the green light to get back on the road, which all of my musician friends are dying to do, myself included. Not knowing how long this is gonna go on, and why not give people new music right now? Hopefully, let it marinate, and it’s not too old by the time we’re able to get back on the road again. At this point, because this is so unprecedented, I have no idea whether it was a good decision or a bad decision, but I don’t regret it.

SILY: From a listener standpoint, I feel like people are pretty happy to get any kind of new art, whether music or shows or books or films. Not even just as a way to spend time, but if something has something to say, it can definitely be comforting to people right now.

WR: That was my hope. I hope my new record was able to do that for some folks.

SILY: In terms of the songs themselves, throughout the whole album, you seem to be singing from a number of different times in your life or to or about different people, if not from different points of view. Does the album follow a concrete narrative? Are songs about specific people?

WR: The record as a whole is a narrative, but I make fun of myself and call myself a story thief. I’m really close with my family, and I’m really lucky to have a lot of close friends who tell me things about their lives, and I definitely steal their stories. I do enjoy writing in the third person, but writing in first person comes more naturally to me. I draw from my own experiences, too. I tell my own stories. But even if I’m telling someone else’s story, I prefer to tell it in the first person. In terms of there being an overall [narrative], I like to think it’s cohesive enough, but it’s definitely not telling one story.

SILY: Do you find that people often assume you’re singing autobiographically?

WR: 100%, as soon as you say the word “I.” I would even go so far as to say [singing autobiographically is] not usually the case. Sometimes, it is, but definitely, people make that assumption.

SILY: The first track, for instance, is inspired by the different stories you’ve watched on Forensic Files.

WR: Not only that, but I don’t know if you’ve seen Orange Is The New Black, but I got really interested in the criminal justice system, specifically for females. It’s pretty incredible the stuff that goes on. Obviously, not only the female experience...the criminal justice system is pretty fucked.

It’s amazing, because I don’t know how much you travel, but I travel a fair bit, and [Forensic Files] is one of the only constants. I can count on it being on HLN when I get home from a gig or when I get to a hotel after a 15-hour drive. The narrator’s voice has become somewhat of a lullaby for me. Sometimes, I put it on and I’m asleep within 30 seconds. It’s that calming. It’s one of those constants you can depend on.

SILY: Do you think you’ve watched every episode?

WR: I don’t know about that, because they always go on loops. But I can tell you I’ve seen some episodes 4 times. I tend to exaggerate, and I’m trying to do that less, but I would not be surprised if I’ve seen 500 episodes of Forensic Files...but I don’t know how many episodes there are. I should be on Wikipedia right now [looking it up.]

SILY: My girlfriend and I are at the point where we can’t go on Netflix or anywhere it’s streaming and find an episode we haven’t seen. For a long period of time, it was exactly that: something to fall asleep to.

WR: Absolutely. And I only watch it on Netflix when I’ve been trying to sleep for an hour or two and I can’t. It’s that thing that will put me to sleep when it’s important for me to go to sleep. We always need rest when we’re on the road. But at home, when I can’t fall asleep, I go straight to Netflix and put on Forensic Files. It usually works pretty quickly.

SILY: The track “Believe Me Angela”, I’ve read that you started out wanting to write a revenge tale, but it ended up being one where the two women at the bad end of infidelity find solidarity with one another. The song is structured the same way: You think it’s gonna go one way, but on the final verse, the narrator talks it over with her friends and keys the guy’s car instead of the other girl’s. Was that trick intentional, or did it just happen that way?

WR: It absolutely just happened. But not easily, because--[sighs]--I don’t know, that day--you know some days, you’re not angry or enraged about anything, but you’re a little more spunky than normal. I was just in this really awful mood and felt like writing an angry song and calling someone out on their shit. So I thought, “Okay, I’ll write a cheating/revenge tune.” I sat down, and was writing it but I was not feeling it. The more I wrote, the less angry I got. I started feeling compassion for the characters. I got derailed, and it happened.

SILY: Does writing songs in general have that almost therapeutic quality to you?

WR: Absolutely. Even just strumming a guitar. It’s effectively my medication. Even if it’s just three chords over and over and over again for half an hour to an hour. I find it really really soothing. Usually, when I do that, I start thinking of melodies, and that’s how a lot of my song ideas come to me.

SILY: In terms of your lyrical delivery, the one that stands out most to me is “In A Rut”, especially the way you say the title really quickly. Did you do it that way to have it fit within the tempo?

WR: It’s funny; when I wrote that song, it’s probably the best example of what I just described, playing the same three chords over and over again. In this particular instance, I had just come off the road, and I wasn’t feeling the best. This isn’t how I approach every song--I don’t just write when I’m angry, I swear. But it actually started out a lot slower, and picking up my guitar for the first time in a few days, which doesn’t usually happen. Usually, even if for a few minutes, I play every day. But I was in a weird mindset, and I started playing these chords and singing these three words. It was a lot slower. But when we were in the studio, I thought it should be a little bit more of a rocker. I didn’t want to be sad, but a little more frustrated. The most effective way I could do that was try it as a rocker. My band on this album is amazing. They could have done anything--that could have been a ballad and they would have done an incredible job. But when I heard them playing that at a faster tempo, I fell in love with it. We just moved forward with it. We didn’t even go back to the country shuffle.

SILY: It’s almost an anthem, the way it turned out.

WR: Thank you! It’s really fun to play live. It’s one of the only tunes I got to play live with my band before this happened. I always have a lot of fun with it.

SILY: Your band is pretty steady throughout the whole record, but I do love that there’s an overall palate that occasionally introduces something new, like the banjo on “I’d Rather Be Alone” and the harmonica on the title track.

WR: Every musician on the record is so versatile. They can play any style. That’s one of the biggest reasons why they were hired. Matt Hubbard and Rich Brotherton, when they came to the studio, they were involved in the base tracks, with Lisa Pankratz on drums and [Dave Leroy Biller] on guitar and [Brad Fordham] on bass. It was all pretty much within the same week. When the piano and extra guitar player came in, they had a truck full of instruments. When we were helping them load in, we were like, “Holy shit! How many instruments do you have in here?” They didn’t know what we were looking for. Playing around with the extra instruments was so much fun. I’m sure that’s super nerdy. But Matt Hubard on harmonica on the title track, Rich Brotherton on banjo and acoustic guitar on “I’d Rather Be Alone”. Matt Hubbard on the Wurlitzer. Watching Gurf Morlix do his thing on two or three tracks was incredible. One of my favorite guitar players, Nichol Robertson, who is based in Toronto--timing didn’t work out for him to come down here, so I sent him a couple tracks, and he sent back some amazing stuff, like the outro for “I’d Rather Be Alone”. 

When I write, I write alone, so I have to imagine how it’s going to sound in my head. I’m just a strummer. I’m by no means a good guitar player. I enjoy it, and obviously I play guitar a lot, but by no means am I a maestro. Seeing people care about these little songs I’ve written, and having them listen to me and listen to what I want, and having it become a musical conversation. They are maestros, and they know so much more about that world than I do. Seeing what they bring to the table. I wish I could be in the studio all of the time. It’s such a learning experience. It’s so inspiring. The only thing it hasn’t inspired me to do at this point is actually get really good at an instrument.

SILY: The line on “I’d Rather Be Alone” that gives it its title seems to be prescient right now: “I’d rather be alone than lonely.”

WR: There are a lot of things on this record that aren’t the best timing. Everybody in the world right now just wants to be out in public. “I’d Rather Be Alone” is socially responsible, but what people really want is to be able to go out to dinner with their friends, go to a park, go out for coffee, go to a beach, go to a pool. That one is telling a story of a friend of mine who basically said half of the line. I was listening intently, trying to be a good friend and listener, but I couldn’t wait to get off the phone and write that song. [laughs]

SILY: The line on “Through The Cracks” about finally getting a king size bed after becoming alone again differentiates being alone and being lonely, too. You can be lonely, but not be alone. And part of aloneness can be these things that give you comfort.

WR: There is such a difference between alone and lonely, and a lot of people don’t realize that. I don’t think it’s groundbreaking or anything, but it could be helpful for people who hate being alone to have a better understanding of people in their lives who don’t need people around, to the point where they’re uncomfortable having people around. It’s something you can realize within yourself. “I’m alone right now, but holy shit, I’m not lonely, I’m actually really happy.” Vice versa, “I’m lonely right now, but I’m not alone, so what does that say about me.” Understanding people in your life who are different than you.

SILY: What’s the story behind the cover art?

WR: It’s kind of embarrassing, actually. I wanted to do something really simple. In the past, my artwork hasn’t been glamorous, but this time, I wanted to do something a little more natural and simple. My fella and I just went out for a drive one day. He took that photo, and I saw it, and I thought, “Let’s use this. That’s the album art.” My friend Tom Ionescu put the borders on. We worked together to maintain that simplicity with the fonts and how everything appears. I wanted something not really flashy. I have one hand behind my head. It was free. Why not?

SILY: Have you done any live streams?

WR: I haven’t, and it’s not for any reason except it’s gonna be the first time that these songs are for the most part being presented, and I want to present them properly. If I were to live stream just me and my guitar, I feel like it would be sending kids off to preschool but not putting any clothes on them. It doesn’t feel right. I’ve even recorded myself doing a live stream, and I’m not happy with where it is. Also, one of the times I did a test of a live stream, I knocked over my microphone. I couldn’t stop giggling. It feels really, really weird. To execute it really well is really, really difficult. The space in between songs is dead air unless you have something really clever to say. But I don’t want to say anything. I just want to play my songs. Basically, I’m just waiting out the really strict quarantine, and when I have all of the gear and cameras to have my band over to my house and practice distancing and do a live stream that way, instead of doing it just on my own. The best that I can go for with just me and my guitar is endearing, and I want better than that.

Even if it was a different record that I put out, it might make sense for me to do some solo live streaming, but for this record, I’m gonna wait until I can have my band.

[Editor’s note: Since this interview was conducted, Rose has been featured on two SiriusXM channels.]

SILY: In the meantime, is anything else coming up for you? Are you finding yourself writing?

WR: Yeah. I’ve been writing, and I’ve been practicing, and I’ve been doing what everyone else has been doing. And just like everyone else, some days, you wake up really inspired, and you read, and you exercise for a while, and I’ve been practicing French, so I’ll do 4 or 5 French lessons, and make a really nice meal. And then the next day, I’ll be like, “Oh, yeah, I’m gonna watch 5 episodes of The Office.” It ebbs and flows. The other day, a friend of mine said, “This is a really weird time. As long as you’re getting by, great. You don’t have to master that third language. Great if you do, but if you can just get through this, that’s enough.” I really appreciated her saying that. It really spoke to me. I’m sure there are a lot of people out there who feel the pressure to keep being productive. I’m not coming down on that mentality at all because it’s ideal. But for me, I’ll readily admit that it’s not sustainable. 

SILY: Is there anything you’ve been listening to, watching, or reading during quarantine or before that’s caught your attention, inspired you, or comforted you?

WR: I love the new [Lucinda Williams] record. She released it on the same day as [I released mine]. Two days after she released it, I listened to it 4 times. Right now, I’m reading Becoming by Michelle Obama. I can’t wait to watch the Netflix special. I’m almost done with that book. We rescued a baby blue jay, which took up about a week. The baby fell out of his nest in my yard, and the nest was too high to put him back. He was about to get eaten by a feral cat, so we took him inside. The next morning, we were gonna take him to animal rescue, but we saw his parents in the yard, so we ended up making a makeshift nest for him. By the end of that first day, his parents were coming to visit him and feeding him every 20 minutes. About a week after that, he flew away with his parents and I think one or two siblings as well. That was great. That took up some time.

SILY: Do you have any pets?

WR: I do not, no. I love animals, but with my old lifestyle, spending so much time on the road, it wasn’t really feasible. For a few months of the year, I’d have to find alternate care for a pet. It hasn’t felt right since I started touring full-time. Right now, I would even kill to have Ace back. I’m glad he flew away, and it had a happy ending, but I loved having him around.

We Still Go To Rodeos by Whitney Rose

[jae-bummer]

Step One

Request: Hello~~ Can i request #2 with Seungkwan since he's my ub and i realised that you've never written any seungkwan fics before >< and can you please make it extra fluffy? Thank you ♡

2) “Okay…so like…there’s only a 30% chance that we’ll die.”

Member: Seventeen’s Seungkwan x Y/N

Type: Fluff

You heaved a sigh as you shimmied out the stress in your shoulders and tugged down at the top you had on. Another scheduled date night had come to fruition with your boyfriend, and you were trying to prepare yourself for the usual theatrics. You began to go over your mental checklist of how to properly go on a date with Seungkwan.

Step one, show up on the doorstep of the dorm at exactly six p.m. You always had to meet him at his dorm. If you ever mention him taking the bus to your apartment, you would never hear the end of the whining. It wasn’t specifically that he didn’t want to take the bus (granted he was a bit high maintenance for public transportation) but he loved to show you off. If he could mention that he had a girlfriend to his members at least once a day, he would be a happy Boo. If he could actually get you in front of them, he shined with pride. 

And you weren’t about to be the one to dull Seungkwan’s shine. 

Step two, he will probably be coming out of his skin with excitement, knowing you’ll be arriving soon, but will literally act as blasé as he can when he answers the door. He’ll offer an eyebrow wiggle, or maybe a sassy sentiment about how your clothing choices were getting better since you started dating him, but more often than not he’ll just tug you in. As much as he loved to parade you around for a meet and greet, Seungkwan wanted it over as quickly as possible. 

At his core, he wanted you all to himself. Which you were more than at peace with. 

Step three, spend a moment with each of the members in the dorm at the time. On this evening, it was your favorite duo, Hoshi and Seokmin, lounging in the living area. 

“If it isn’t our favorite inconvenience,” Seokmin grinned as he enveloped you in a hug. “Seungkwannie didn’t tell us you were coming.”

“He never does,” Hoshi grumbled, standing as well to wrap you in a hug. 

“Why should I have to tell you when MY girlfriend is coming over?” Seungkwan spat, rolling his eyes. 

“I don’t know, maybe because-” Seokmin began, but was instantly cut off by the sound of heavy footsteps on the hardwood. 

“Noona!” you heard a bright voice call from down the hallway. You turned just in time to see a charging Chan take you into his arms, much larger than you had last remembered. 

“What have they been feeding you?” you chuckled, hugging him tightly in return. 

“For a kid who is so shy around girls, he has no problem getting comfortable with Y/N,” Hoshi clucked, shaking his head. You knew he was trying to tease Seungkwan, and judging by the look on his face, it was working. His cheeks were now a bright red as he took a step toward you. He pulled you back from the youngest member and wrapped his arm protectively around your shoulders. 

Step four, have Seungkwan actually get mad about showing you off to his members because somehow his feelings get hurt. 

“Aish, you can’t just grab someone like that,” he clucked with a pout. “You might’ve surprised her and she may have gotten scared.”

“Only you are frightened that easily,” Seokmin cackled, his usual bright smile present on his lips. 

“Like the time I brushed my hair against your arm and you thought it was a bug and you nearly scalped me,” you chuckled along as well, sending fluttering fingers into Seungkwan’s ribs. 

“Yah, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he muttered, unwrapping his arm from your shoulders. “I do know that we have to go.”

“You always bring over Y/N just to take her away again,” Hoshi pouted, crossing his arms. 

“I’ll come over sometime just to visit with you guys,” you smiled. “And I won’t even act like Seungkwan is here.”

“Impossible,” Seungkwan hummed, shaking his head. 

“Old Divaboo is right about that one,” Seokmin sighed. “He’s too loud to be ignored.”

Step five, Seungkwan rolls his eyes and stomps out as he tugs you from the room. 

You chuckled to yourself as he was quick to intertwine his fingers between your own. He moved swiftly down the hallway and into the elevator, launching you to the ground floor of the building. 

“And what are you laughing about?” he hummed, eying you carefully. He attempted to show disinterest as he gazed at you, but it was difficult to hide his enthusiasm. While Seungkwan was his own biggest fan, he was also your biggest fan as well. 

“How your members like me more than you,” you muttered, batting your eyelashes. “Bleach my hair and give me suspenders, I’m joining Seventeen.”

“That was one concept!” he sighed. “Have you ever seen me in suspenders since?” 

“No, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be,” you laughed. 

“Well, on our next date we’ll go suspender shopping,” he grinned. “All suspenders, all the time. Sleepovers; suspenders. Water park; suspenders-”

“Do they make swim suspenders?” you asked curiously. 

“I’m positive they have everything on Amazon,” he nodded. 

The elevator doors opened, exposing you to the busy street before the dorm building. The streetlights were bright on your faces as you stepped out and onto the pavement. Seungkwan quickly guided you in the direction he planned on going that evening. 

Step six, you have no idea what Seungkwan has planned, but you pray it isn’t karaoke again. Granted, you loved his voice. You recognized the talent that lived within your boyfriend’s vocal chords and complimented him as often as you could. You did not appreciate, however, the occasions when you were forced to go to karaoke and listen to him freestyle every Mariah Carey song known to man and make sure the crowd knew he was singing about you. In his best go at English, he would mutter a small, yet enthusiastic speech about how the song was dedicated to his girlfriend. God heaven forbid if someone in the room didn’t realize you were together.  

“Seungkwan, I love you...” you trailed, looking toward him cautiously. 

“Why do I feel like a ‘but’ is following that statement,” he muttered, continuing to saunter down the sidewalk. 

“But please, do we have to go to karaoke tonight?” you whispered with a wince. 

“Why on earth would you not want to go to karaoke?” he hummed, batting his eyelashes innocently. 

“Well...uh...for as much fun as it is,” you continued. You tried to pick your words carefully as you spoke. “I don’t...I don’t really get much time with you.” 

Yes, you’d go that route. That was the reason why you didn’t want to go to karaoke.

“Oh, jagi,” Seungkwan clucked. “You get to hear my gift so often. These people aren’t as privileged. You have to learn to share my talent and quit being so selfish.”

You grimaced and let out an unintentional sigh. 

“Quit being so upset,” he hummed. “I know we aren’t going to the karaoke bar, but you’re going to have to contain your disappointment.”

You couldn’t help the slow smile that spread across your face. Your ears immediately perked up as you focused on your boyfriend. 

Step seven, immediately regret not actually going to karaoke. 

You stood before a small restaurant, it’s roof nearly caved in, and no clear door on the front of the building. 

“Mingyu hyung said it was really good,” Seungkwan whispered, a slight panic in his tone. “So like...there’s only a 30% chance we’ll die?” 

“From the food or the ceiling caving in?” you muttered, searching the front of the building in the dim evening light. You had long since turned down a vacant alley to actual find the location Seungkwan had been searching for, so it wasn’t the most well lit area you had ever ventured in around Seoul. It seemed as if the man beside you was legitimately had begun shaking as he glanced around, not at all at ease with the situation he had put the two of you in. 

“Is it too late to turn around and go to the kara-” he whispered. 

“Door, found the door,” you nodded, a bit too enthusiastically as you shuffled to the entrance hidden behind a beaded curtain. “Found it, that means we go inside now. Into the restaurant and not karaoke. Waiter is probably watching us and waiting for us to come in. No turning back now.” 

Seungkwan deadpanned as he looked at you, not at all amused by your antics. 

“If you think I’m dedicating ‘Hero’ to you ever again, you’re wrong,” Seungkwan pouted, yanking open the door of the restaurant and gliding in. For a moment he had seemed to forget how natural of a coward he was as he led the way. 

You hurried behind him, afraid to enter the falling down restaurant, but more frightened by the idea of being left alone in the alleyway. 

Step Eight, no matter the situation, Seungkwan will probably get frightened at some point.

Seungkwan gripped your hand in his, his knuckles turning white from the pressure of his grip. 

“How are you so scared?” you whispered. “Do you really think a serial killer is going to use a restaurant as a storefront for his nefarious activities?”

“Well, I didn’t before,” he gasped with wide eyes. “But I am now!” 

“How many?” a waiter asked, seemingly appearing from no where. 

“Yah!” Seungkwan shouted, spinning with a jump as he realized the new person’s presence. “TWO PLEASE.”

You couldn’t help but snort at your boyfriend’s polite yelling. The waiter lifted his brows, muttering something to himself as he led you to a booth. You looked to Seungkwan who still had his hand placed over his heart. All color had drained from his face and he looked wearily at the back of the waiter’s head as he shuffled along behind him. 

You held to his hand as you crossed the dining room, closing your eyes for a moment as you took a deep breath in. The restaurant smelled amazing. That was a good sign at least.

“What can I get for you to...” the waiter trailed, halting his sentence as he watched the two of you curiously. You looked down at your menu, thinking nothing was out of the ordinary until you looked up again and noticed Seungkwan had slid into the booth on the same side as you. 

“I’ll have a soda,” he hummed nonchalantly, looking at his menu. 

“And I’ll have...a tea?” you answered, tilting your head as you looked from Seungkwan to the waiter. 

The waiter’s eyebrows were lifted as he watched Seungkwan. Without speaking, he spun around, off to fetch your drinks and contemplate how strange the young man was that he was now serving. 

“Uh, jagi,” you whispered, sending a soft elbow into his arm. “Why are you sitting on the same side of the booth as me?”

“So I can protect you in case the situation presents itself,” he nodded confidently. You remained silent, now your turn to lift your brows as you stared at him. 

“I have a sneaking suspicion it’s because when you’re afraid, you get clingy,” you chuckled. 

“I do not!” he gasped. He looked up from the menu and eyed the restaurant warily. “I mean...we are the only people in here...so no one would hear our cries for help...but who’s thinking about that? Not me.” 

Step Nine, no matter the situation. You love Seungkwan anyway. He was difficult to consciously not love to be honest. You couldn’t help but grin like a fool as you watched Seungkwan try to occupy his thoughts by reading the menu. He was probably the squishiest human being you had ever come into contact with and you were constantly reminded by how much excitement he brought to your life. 

Whether it be sass, unnecessary memes, sensitive emotions, or a capacity to fear everything - your boyfriend had it covered. He was obviously the complete package. 

“Hey,” you cooed, wrapping your arms around his. “Get the wrinkles out of your forehead.”

“What?” he grumbled, not looking up from the menu. 

“It’s okay to be nervous,” you hummed. “But I’m here. And I love you.”

The worry lines on Seungkwan’s forehead flattened out as he looked at you. His eyes were soft as a smirk tugged at his lips. “I love you too, but if you tell me not to worry, and we die, my ghost self will never forgive you.” 

You rolled your eyes and placed a light kiss on his cheek. “Deal.” 

[underachievers-please-try-harder]

Interview // Everything Everything

I inteviewed Alex Robertshaw and Michael Spearman of Everything Everything for 7digital.

Congratulations on the extremely creepy video for ‘Can’t Do’. Those masks are pretty unsettling.

Michael Spearman: Yeah, my mum doesn’t like it. She said it was creepy and horrible.

Alex Robertshaw: Jon [Higgs, singer] found the masks. This record is based around early Warp Records stuff, so we were looking at those great Aphex Twin images that make you feel uncomfortable, to fit in with the whole notion of a fever dream.

You reference Warp, but there’s a real rock feel to some of the tracks too.

AR: Yep, I feel like my 14-year-old self is finally being satiated, where I was all about Warp and Ok Computer and Nirvana and Weezer. Ok Computer is still an important part of my life; it got me into music and playing guitar more and more, and appreciating that bands can be more than just three-chord nonsense.

Discussing your last album, Jonathan said that he wanted it to be “like a sledgehammer.” What was the goal for A Fever Dream?

AR: I started a lot of the writing for this record, so for me personally it was about reigniting the flame of my [interests from] childhood. I felt like a lot of the stuff we’d written before was courting R&B and hip hop and stuff, with Arc and Get To Heaven. And that was cool, but with this record I really want to connect with what I was into. We didn’t want to feel ashamed of being a guitar band, or doing music that makes us happy, or to feel a duty to bamboozle people or whatever. Writing was much more natural.

MS: And quicker as well, because we weren’t trying to make things work; it was just a case of bringing a certain side to the fore.

AR: Musically, it’s our most honest record, I think.

A Fever Dream might be your most honest album, but musically it’s still very complex. You’re still not making it easy for yourselves, are you?

AR: Going back to these Warp Records references, a lot of that stuff is known for having really interesting drums, so I was writing a lot of drum beats that were almost impossible to play. And then Michael’s learned them all, and improved them. Guitar-wise we wanted to do more solo-y type stuff, and be a bit more adventurous all round. So it’s a lot harder record to play and really exciting to listen to, and hopefully not impossible for people to understand. We wanted to be direct.

MS: There are obviously some heavy riffs and some of the album is very electronic, but musically I think it’s more cohesive. I suppose part of our manifesto as a band is not to repeat ourselves. And of course, the more you do the harder it is to not repeat yourself. We don’t really want people to be able to pinpoint our sound too easily. I think we’re slightly paranoid that people see us as the wacky band, or whatever.

Can you tell us about your decision to swap Get To Heaven-producer Stuart Price for James Ford?

AR: Well we’ve played James demos in the past and he hasn’t been into it. (Laughs) Or he’s been busy and has other projects on. But this time, he was like, “Yeah it’s perfect for me.” Stuart Price was incredible as well and that was an amazing record to make. Everyone we’ve worked with has generally been the right person for the record at that time.

MS: We did ‘Can’t Do’ with James as a tester and we just got on very naturally and easily.

AR: He got what we were trying to project in the writing, and he managed to enhance it, which is the best thing a producer can do.

Lyrically, for Get To Heaven Jonathan drew on experiences of watching rolling news about the rise of UKIP, Ebola and terrorism. The world’s not really gotten that much less stressful in the past two years...

MS: No. But things were coming to a head at that point, and now things have come to a head with Trump and Brexit.

AR: The whole world feels like a nightmare, or some sort of crazy dream, with Trump being in power and other things that you would never think would happen have happened. It’s like some crazy Alice in Wonderland thing is happening. So A Fever Dream is not overtly political or directly referencing things, as Get To Heaven was. Jonathan finds the idea of telling people how he feels is boring, so he’s talking from a view point of not really understanding what was going on. It’s about posing questions.

Was that partially about self-preservation – so he didn’t have to immerse himself in that world?

AR: Yeah, Jon admits that he watched the news too much. The difference between this record and the last record is that as soon as we started going on tour with Get To Heaven, I had written ‘Can’t Do’ within the first handful of shows back. We were just rolling on from the buzz we were experiencing with Get To Heaven so we wanted to keep working. We didn’t have that time at home [like with the last LP] where Jon just went completely insane, essentially. He had a whole year off when we were trying to write Get To Heaven, and was just watching rolling news continually at home with all his cats, and being a madman. (Laughs) He realises that and he looks back on it like, “I don’t know why I let it get that bad.”

MS: I think we engineered it so he didn’t have a chance to have too much time at home. Because it’s so binary what we do: we’re either away and playing different places and having a topsy-turvy existence on the road, or you’re at home catching up with boring stuff. It’s very easy to get isolated in these bubbles and we had to guard against that as best we could. So I remember thinking we finished our record, and thought it was time to step away from the news.

AR: There’s a sick enjoyment people get out of putting themselves through it as well. Like, “I cannot believe this is happening.” And then everyone can sit around shouting at each other, making each other feel awful. (Laughs) You know, just being so upset with what’s going on around you instead of actually going out and doing something useful.

MS: ‘Ivory Tower’ is about internet warriors. You know, everyone has an opinion and it’s all in caps lock. The internet is a super stressful place to be now. It’s just one-upmanship. Like, “I’ve got a more extreme opinion on this than you!” It’s so tiring. (Laughs)

‘Ivory Tower’ sounds like it’s made up of internet soundbites?

AR: Yeah, yeah. Jon had to remove himself from Reddit because he was just watching people say the most horrific sh*t to each other so the whole point of that song is the concept that in a social space you can hide behind anonymity. It’s just about trolling, essentially. That’s why he says some really horrendous stuff in the song; it’s not coming from Jon’s mouth, it’s coming from different characters that are within this world. So yeah it’s just about conflict and wanting it to end, and the song spirals out of control.

How else did the political and social climate influence the album?

AR: Well ‘Big Game’ is to do with Trump, and the idea that someone can be in power and yet be incredibly childish. So the whole point is that it’s meant to be naive and childish, and the language is like schoolyard bullying and lying.

What were the challenges making this record in particular?

MS: It was less challenging, I thought.

AR: It was the most work I’ve ever had to do on a record, personally. For Man Alive and Arc, Jon wrote most of it, and then with Get To Heaven we both wrote but we wrote individually. And this record I wrote more than I normally would, and then we wrote a lot of stuff sat down together. So I did more work than I normally do, but I’m fine about that. (Laughs) I think the album’s good. I mean, if the album bombs then I’ll take a step back. (Laughs)

It’s 10 years since you formed in September, right?

MS: Yeah, September 10th.

Will you be celebrating?

AR: We’ll probably just go for a curry. We’re not very adventurous. Outside of the music we have literally zero imagination. (Laughs) It all goes into the songwriting. We were saying this other day: I was staying with Mike and I was like, “Mike, maybe one day when I come up to visit, we shouldn’t always eat the same thing?!” (Laughs)

Is there anything you wish you’d known when you were starting out?

AR: I wish we’d been more honest in our writing sometimes. I think there were times in the past when we’ve written songs that we thought would be good because they’d get on the radio. I think it’s down to being more confident, essentially.

MS: It’s a hard game to play, but I think we’ve played it pretty well, really. You’re learning on the job because your first album is the first album you ever make it. If you look at film makers, they’ll do low budget films and then they’ll come out with their studio film with 10 small films under their belt. But with music you see the works in progress. We definitely learned a lot from the first two albums.

Are there any unfulfilled ambitions?

AR: Yeah, I think the next record is going to be entirely more about the songwriting as a core thing. I want to write classic songs, and for it all to be about melody and harmony.

[tinymixtapes]

Interview: Sun Araw

Keeping it real these days is no easy feat, and finding something original to say is even harder. So it’s a blessing that we have folks like Cameron Stallones still out there, wading freely into the deep end in search of radical new visions to wrangle from the innersphere. It’s been a long journey he’s taken down the twisting pathways of Sun Araw, and musically it might seem like he’s come about as far as one can come from his early days of shredding echo loops into the psych-tropic canister. But mentally, he’s just been getting closer and closer to the point. Lately, Stallones has been flexing his Texas roots out with a shimmering question mark of an LP, The Saddle Of The Increate. It’s a deep and divine slice of frontier majesty, an unclassifiable and homespun Herculean epic as interpreted by a single grain of sand caught between your teeth. Stallones had a lot to dish about it, so we had the following chat over pupusas and a few games of pool, and as you can see, the conversation tended to shift about, like the colors of clouds hanging sweetly over a balmy Utah sunset… --- So before we dive into the new record, I have to ask what’s going on with Alex Gray? He seemed like a really big part of the project for a few years, but I haven’t seen you two play together in a minute, and it seems like he’s done making music as D/P/I. Well he and Jessica [Smurphy] actually just moved to the Yucatan. We might do some European touring together soon, because getting him a flight over there is easy, and we don’t gotta rehearse, me and him. But for playing anywhere else, he’s a bit out of the zone. He’s an extremely passionate dude, and when he goes in a direction, he goes in the direction. He’ll definitely keep making music, and you can quote that [laughs]. He might not share it with anyone else, but it’s in his bones. He’s literally one of the finest musicians I’ve ever met in my life, and in a way that’s so natural and organic. As an instrumentalist, he can play circles around me on anything, except maybe keyboards, which I can’t really play either. But on guitar, and sax, and drums, he’s insane, and it just comes from his natural mojo. It’s part of his being, you just watch it unfold. When we had to stop playing when he moved, it was tough to readjust. Because we had been playing together for almost six or seven years at that point, and I hadn’t realized how symbiotic what we were doing had become. When he was gone I all of a sudden had to rebuild the structure, and be like, ‘What do I want the live thing to be like?’ And I hadn’t had to think about that when he was there, because our minds would just meet and then become something. There are definitely two distinct phases of Sun Araw in my mind, where before there was all the early Not Not Fun fuzz, and now there’s this new wave that’s driven by these sparse, blippity rhythms, and it does feel very symbiotic with what he was doing as D/P/I. He really inspired me to start using a laptop, because now I use a laptop live and I don’t think I’ll ever go back. I might find other ways to integrate it, but… it’s always been a looping band, and I think we got it to a really cool place, me and Alex, where we were doing audio looping but it really didn’t sound like it or feel like it. But once you move to MIDI looping, the possibilities are literally infinite. Once you’ve tasted that, I can’t imagine wanting to go back. I just don’t understand on a physical level how you actually make music like you do now. Granted, I don’t really have experience working with MIDI controllers, but your music just doesn’t even sound like looping anymore. It’s so changing, it feels like it never truly repeats itself, even for just one loop. I mean a lot of it on Belomancie and the new one isn’t looping, really. But it’s still sort of psychologically looping, if that makes sense? It’s like, I’m hearing the loop in my head, but I’m playing something different. I think I still structurally think about music that way. I think that’s forever burned into me, for better or worse. And it can be kind of limiting compositionally — you’ll notice not a lot of Sun Araw songs have like, chord changes [laughs]. More recently some of them do, but that was always by design. It was always by seeking after a certain trajectory. Well the new one definitely has some notable chord changes in there. It feels like these may be the first true ‘songs’ in the Sun Araw catalog. I definitely knew when I started seeing what was happening when I was making it, that that was going to be part of it. You might ask, who rides in the saddle? It’s a very interesting question. It’s like a koan. No one. No one rides in the saddle. But no one is something. Nothing is demonstrable. So, why cowboys? What got you riding on the honky tonk train? There are honestly three things that came together that made the record what it is. There was this one day where I was watching these four Q.E.D. lectures that Richard Feynman gave in New Zealand in the mid 70s, and that was a big part of it. Then there was this Alice Bailey book that I was reading about the Zodiacal interpretation of the Labors of Hercules, which I had never considered, but there are 12 labors of Hercules, and then there are the 12 signs of the Zodiac, so it’s a book showing how the story is just a walk through the Zodiac, among other things. And then there was this really profound… there’s this restaurant in Alhambra that’s the only restaurant in L.A. I think that serves food from Borneo. I was going there a lot, and just eating this super-thin, super-spicy, hot, seafood egg noodle soup, you know? And I jokingly started calling it a South Asian cowboy record to myself. But the cowboy thing really came from this realization — the Hercules thing was interesting to me, because I had never really thought about the Hercules myth or cared about it at all, or even seen it as deep, and then it was like, ‘Oh, well here’s an in-road to understand it.’ And it’s all just like herding cattle. He has to rope these horses, then he has to go catch this boar, then the last one, the Pisces one, is he has to herd the Cattle of Geryon, and Geryon is this monster, this three-bodied, three-headed, three-everything monster that guards these cows. And Hercules has to get these cows and put them in a golden cup and sail them across the ocean. It’s a cool story. So the record does have a narrative, which is a first, and it’s the story of that. Me trying to retell that story, but then also in the midst of this investigation I discovered that there’s this group of people called the Toraja, a tribe on the island of Sulawesi, Indonesia. They’re mostly known for these incredibly elaborate funerals that they do, where the funeral bankrupts your family for generations. You build a whole village, and you raise money for the funeral, which can take 20 to 30 years, so you keep the dead body preserved in your house, and you bring it to dinner and you put food in front of it, you live with it for all that time, for years, with this corpse. And then you have this huge festival where you invite the whole island, and you spend every dime you have on it, and some that you don’t, but then everyone has to bring tributes, so you kind of get paid back, I think. And it’s just wild, it’s this week-long ceremony that goes on and it’s multifaceted. But what I got really interested in was that they have these temples that they build, and the temples are shaped like saddles. So like, “Heaven is a saddle” is one of the refrains of the record, and you might ask, who rides in the saddle? It’s a very interesting question. It’s like a koan. No one. No one rides in the saddle. But no one is something. Nothing is demonstrable. It’s interesting to me how cowboys are this old-fashioned, mythical thing in America, usually associated with an older time, but you’re bringing it up while your music is easily as far out as it’s ever been, easily as non-referential to anything that’s come before it. That’s really flattering to me, because those are two of the things that I care about the most when making music. I want it to be as futuristic as possible, and I don’t want it to sound like anything I’ve ever heard before. And it’s a struggle to do those things, and sometimes you ask real hard questions. Sometimes I’ll make something for hours and listen back and go, “Am I crazy? What is this?” But I’m really satisfied with how everything came together on this one. There is a logic to it, and I think part of what becomes interesting for me as an artist is to cast that logic further and further out, or deeper and deeper inside the music, so what you’re actually listening to is generated by the logic, but you’re not hearing the logic. You’re not hearing the bassline like it really would be played in a certain sense, you’re hearing an abstraction of it. It’s like making a sketch of a sketch, it’s a really curious sort of process. I feel like your music has always had a really strong sense of humor to it too, all the MIDI presets, and riffs that are so simple and off-the-cuff that they sound almost amateur, there’s always some goofiness afoot. But The Saddle Of The Increate does feel much more upfront about this. Yeah, it’s a comedy. I felt like I had to say that too because I felt like people might not realize that it is supposed to be funny. Like, just so you know [laughs]. It’s okay to laugh at this. I’m definitely laughing at it. I know improvisation is a big part of what you do, but with these explicit narratives and more complex instrumental styles that you’re into now, do you think there’s less of that on Saddle than before? No, it really is improvised actually. I just jam in a room. I jam a keyboard for nine minutes, and then I jam a guitar on top of that for nine minutes. I just sit there and record every track. So it’s really very, very improvised, and almost never forethought. Sometimes I’ll be like, “Oh, I want a transition in this song!” So maybe I’ll surgically insert something that isn’t originally there, but that’s very rare actually. It’s interesting that you say that because this album especially, whether it’s improvised or composed, it does feel more constructed compared to your previous work. I think that’s true. I was trying that, I think it’s much more compositional. I wanted the compositions to be really strong and to be elaborated in a certain way. But it’s interesting because it really is generated from improvisation, and I only harp on that because it’s very important to my understanding of inspiration. I really don’t feel that inspiration is a thing that people have, I think it’s a place people can go. And I think that we share large pieces of emotional territory, like we all know sorrow, right? It’s like a countryside full of stuff. And as it gets more and more fundamental to the human existence, it becomes more and more in common, the things that we all share. I think that inspired art comes from those places, it comes from psychological space. If you go deep into psychological space and your imagination, you can pull out these things. But the reason it can resonate across centuries, the reason Hercules can make a difference to me, or Alice Bailey who wrote that book in 1917, is that they’re touching something that’s held in common. You recognize it. It comes to you, and maybe it’s in a different format than you’ve ever seen before, because you don’t look at Byzantine painting or whatever, but you recognize something, and that’s why you feel something. And you might not be able to articulate it — usually when it’s at a really high level, you definitely can’t articulate it, because it’s happening in a space that is above the duality of language. But I think for me, improvising is the way that I practice figuring out how to go to that country all the time. Because I think that almost everyone gets kind of a free ride there once or twice, that’s why a lot of people can make a great album, or a great painting. But to continue that over the course of a career, we all see our favorite artists take pits and falls. It’s a windy road. But there are people that I see where I can tell that they’ve maintained, and the practice becomes, “How do I get a free ticket back to inspiration? How do I get there on a regular basis with my will?” It makes you a servant of the muse, that’s what they used to call it. And I’m about that. Servant of the muse, for sure. So that’s the ticket is always playing, always recording it? I think for me, it’s the way I can push myself out of my intellectual mind. Because I don’t think the intellectual mind has the deepest root in a person. I think there are parts of us that are not intellectual that are actually much more fundamental and generative of our experience. So when it comes to composition, plotting a chord change versus playing one in a moment, they’re completely different things. Because one is being generated from the intellectual mind, which is cool and it can do all sorts of stuff, but what it’s really good at is craft, and inspiration is not craft. Inspired art is not craft. I would say that most music is craft, it’s the recreation of a form, or the working out of a genre or a form or something. And obviously because of how I’m saying this and the context in which I’m saying it I’m gonna sound like I’m being judgmental of that, but actually a lot of my favorite music is craft. A lot of reggae and dub is craft, it’s taking fixed forms and experimenting and extrapolating, but really crafting these objects, crafting dubs, you know? And that’s part of the creative practice, all art involves craft at some level of its production. But before that comes the inspiration. And then obviously you see art that’s committed to finding new territory, and not crafting objects that are recognizable, but creating something totally new. That’s a totally different part of the mind that is able to do that, it’s the sort of thing that makes you dream, and all that stuff. Having like 50 guitar amps and five distortion pedals is a certain kind of power, but a single digital koto note played in silence is a totally different kind of power. This is sort of a non-sequitur, but do you listen to classical music much? I do, more and more. Especially early 20th century like Górecki, Varése is really huge for me, Charles Ives, a lot of that stuff has become really interesting to me. Kind of just creeping backwards from Stockhausen and people like that, and seeing, ‘Who were their heroes?’ I just read this book called Give My Regards to Eighth Street, it’s a really amazing collection of essays by Morton Feldman just all about that time, about all those dudes just chilling and hanging, and it sounds groovy dude. They were up to some business in New York. It was really inspiring to imagine a creative group of people all sharpening each other, and seriously discussing the principles of what they were doing. The reason I bring it up is just because recently, like specifically the last couple of days, I’ve been making a push to actually dig deeper into classical music and understand it more. Because I’ve listened to a lot of that 20th century stuff, a lot of minimalism and Stockhausen and the crazier music from the past century or so, but I’m still a total stranger to… Yeah you’re talking like, Mahler. That’s sick dude, Beethoven is crazy. Exactly. But we’re on this subject of craft, and I just can’t imagine that sort of music being improvised. Listening to that music, it’s so put together. But also, also: Mozart and Beethoven both describe the experience of being able to perceive their compositions outside of time. They both talked about hearing it all at once, and then they would have to write it out. There’s documented writing of them discussing that. And that’s very interesting, because to me, in the framework that I just laid out, that implies that that shared psychological space is outside of time. So the perception of time is something that is maybe produced by our senses, but isn’t fundamental to mind. Like mind is not necessarily inside time. And that’s an experience, and that’s one experience among many sorts of experiences that humans express from time to time that have that quality, of being able to experience something, just for a moment, that doesn’t exist linearly in time. That doesn’t express itself in duality of now and later, and this and that, and hot and cold, you know? And then the difficulty of bringing that thing back and transcribing it into your 7th Symphony or whatever. It’s interesting to me. But you’re right, that transcribing part of it is the craft, that’s the chisel. And for me, it’s mixing. The playing is all inspiration, and then the mixing is all craft. And this record I mixed the longest I’ve ever mixed. This record took me the longest any record’s ever taken, almost three years, and the mixing was really deep because it’s the first the record I’ve ever made that was completely MIDI-generated. So basically when I’m recording, I’m recording data, not sounds. So I’ll pick a synth and I’ll jam on it, but then deep into the mixing process you can be like, ‘I wanna try a different synth.’ And with MIDIs you just have the data of what you played, and you can apply different synthesizers to it, and re-trigger stuff. Which to me was something I had never explored, so that made it take a lot longer. Because usually it’s like, ‘Well, it sounds kind of shitty, but I’m stuck with it!’ But with this it’s like, I can really tweak it forever. What do you think the ultimate difference is between your earlier music compared to what you make now? I just like clarity now. I think clarity is much more psychedelic. Obviously I think with the early stuff, it’s cool to create atmosphere with reverb and all that, and used well it’s really important, and I still like the way my old stuff sounds, I really do. But I don’t have any interest in doing that anymore. Because to me, when you say you want it to be as far out as it can be… I really am interested in psychedelic music, like psychedelic music as an active principle. Psychotropic music, music that when you listen to it, it changes the way you feel, and the way that maybe the room looks. And that was really what Belomancie was all about. In the writing for that album I said, “These songs are like corridors and chambers.” And I could tell you which song on there is which. Some of them are like corridors, and some of them are like chambers, where you sit and it’s in the room with you. And that’s something that I think has become super important in the way I create music now, I just want it to be extremely transformative to the space that it’s in. And being in a crazy psych-rock band like Magic Lantern or whatever, having like 50 guitar amps and five distortion pedals is a certain kind of power, but a single digital koto note played in silence is a totally different kind of power. And it’s, in my feeling, way, way more powerful. But also more delicate, and harder to hold together. And because of that I think sometimes the shows, when they go bad, it’s really hard. And it could just be the space, that you have to really fight something, because it really is hanging together on a thread. Photo: Iria Dust It does feel like your music needed time to eventually get to the level that it’s at now. Because all the earlier stuff, even though it is experimental, you can see how it might have a more wide appeal in the general psych-rock circuit, and make it onto popular video game soundtracks. That’s actually what’s really cool about it, it’s profound in its own way but it’s also easy to just hang to — but your newer music definitely raises the bar for the listener. Totally man, thank you. And that’s where I was at, that’s what I wanted to hear, and I’m really proud of that. That record especially, I mean all of them, honestly, but On Patrol in particular, I’m really proud of that record. When I listen to it now, it still has a quality where I think the way it was recorded — which was really crazy, I mean I still record in a similar way, but it was extremely primitive — but it sounds great to me. I wouldn’t really change anything about it, except maybe remaster it or something. But yeah, I think Inner Treaty was a line, where a lot of people didn’t cross that line. My albums have been progressively less “successful” in a music industry sense since that zone, and I totally understand that. It doesn’t surprise me, and I’m not bitter about it. But my interest is in making what I find interesting to make. That’s my priority. You’ve talked about the psychedelic experience, and how important it is in your work to convey that, but what does ‘psychedelic’ actually mean to you? It’s a word that gets tossed around a lot. Yeah, it means like, fuzz guitar, right? [laughs] No, it doesn’t mean fuzz guitar. It’s like how I was saying with the word ‘psychotropic’ — for me a psychedelic is something that you ingest in some way and it alters your perception. And of course demonstrably, everything does that. Water does that, the color of your shirt does that. Everything changes your experience. But the human mind has certain patterns that it follows normally when it’s left to its own devices, and the will isn’t being used in a really strong way. And it’s possible that there are other patterns, right? I mean you can breathe weird, like when you were a kid you ever do those things? Lean over and do the head rush, you can do all sorts of stuff [laughs]. To me, psychedelic is something that has a profound effect of cracking, breaking, giving space, or giving transformation to that normal brain function. Obviously unto that definition, anything can be psychedelic. Music, food, I mean dude Szechuan? Go have a crazy Szechuan dinner in San Gabriel, tell me that’s not psychedelic dude. You walk out of there tingling. You’re in a fire brass brassiere, it’s crazy. It is about change in a sense, and movement. The sense of not just staying on one unmoving path. Well some people would say that part of the problem is that we always change, but the problem is we don’t realize that. We pledge allegiance to a part of our self that actually is not the main part of our self. Change allows you to notice. Like, you don’t notice what apps are running on your phone until you look. And then suddenly you realize, ‘Oh, all these apps are running, it’s slow,’ and it’s like, yeah, well you got 10 apps running! I mean, I don’t like to compare the mind to a computer, but it is a decent analogy, right? You see some people who sees things like they’re just running an app, it’s just a filter between them and the world. And the mind is that, the mind is like a filter, it takes in stuff and interprets it. So when you know that, there’s not a problem. When you don’t know that, it’s a problem. Because then you’re like, ‘Well that’s just how it is!’ And it’s like, well, for you in this exact moment of space-time, which was actually different five minutes ago but you didn’t even notice because you’re not even aware that you’re changing. The person that wanted to go get a snack is not the same person that is talking to his wife on the phone, you know what I mean? They’re different people. So I think change is cool. I got really ratified by [Marshall] McLuhan at a young age, which is weird [laughs]. He was the first media theorist, ‘the medium is the message,’ that was his deal. It’s deep, but his vibe was that it doesn’t matter what’s on TV, TV is TV. TV is the medium, TV is the message. The medium is the message. And it’s the same thing, people don’t realize that just watching TV changes the way you think about everything. It changes the way you experience the world, it changes everything about you. So he was really about eliminating the Western-European idiom from early philosophy to now, which has been based on this idea of the objective third-person point of view, that there’s an objective reality. And that’s not demonstrably true! [laughs] Whose is it? What does it look like? It’s all being experienced by someone and therefore interpreted. There’s not one world, there’s thousands and thousands of worlds. I don’t think the intellectual mind has the deepest root in a person. I think there are parts of us that are not intellectual that are actually much more fundamental and generative of our experience. I know you’re originally from Austin, did that play into the vibe you had making this album? Definitely, I love country music. To me the pedal steel guitar is literally the most beautiful instrument in the world. There’s nothing that I want to hear played more than a pedal steel guitar, someone that can really play that thing is like… I can’t describe the way it makes me feel. So that’s always been something I’ve wanted to include in the band, and for whatever reason the time was right for all this love to come out. I also have to give a shout-out to discovering Terry Allen’s records. He was a huge inspiration for these songs. Someone handed me Juarez maybe two-and-a-half years ago and it blew my mind. And the writing thing with this record, the lyrics, I spent much more time on them than I ever have before. I was really interested in stretching that part of it. Because I like to write, I enjoy writing, but I’ve always had a hard time because there are certain words that I don’t want to hear myself sing, you know what I mean? [laughs] I’m not confident with my voice, so I can write things that I think are great, but it could never be a song because I won’t sing the word, like…whatever [laughs]. I just can’t stand it. The thing about the Terry Allen records is the scope. Like Juarez, it’s funny because that album is literally just piano and voice, and that’s it, but the scope of that record feels so immense because of the way it’s written. And I was really inspired by that and I wanted to challenge myself to do something like that, because I had never tried to write something that felt really generous and lengthy and that you could really go into in some way. And I don’t know what you would get out of it, because I think it’s not clear what it’s really about [laughs]. At least in a certain way, I think the sentiment is present. There’s a lot of specificity in the writing for me, but that’s meaningless to anybody else. And it’s not actually worth sharing because it’s totally meaningless, it was just what I used to generate the thing, but the thing is now its own thing. Do you miss Austin at all? I really do because my parents don’t live there anymore, so I never get to go back. I would go back for SXSW, which was just the fool’s errand of fool’s errands. I went there three times in a row always promising myself, “This is the last time I’m ever coming to this fucking psychopathic…” It’s like the worst tumor of Western culture, the idea of what fun is. Like a music festival? It’s like, brought to you by Skynet! You can’t imagine worse circumstances to play or listen to music. If you sat a team of people down to be like, ‘What’s the worst imaginable venue situation to watch music and to play music?’ they would come up with SXSW. It’s beyond reason. And I had a really good time there in the early days when there were all those parties you could play, cause those were always great. But then they cracked down on that shit. It’s like, ‘Why don’t you come and play for 250 bucks,’ it’s absurd. And obviously there aren’t 700 sound men and women in Austin, so it’s just some poor bartender who’s pissed, and you walk in the door and you’re unrolling your first cable and they’re like, ‘Hurry up man you’re cutting into your set time!’ And then all the PA’s are on limiters because you can’t have a show here and a show next door and a show next door because of the sound bleed, so everyone has to play really quietly, so artists are always trying to turn themselves up more because it’s so quiet, so they’re always distorting through the PA because they’re maxing out their levels and they’re fighting some bitter-ass drunk bartender who’s just like ‘fuck you bro.’ It’s totally insane. I’ve never been before and that’s definitely the vibe I get, it doesn’t really make me want to go. It seems like the music is just the label they put on the package. It’s just hardly noticeable, and hundreds of thousands of good bands play there every year, and no one knows. I mean I’ve seen some powerful performances there, there’s places where you can control the vibe a little more. But for the most part, for someone like me, it’s just like eating dog turds. It’s like, I’m not gonna punish myself like this. I’m not gonna present my music in a place where it’s bound to fail, that’s just being irresponsible. On the flipside, how do you feel about L.A. these days? I really, really, really love L.A. It’s complicated, but I really love it, and I have a hard time imagining leaving it. I think if I left I would probably just leave the country, because that’s the only thing that would be attractive enough. But I truly love this city, the proximity to nature first and foremost, and the food secondmost… San Gabriel Valley is a gift to humanity. I never dreamed Chinese food could make me feel that way. It’s kind of my biggest hobby, eating noodles in the San Gabriel Valley. I’ve talked about it at other times so I don’t want to repeat myself too much, but it really is a city unlike New York or Chicago or the other major cities in America, where it had no modernist planning, really. Outside of the downtown area, which is the catty-corner, it’s its own little grid, but the city isn’t laid out on a grid, it’s sprawl. It’s like the first really major sprawl, and it was generated by all this crazy immigration. Where I live, in Glendale, there are more Armenians in Glendale than there are in Armenia. And it’s this strange diaspora that happened, I think mostly due to the tragic goings-on there at the beginning of the century. Even the San Gabriel Valley for that matter, it’s this busted, faded, SoCal 70s suburb that’s turned into this hopping, super-deep Chinese neighborhood where you go to places and there’s no English anywhere. But it’s in a place that used to be a Taco Bell in the 70s, with the old Taco Bell architecture. The good Taco Bell architecture [laughs]. And it’s just totally psychedelic and crazy. And then there’s the film industry obviously, which is the main, maybe not originally, but quickly became the main financial power here. And that’s literally the manifestation of imagination. That’s the industry. The manifestation of imagination and all the cancerous calcification of goo around that, around people who are inspired and those who try to take advantage of that, to get a piece of it. That is the other main sort of architectural force here, so it’s a really, really cool place to live. Especially on the East, it’s so green, there are so many parks I can go to so close to my house where after five minutes of walking I can’t see or hear the city. And of course, the weather. Yeah I love it out here too man, it’s such a fascinating city. Even though it does have these terrible aspects to it, it all still plays into what’s so special about it. I mean there are parts of it that feel like hell. Also, because of the nature of it, and this is the film analogy, Los Angeles makes you the editor. You edit your version of the city, because it’s so big. I’ve got my zones, and they get bigger and they expand and you add new ones all the time, but there are places I never go. Like, I never go to Olive and Highland, unless I’m trying to see a movie at the Kodak or something. But yeah, it’s crazy. And dude, California? Because I love Texas, I really do, I have such a warm and deep blood-level resonance with central Texas just because it’s where I’m from, but the High Sierra? Yosemite? Joshua Tree? Anza-Borrego? The ocean, up and down, Big Sur? I mean it’s psychotic, it’s like, can’t let too many people find out [laughs]. I went on a backpacking trip for the first time this year. I’d done tons of hiking, like really extensive day hiking even, like 20-plus miles a day, but I had never done a backpacking trip. So I went on a 10-day trip across the High Sierra, from Sequoia over to Mount Whitney, and it was just like… it’s so necessary. To be in a place where you have to walk three days to get there? That’s the only way you can get there is to walk three days. I had never experienced a place like that. A place like that feels super-different from a city. And it does things to you. If you’re responsive to it, it tunes you. Because you’re there, and you can’t relate to it the way you relate to the city, so you start to relate to it in a different way, and then you start to feel really good. And then you realize, oh wait, people are supposed to relate to nature, but on a regular basis. Because it makes you behave differently and think differently and feel differently, it’s psychedelic, you know? And then you come out and it’s transformative, it’s really important. You recognize something, and that’s why you feel something. And you might not be able to articulate it — usually when it’s at a really high level, you definitely can’t articulate it, because it’s happening in a space that is above the duality of language. But I think for me, improvising is the way that I practice figuring out how to go to that country all the time. You mentioned how green it is out here, and I think that might be part of the reason why I’ve always liked your music. I’ve always been really drawn to the color green, and just in terms of the sounds you use and your artwork, I get a lot of green vibes from it. Woah. I get it man, greenery is big for me. Like, lush. Central Texas is very green, it’s not like West Texas or North Texas, it’s lakes and rivers and hills and big, old Cypress trees and oak trees. That’s deep in me, and then also obviously the jungle has always deeply held fascination for me. There’s always been a heavy jungle vibe in the stuff I’ve done, and I’ve tried to explore that and expand that a lot. I don’t think that most things sound that way necessarily, but yeah, it’s a deep color man. It’s the biggest part of the spectrum. I didn’t know that, someone recently showed that to me. Because it’s the middle, ROYGBIV, right? And it’s because the spectrum is parabolic, so as you approach ultraviolet or whatever, and it goes from green to blue, etc., it changes faster. So it’s green for the longest in that bottom of the halfpipe, and then as you go up the half-pipe the colors change really fast. Oh my god dude, that’s good. It’s good, right? It’s really nice. http://j.mp/2rGVsEA