Shouting and Faithless, Cold and Shameless (Thesis addendum)
The songs on this album cover a lot of ground, stylistically and lyrically. I don’t tend to like explaining my music, but since most of you probably won’t sit down and listen to this album obsessively, I thought I’d help out a bit and explain some of the material here. It’s not the most detailed, but hey, it can’t hurt.
“No Victories” originated as a loop of what I believe is a brief sample of me singing. I guess I expected the additional layers to be more varied than the two chords in the loop, but the guitars followed the sample, so the song only has three chords. The lyrics are based on an idea I had about a twisted rapture scenario, which I will not explain in greater detail here because it will absolutely make some of the readers quite angry. This song features the first of two guitar solos on the album.
“Left To Die Talking To God” was written on bass. That should hopefully explain why the bass is more grounded and the guitars flail more wildly. The lyrics are, like the song before it, about religion, but from the perspective of an autistic individual (myself) noticing patterns in outsider artists incorporating religious imagery into their art. Daniel Johnston and Henry Darger are good examples of this.
“I’ll Hold The Mirror” started as a set of lyrics that I recorded vocals for before I’d even written chords down, although I could already imagine how the song would go before I’d recorded any of it. The lyrics themselves are completely meaningless. Don’t read further into them, there’s nothing to read. This song features the second of two guitar solos on the album. This was slated to be the fourth single but was canned because my video idea proved too daunting when tested.
“Lay To Rest” was written on an Omnichord at Gradwell House Recording, a recording studio I interned at over the course of this album’s recording. It’s the same Omnichord you hear throughout the song. I also wrote the lyrics whilst recording the Omnichord, but didn’t record them in the studio. The lyrics are about an old married couple spending their last day alive on a beach before going back to their breezy motel room for the eternal sleep. This was slated to be the third single but was canned after realizing I didn’t really want to learn 2D animation to make a music video.
“The Way It Is” is a touching ballad abo- who am I kidding. This is an aggressive political song. I wrote it in a weird tuning so I still don’t know what one of the chords is.
“It’s Just You” also started out as a looped and sampled vocal. The difference here is that, instead of letting it run through the whole song, I paused it at times to allow for something more dynamic. The entire instrumentation was done with MIDI instruments, including a notoriously bad plug-in called Delay Lama and a discontinued plug-in I found on Soulseek called quadraSID. The lyrics are about blurring my personal identity and my artistic identity, and my continuing of this unhealthy boundary blurring. This was the first single.
“New Crown” tackles similar lyrical themes as the previous track. The original version of this was called “Crown Of Fools” and almost had a country feel. After it proved difficult to shape into a more sturdy song, I scrapped it and re-purposed the lyric to match a demo I’d recorded during the EP stages but hadn’t used for any of them. Every instrument besides the acoustic guitars and vocals were performed by Todd Jordan of Floating Cloud Music and Kevin & the Bikes. I’ve known him for a few years but had never worked with him, and this seemed like a good song to let him fiddle with. I was not expecting him to send back twelve stems.
“Imitation” was also written on bass, but this time the guitars were carefully orchestrated. The lyrics are about trying to stand out as a musician by being unique (which I’m not, but that’s beside the point) when it’s more marketable and profitable to just do what everyone else does. This was, at one point, going to be the first single.
“Easily Entertained” isn’t a new song. It was first written for Atlantic Witchcraft last year, after seeing a few bands live in the Student Center and thinking all of them sucked. If you’d like, I can tell you what bands they were. The song didn’t make Witchcraft because its atmospheric, slow-burn nature didn’t fit the other songs. One year later, I decided the time was right to give it another go. Ethan Oliva from Barlow, Ex Pilots, Sober Clones, Living World, and Gaadge plays the lead guitar.
“Please Stop Dancing” was the first song I wrote for this album. It’s a half-genuine half-joking piece about why I don’t like dancing as an art form because even watching it, let alone participating in it, gives me horrible anxiety, whilst also recognizing its cultural importance and understanding that saying it should be completely eliminated would be outright insensitive. This was the second single.
“Under Her Brilliant Ways” was also written on bass. The lyrics are meaningless, I think. I don’t remember. It’s probably the least interesting song on the album but I liked recording it and I like listening to it so here it stays.
“Chariot” is more word salad, although some of the lyrics come from various tracks recorded in the EP stages that didn’t make the album. The main riff was written in 2015. The song as a whole was written on guitar, but I thought it sounded better on synthesizer. After recording a synth, a bass, and some vocals, I sent the song to Danny Loos, who played on the last Hello Whirled album Hole Of Infinity. He used it for his Audio Production and sent me back fifteen stems.
“Mrs. Matter” was written lyrics first and recorded vocals first, although the original vocal track was not kept. There was, and likely still is, a “for sale” sign deep in my neighborhood with a realtor whose last name was Matter. To provide any more details would be disrespectful and invasive, but let the record show that what I saw was enough to warrant writing a song.
“Heroes Are The Best Villains” started as a noise jam, and also ended that way but with the last minute and a half cut. The lyrics were assembled from some little passages I had sitting around. Much like the title track, I would prefer not to publicize what the song is about.
“Money Is The Death Of Art” began life as a nine-verse/nine-chorus anti-folk song from one of the EPs. I canned it from the album because it was over five minutes long and didn’t progress much musically amidst what amounted to a poorly sung rant. Still a good version, but not what the album needed. One day at Gradwell House, I found myself with some studio time, so I recorded a new version of the song from the ground up with some strange recording techniques, like lining up five microphones in front of a poorly assembled drum kit just to see what would happen. The lyrics are still a bleak take on attempting to live as an artist.
“Savannah” is the last of the sample-based songs on the album. I almost didn’t change anything in the mix from the EP to the album, but decided it would be smart to re-record some of the vocals, as I did with most of the other songs. Since the original performance was fairly strong, I probably pushed myself too hard when re-recording them, so a lot of the original vocals are still in this mix. The lyrics are about a woman wandering through an empty desert at the end of her rope, so to speak.
“At The Bottom” was written in 13/8 or 13/4 or whatever. Unlike my last song to be written in that meter (“Burn The Flower”), I aimed for simplicity over complexity. The lyrics are again political in nature. The vocal interplay that runs through the whole song may be the most technical thing I do on the entire album.
