0. content

the winter of my senior year of college, i bought a two input line 6 audio recording interface and an sm-57 microphone. this is the first recording i have, which i made the day they came in the mail from musician's friend to the house where i lived in tallahassee a few days before spring semester. in the few years after that i would release around a hundred songs and this series will explore these basement tapes, my back pages.

this one minute song, content, the lyrics of which are just the word "content" pronounced two different ways over and over again, already has in evidence a number of characteristics that will repeatedly be seen elsewhere in my ouevre:

• layered downstroke electric guitars
• the use of EQ'd down guitar as "bass"
• blown-out sound (both aesthetically and also unintentionally)
• faux-analog (all effects are always digital) tape delay
• avoidance of writing "real" lyrics / reliance on puns

1. songs about food, pt. 1

i don't know if i'll stay roughly chronological with these or jump around but these are the next earliest recordings i have, from the next few months as i started to learn how to use my gear. my studio during this era was a small bedroom in a four bedroom house a few miles south of the university. i had a single bed with a wood frame, the same bed i had slept in my entire life (save for my freshman year in a dorm with its own bed). my comforter was a light blue fleece (you do not need much of a comforter in tallahassee). i never used my overhead light (i have always been a lamp person) so i installed a blue bulb in that which looked cool when it was dark and i was high.

one way of trying to avoid the cringe of writing "real" lyrics that i chose as a generative device in those days was writing songs exclusively about food. when i was a teenager even before i started playing guitar i had loved the band shonen knife who made a repeated practice of this (see also: cibo matto). i also always liked the title of the album more songs about buildings and food by talking heads (more than the music if i'm honest which is).

ketchup i think this is the second song i recorded, a day or two after the previous one. it's not quantized or looped, vocal and guitar live to tape with a punched in guitar solo at the end. i would often use this particular dry telephone vocal the spoken word bits now feel a bit olivia rodrigo but also there's something where i'm almost like holding my breath a little or doing head voice or something. the lyrics are a true story.

yogurt this is the first recording i have with percussion and i think guitars looped by the app rather than me playing them over and over for the duration of the song—i still hadn't figured out how to use the recording software (at this time i was using an app called sonar) well enough for drums so this is me thumping a book and shaking a plastic egg filled with sand into the mic. the yogurt i ate most at this time was yoplait fruit on the bottom blueberry (it was not a great time for yogurt).

snocone from later in the spring, this recording is already way more sophisticated than the others—the first appearance of keyboard, quantized and sequenced with sync delay, actual (if muted) drums. (the lyrics are prosaic to the point of being just kind of simple declarative statements about my snocone preferences and experiences). i thought of this as like a melancholy underwater take on "ice cream man" by jonathan richman, a song i liked to cover.

i played music with friends throughout college which was a great source of joy (the music and the friends) but i usually stuck to guitar and was too shy to sing (and when i did sang i sang in a shy way). the mediation of recording / the privacy and safety of recording myself in my bedroom was how i found my voice.

2. fingerpicking as meditation

i got my first guitar for my sixteenth birthday. it was a black and white ibanez stratocaster copy that came with a tuner, a cable, a very small practice amp, and a handful of picks. the low e string was very buzzy (i think the nut was loose that's what she said) which led me to not really play many power chords, the natural for the rockist electric guitar novice (i also felt (don't really still feel) they lacked a certain richness—i loved the ramones and people would always talk about how it was just power chords but listening to their records it felt wrong, no, there are other notes, this sounds more colorful than just the first and the fifth).

i've always thought of myself (still think of myself) as an electric guitar player first, but if you are a straight man at college you're legally required to own an acoustic guitar and so i got one and i learned that i did really like fingerpicking as a kind of meditative activity. i think most guitarists have certain patterns their hands naturally seem to fall into. most of the way i learned to play guitar was not learning actual songs (which would have been too "homework" to me) but just kind of mindlessly plinging around as my mind wandered.

for whatever reason, this is the particular "acoustic guitar instrumental" thing that felt most pleasing to my hands and thus, because i enjoy easy pleasure, is the pattern they would fall into—at this point, i had probably been playing it on guitar for a year. the initial part of the riff feels like a monkey swinging between ropes to my hands and then a long double stop slide from high up on the b and g strings down to the root and then back up high for some twelfth fret harmonics (most of these songs i couldn't play now but i still play this core loop). i felt that the acoustic guitar itself wasn't sonically interesting enough so i added some forest field recording i had downloaded (which i think is why i titled it that?) and more live percussion on not percussion instruments and jagged os mutantes-inspired electric guitar and then a mellotron female choir (my mind blown by the fact that on my computer i now had things that were called soundfonts, free multi-velocity samples of real acoustic instruments, realizing that in my boring black dell computer in the corner of my bedroom all i had to do was download a file and my studio now had the instrument that played the riff in "strawberry fields forever", the aura of the tape leaking through into the digital (watch paul mccartney play one)

3. songs about food (and sex), pt. 2

i was still a virgin when i recorded these songs. i kept doing food songs but i started to want to push past the limited emotional range (while also not like getting serious and putting my actual feelings at risk). i had the idea to start singing about food but as a kind of double entendre that then like gets taken to a ridiculous degree to the point where it doesn't really make sense and is maybe funny. i guess it was a way to try to bridge from just literal statements about food to something more emotional or expressive.

candy, darling is based around the idea that i am asking a woman for her candy, like literally actual sugar candy she owns and possesses, but then it's also like candy is sex. it's silly and also kind of gross. the guitars are my already usual flavor of strokes and i think the mono synth that it's anchored around was kind of inspired by one of the songs on summerteeth but it's kind of a weird one. often in the songs there will be production or performance choices i regret and one big one is the amount of master reverb there is on this track (since i like the guitar parts and the drums but they all sound too tinny) and the bellowy low vocals which like if you continue listening to these you are going to hear me doing some pretty weird shit with my voice but the amount of strain and inflection i put on here is something (like i projected out of my shyness but then blew right past taste).

i really love breakfast cereal and in an ideal world i would eat it every morning for my entire life and the phrase i wanna frost your cheerio just got stuck in my head one day and i loved how visual and lewd the metaphor was (and yet also innocent? like it is obviously a virgin singing this and at this time in my life anyone who is going to listen to this song is my friend and already knows i haven't actually had sex with anyone). i wanted the production to be a kind of spector solo lennon chamber thing but also with a little bounce to it (the skittery guitar dancing over the drum fill between the chorus and the verse)—unlike the previous one, i think this song benefits from the reverb. i definitely got drunk in order to record the vocals (though also i am playing up the drunkenness i am not mark e. smith) and the multi-tracking of a chorus of drunk me's makes it feel even more unhinged. my dad put sugar on sweetened cereal when i was a kid and i blame him for my prediabetes. i would call this PBR&B but high life was the beer i got drunk on to sing this song.

i think after the end of senior year but before i moved out of the house i had a crush on this really beautiful girl whose last name was pai and who once whispered in my ear, after professing an interest in me in front of other people at the end of a party we had seen each other at, "i want to make you dinner" which was the hottest thing any girl had ever said to me in my life but the problem was we were only really tertiary friends and so i didn't see her a lot and my out-of-control unmedicated anxiety (except with enough alcohol and weed to go out, but even then i never really thought i became a different person when i got drunk (which i kind of wanted sometimes, to actually lose my inhibitions), just a dumber happier (eventually sicker) one) meant that actually independently acting on this and trying to go out on a date with with her was simply impossible so instead story of my life i recorded this blues rock song called pie and posted it on my facebook wall, which was where i had shared some of the previous songs and where i thought she might hear it and wonder if it was about her since we were (digitally) friends and that afternoon after it had been up for a few hours i got a call from a number with an area code of her home town, a fairly specific place that i had never gotten a call from before, and it was like the moment where the thing you're fantasizing will happen but sure is never going to actually happen is like actually happening except once again at this time i had no courage or game or anything and just let the call hang and didn't pick up sorry for the buzzkill not gonna james frey this who knows it might have just been a telemarketer! but even though that was a total loss and though the lyrics are dumb, i do still kind of like this song—there's something organic about the interplay between the piano and the acoustic guitar and the drums, the wordless vocal coda. at 21 i was such a romantic and so ready to love and be in love (and also have sex) but also incapable of making it happen, not a whole person, a scared kind of shell. i sometimes think about what it would be like to be that age now and have all of these ways all the time to broadcast my inner self out into the world and find connection through mediation that weren't there then: the grass is always greener tho, this be the verse. it's nice to listen to this recording and know that with time i'd have the thing i dreamed of (true love).

4. "theme party costume"

i thought of myself as "very liberal" when i was in college in the mid aughts and that mostly manifested in not being loudly/consciously racist (while attending school in one of the most segregated cities in the country and bemoaning the absence of special scholarships for mid white boys with no accomplishments or skills or history of community service), being pro abortion, saying "fuck bush" (the first thing i ever tried to buy off the internet was a "not my president" t-shirt made by fat wreck chords (it never arrived)), reading/carrying around michael moore books, voting for kerry in the 2004 election (the only time i went downtown in tallahassee other than the time i had to go to court for an underage drinking citation), and once going to a kegger that was ostensibly a benefit for the green party.

WMD LUV, which begins with the line "i wish i was an atom bomb / so you'd have to pay attention" was a song that grew out of that ferment (also the literal ferment of a lot of solo drinking during a last spring break spent by myself reading and recording, basically the boring incel version of lennon's lost weekend). the premise of the song was that it was sung from the perspective of an atom bomb who is in love with this girl and thinking that the power of his destructive potential will turn her on. one of my favorite movies of that time was dr. strangelove and i wanted to do something with the image of the bomb ride as sex position and my fiction writing (my major) was very inspired by the tradition of magical realism starting with say donald barthelme (the writer i looked up to most at that age, even though i never had his ability to go obscure and esoteric). a story that maybe has a kinship to this one is "some of us had been threatening our friend colby"), where you make a small weird change to a world that is otherwise the same as the world we live in and the rupture of that defamiliarization reverberates.

it's hard to imagine exactly what was going through my head to inspire me to write a song romanticizing scorched earth. what i think i probably thought is i was being ironic, that the song was wryly anti-war, defamiliarizing the tropes of both weapons of mass destruction (this glib titular reference to the fake reason my country went to war in iraq, the backdrop of my college years that i basically never thought of as anything but an abstraction (if i thought of it at all)) and love ("millions wouldn't have to die if i could touch your breasts"). listening to it now, while i can find bits of the melody or the way that the tempo slows down and the mic gets closer as the glockenspiels twinkle at the end charming (this is still from before i started making almost entirely music that was quantized to a grid and bound to a tempo, which means it's sloppier and simpler but also in other ways more alive), in terms of the lyrics, the song isn't anti-war because it honestly isn't anti anything other than that no girls were in love with me. there's no meaning, it's just using "bodies ripped apart by the force of nuclear fusion" as a theme party costume, a set of bits to pun on ("hiroshima, mon amour" but make it a rom com!). it's hard for me now to understand how i thought bombing was a cute funny thing to write a song about.

5. georges perec

deborah's hairdresser pitched the show from to her and i was skeptical despite wanting a new drama to watch but then received a second confirmation this weekend when e's boyfriend described it as "lost but in a small town" which like sold and nothing is perfect in this world including this show but we've been watching several episodes of it a night and the needle drop over the end of the [lost-ian weirdness intensifies] season finale we just watched was "everybody knows this is nowhere" by neil young, my favorite of his songs.

in honor of lost, today's episode features a flash forward. the first version of this song would have been recorded during the same spring break as "WMD LUV" and the second is from two years later, when i was living with my parents after moving back from korea and making music in a closet while slowly going crazy (or maybe i have always been slowly going crazy and that was actually a brief time of doing so more quickly).

that can stay in the future for now, though. the inspiration for u was george perec's a void, a 300 page novel which famously did not contain the letter 'e'. i did not actually truly formally commit to this formal constraint in writing the lyrics, probably after meeting the slightest difficulty (not that this saved me from awkward constructions like "my eyes did tear"), but instead used it as wrapping paper for everyday dumb love.

they're very different versions (one is indie folk pop, the other is southern rock) recorded years apart but do share a weird (but unfortunately not rare) commonality, which is that the singing annoys me. it's not that it's bad per se but one of the things that's a struggle listening to these recordings is the belief that most of them would be so much better if everything else was exactly the same except i had just done like 15-25% less vocal affectation, like just singing clearer and straighter and with less inflection and melisma and strain and bleat and [jazz hands]. i have the neutral accent of a millenial raised on cable television and i don't know why when singing i so often stretch so far to the point of sounding like a cartoon character, but i guess if i want to think about it with gratitude, maybe it speaks to a kind of brief freedom from self-consciousness, the trance of being alone with yourself in headphones.

despite the singing, i do like the end of the the second version — those splashy cymbals floating in big reverb, the space jam vocal and piano bridge at the end (pitchy harmonies, but harmonies nonetheless) leading into a "everybody knows this is nowhere" indebted freakout solo that kind of somehow feels like it's in slow motion even though i don't think the tempo has changed.

[screenshots from "a rupture in time" by sarah aziza]

6. writer's block songs

the most represented subject in my catalog is not sex or drugs or god or revolution but instead, unfortunately (for both me and you) "wanting to write a song but not really having anything to say" (the second is television, love probably third). while i've always been a reader, i've never really been a lyrics person; listening to music has always been a kind of sensory trance where bad-enough lyrics can break the spell but good or great lyrics, though i occasionally grasp a phrase, mostly float along under the surface of the song (this is true even of rap, though the words are more important there than in melodic music). most of my favorite songs i could not sing most or all the words to without a karaoke machine and despite having in my life played hundreds of different songs, some of them many times, there are very few that i actually know by memory all the way through.

but the music i have always loved most is pop music and for pop music you have to have words. i always want to be making some form of art and nothing makes me happier than to finish something, even if what is finished is in another way unfinished (because it is imperfect, undercooked). i think i have standards and often (in short bursts) enjoy polishing and tweaking and iterating but i'm also emphatically not a perfectionist (lmao like you the person who reads my unedited diary would ever think that)—i want to reach the closure of completion and then i want to move on to the next one. if is a dark jazz riff that my hands found, these three note chords on the lower middle strings linked with single notes. i tried to write some something over it that felt appropriately standardsy and i feel like the words start off promising in that direction:

if you were blue
and couldn't pull through
i'd go to the ends of the ocean

in my canoe
i'd bring back to you
a color-changing potion

and i played that bit over and over again and started to write some of the other verses (always easier once you have established the rhythm of the words with one of them) but then i knew there needed to be a chorus for it to be a song and i found some chords that worked musically but instead of like actually saying something in the chorus i say something about not being able to say something because that is all i had the capacity for in the moment and i wanted to finish writing/recording (these things have almost always been very tightly connected, since i would not see the point in writing a song if not to record it):

and if i knew
what to do
i'd do something for you

yeah if i had
a fucking clue
well that'd be something too

i flesh it out a bit more in the second chorus and the rest of the song has stronger moments and weaker ones and ones which, as discussed in the previous point about my singing, would have been better with just a tiny little bit more editing ¹, but you can tell by the fact that the closing solo features, for some reason, dry spoken narration calling attention to how perfunctory and incongruous it is musically to the mood of the song that even for me i felt self-conscious about the lack of substance. all that said, i'm still happier to have this imperfect thing than nothing (story of my life) click send.

¹ like, okay, specifically this part:

if you were cold
i'd simply fold
you into pastry dough

i'd bake you until
you'd lost all your chill
and flake crust off your toes`

like if i had just said nose that would be an adorable image but instead the first word that came to my mind and thus that i used when recording five minutes later without thinking of it had to be "toes" and it is gross there is no romance in crusty toes (i mean for me, no kinkshame, you do you). semi-related (in that everything in this newsletter is semi-related because it is coming out of my brain) every time i listen to "lacy" by olivia rodrigo which starts with the line "lacy, lacy, skin like puff pastry" that always seems weird to me because i imagine cooked puff pastry and that does not seem like healthy skin and it makes me think of a parody of the song about john wayne gacy called "gacy" but i guess sufjan kinda got there first).

7. someday

i think these are the last recordings i made the summer after graduating before i ran out of money from my last student loan disbursement and moved in temporarily with my parents, who were trying to sell their house because my dad had gotten a new job in orlando. earlier in the summer, after realizing i had no idea what to do after not getting into any of the...3? MFA programs i applied to (this will not be the first time in this narrative i am foiled by lucky girl syndrome), i had gotten an english teaching job with a japanese company in osaka (my mom had driven down to take me to the interview in tampa, where i lied about having run a marathon to an interviewer who then responded "how long is a marathon" and i didn't know the answer and yet somehow they still hired me (incredibly low standards and a dysfunctional business culture is how)), though the visa would take a while to come through.

it was a deflating time, in some ways, a hangover (i remember when we bought fake acid from a guy at a party and were so excited to cross into the next stage of psychedelics and instead sat around in the humidity as nothing happened) and yet i felt free too, endless days laying out at the swimming pool in the apartment complex near our house (i also remember going to see the band battles, the last concert i would attend for a long time after). around this time, feeling a need to establish a place for myself as a writer, i got a wordpress.com blog and started posting my songs there using a free plugin called splashcast. my theory at the time was that neither my writing or my songs were good or interesting enough but that if i put them together, it might be worth more.

the last day as i packed up my stuff i wrote:

anyway i had hoped to do a song a day this week as a way of saying "goodbye, tallahassee" but actually spending time in tallahassee as opposed to at my computer seemed like a better use of my time.

and now i am much older and it is friday night and i am still sitting in front of a computer writing in lowercase something that i will send in just a few minutes because that's what i want and all i have ever wanted is to do what i want (scorpio season impending btw). it's been all originals up until now but since these songs are covers, they could be a bit more earnest without feeling unsafe. someday (sugar ray) was an attempt to take a song i have always very genuinely loved (also do not sleep on "every morning"!) and render it in a more indie aesthetic, built on a bed of warm organ. thirteen (big star) is a song that i loved to fingerpick (both because it is beautiful and also more importantly because it came naturally to me and was easy to remember) and senior year we had gone to a party where a guy had been playing it by a campfire but strumming instead of fingerpicking, which i made derisive "poser" comment about (as prev noted i am great at narcissism of small differences) but because i was too shy to ever do what he'd done and voluntarily sing in the middle of a party, i had a recurring fantasy that involved an insane scenario in which some stranger challenged me to play (???) and i then wowed everyone with my incredible skill and humility. i do really like the way the syrupy lead guitar darts in and out and through the chords. take care, a song i'd been introduced to by yo la tengo's cover on summer sun (an album i'd bought at the local record store soon after it came out and listened to a million times), is the very last recording of this first era and unlike the other two was recorded live, in one take. i like how much room tone there is in it, even though so much of my recording career has been about trying to escape the noise floor, because it captures the space i was in then, for one last night, the way a photograph encodes a particular moment of light.

8. advice column

i missed a day of these emails last week because we went to see clairo again wednesday night and got home late. deborah, who is doing a comic a day, did two the next day to make up, but i was lazy about that and happy to be lazy, to know that it does not really matter if and when i write. for a long time, my internal identity was completely based around being a writer and so the idea of spending time not writing was something i should feel bad about. i don't really feel any nostalgia for that way of living, but obviously i still like writing and want to write and beyond the satisfaction of placing things in other people's brains, the act of writing regularly (what i would call dailyish*) places my brain in the kind of state that i want it to be in.

this newsletter was initially built around the very rigid formal device of starting every sentence with "i'm thankful" and while that was in part a homage to joe brainard's i remember and in part because i had read about gratitude practice being a thing that actually does help people be empirically happier, it was mostly because that device seemed like it made it easy for me to write every day regardless of whether i felt like it; that because i limited the potential of what any given sentence could be by making them all start the same way, it meant that i could more reliably sit down and slip back into the rhythm of producing, which was worth more to me than ever writing something "real" and "finished" again (still is).

i grew up in a family where my mom read the local newspaper every day and when this song was written and recorded, i was newly back at home with my parents, on the way to my future but in a holding pattern waiting for a visa and not really trying very hard to learn japanese. not having a job or any real responsibility beyond walking the dog and helping my mom prepare the house when the realtor had a showing, so i was definitely reading the paper. this song, dear abby takes the american daily advice columnist "dear abby" and imagines a character who is writing to her because his lover has left and he's an alcoholic and...i guess...he really likes reading her newspaper column and idealizes her and thinks that if she plucks him from the pile and answers his letter, that will fix him (also he is an alcoholic). i don't know, man, as i wrote in the contemporaneous release notes:

none of my songs are about anything. i would really like to invent a language like that guy in sigur ros because i hate writing song lyrics and then i could just sing bullshit and people would think it meant something. but then that is not that different from what i do now.

the subject matter and weird affectations to the vocal (the "swimming laps in booze" sounds almost like a jimmy stewart parody) notwithstanding, i like some of the energy of this song, the way the guitars in the bridge gallop forward out of the verse and then half time skank arm in arm with the piano bass notes (i think in some ways it now reminds me of "martha my dear", a beatles song i'm sure i had heard but did not really know well at the time because i didn't have a copy of the white album), the different flavors of backing vocals, the clearmountain pauses, the gratuitous major key solo (where the melody line being played duets with the vocals, a Queen gesture that you will find i have trouble resisting). there is probably more i could say or say better but it has already been two hours and i'm ready to send the email, see you again tomorrow(ish).

*(which in my mind roughly translates to: it's always okay to skip a day or two or three for any reason at all even and especially "fuck rules", but if you skip longer than that, it will be harder to come back, so try not to, and if you're in a streak or want to push yourself, you should try to sustain that as long as it on balance is making you more happy than what it costs you to do it, and if you're in a drought then try to capture sparks wherever they might exist and be less self-critical ([bonus]: two recent newsletters on process and practice: (lena moses-schmitt and tyler coates))

9. mostly shallow

like dear abby this song is about a nontraditional relationship, in this case between a person in a picture singing to the person on the other side of photoshop, sculpting a different version of their image. the first time i used photoshop was in suffolk virginia in eighth grade on the computer in the office in the back of the art room. there was a flatbed scanner and the first thing we did was scan a dollar bill and take pictures of ourselves with the low resolution digital camera and then try to create money with our faces on it and when we printed it out and the teacher came back to check on the good students who he allowed to use his computer unsupervised and the first thing we did was print money (later in the semester we tried to block up the sink with plaster of paris). he was a kind if imperfect man and that year's honors art class (including me) did not do him right.

flash forward to august slipping away like a bottle of miller high life and i was still (or rather in new and different ways) kind of a (lauren conrad voice) "sucky person", in the way that dumb twenty-one year olds often are. a thing i had leaned into on the back half of college was a kind of affected shallowness (my facebook wall for a period featured me describing myself as "like a swimming pool, shallow but deep"), a shallowness which came from a place of insecurity and which in some ways i meant ironically but also like other things you can do ironically at the end of the day you're still kind of doing it! that wasn't all of who i was and i had good and worthwhile parts too but i tried to refer back to my blog archive to double check the chronology of the recordings a few times and also thinking the posts will be generative or provide useful context and maybe they will eventually but they're honestly for now a million times more excruciating to revisit than these songs (trust me, please don't look for them) and i cringe out every time: i see myself too closely and the distance between the person i think i am now and the person i read in the words feels very far (but then that makes me wonder how me in another twenty years will think about the me of what i'm writing here now: i hope better, but i guess you can't know). the closing monologue of this song is dumb fluff in a way that was typical of my worst angles at the time, my most tired looks, but at least it's dumb fluff sung over a groovy bed of space age bachelor pad bossa guitar.

10. the strokes pt. 1

the strokes were my favorite band when i was seventeen and so on some level they'll probably always mean something to me. i remember the super 8 light leaks video for "someday" which was like a three minute dream of what i wanted my life to be, to look like and sound like and feel like. my freshman year of college s down the hall got an early rip of room on fire that was really low bitrate even for then but i still inhaled. once that year i was so drunk at a party that according to my friends i seemed to believe that the strokes were there playing, live (it was just loud speakers in an empty room).

in psychology there is the concept of the mirror stage where the child apprehends its image and a similar kind of epochal transformation in the life of a home recorder is when you start to hear noise in your audio. for a time you live in innocence and then like a character in a really boring version of an edgar alan poe story you are suddenly constantly hearing different kinds of buzz and hiss and click and pop. certain kinds of hiss can be acceptable and buzz can be masked but clicks and pops basically always just sound bad unless they're intentional in an IDM kind of way, these glitches breaking the illusion of the song. sometimes you can get to a point where you feel you're winning against the noise or make peace and forget about it for a time, but it'll always come and go in these cycles of waxing and waning.

i don't know why i have two separate takes of "the modern age" from august 2007 (i think because the first one i thought had good moments but was too marred by CPU issues especially at the end, whereas the second one, though still a bit speckled with glitches, mostly holds together) and then somehow, without having remembered or intended to do it at all, i recorded a third version exactly ten years later in august 2017, an entire different fucking life (and a different era, musically, more folklore vibes). in 2007 when i posted the second cover of "the modern age" i wrote "also, i just got a myspace and i have 0 friends. it's sad. if you like the music, please add me". if you're reading this thanks for adding me. i followed the link and the myspace is almost completely broken but it does have the handle, which i'd forgotten was "melodramatic popular song".

11. television purgatory

we're finally caught up on new episodes of from, a show where people are stuck in a purgatory (if not [lena dunham voice] the purgatory), which is a bummer, because while there were still more unwatched episodes in the cache we could reliably put ourselves inside that familiar blanket of an evening, and also fine, because in some ways, the show has become a purgatory we are stuck in! from is clearly deeply influenced by lost (has writers and directors who worked on that, is built around an actor who was on that, includes many "mysteries") and lost is the first show i remember binge watching in the modern sense, which i did during the summer when i recorded some of these songs you've heard so far, downloading low bitrate rips with hardcoded subs in various languages from whichever file sharing sites with ads i could figure out how to "outsmart" (there is no outsmarting ads).

with respect to max read, i have decided that from is the gas leak version of lost. it's not like the characters on lost were geniuses or that there wasn't stuff on lost that didn't make sense or add up but from has gotten to the point halfway through season 3 where basically every scene watching the characters i ostensibly care about (and who spend the show tortured both by demonic monsters and also man, the greatest monster of all!), i am just like "you are the dumbest fucking people in the world WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU". in this respect while lost is the reference point it feels closer in quality to the walking dead, but at least that show had a constant stream of high concept action movie setpieces to keep things moving.

lost held me through not just setpieces but a narrative strategy of dazzle camouflage—the writers were constantly throwing out an embarrassment of riches, layering on new implications and possibilities for fans to then read even more into, creating a universe constantly expanding with potential meaning (even if none of it really could add up). to periodize (i am reading/loving this book), i think from's lacks are in many ways not individual artistic flaws but a reflection of the shift to the current post-prestige era streaming mode of production. deborah pointed out how many of the scenes are two-handers and how they always go on so much longer than they need to (every episode as a series of bottle episodes) and i think that goes hand in hand with at the macro scale how slowly the show parcels out morsels of new story and lore across the episodes. it does feel like what lost would be if it were made now, which is to say lost without the money (lost was at the time the most expensive TV pilot ever filmed; the walking dead could also afford its setpieces because a network depended on it), the removals of formal constraints (the rhythms imposed by ad breaks) providing no real artistic freedom and instead just drawing more attention to the emptiness inside the mystery box.

as though i have any real critical distance: we'll be back next week for more of that emptiness. today's song is called "won't you be in a cage with me". it is a kind of romance inspired by big brother, which i would have been watching with my parents late that summer after i moved home (the previous year, the summer after my junior year, we had showtime for a while and i was doing absolutely nothing so every night between midnight and three AM i would watch "big brother after dark", which was unedited live feeds from the house). the metaphor at the core of the song is a bit rotten (abolish the carceral state!) and this is unfortunately going to be a topic that we are going to be exploring a lot, but i think the song typifies how i had an almost religious belief in the power of other people's attention, this sense that if i could just become famous, like someone on tv, that would unlock life and love and happiness for me. i believed so much in images then (as if i have any real critical distance).

12. lunch poems, pt. 1

i had gone to college to attend film school but despite a strong start (after tearing apart everyone else's first assignment in directing class, the teacher called mine "beyond criticism"), i had quickly flamed out my sophomore year, partly because social anxiety (making films required so many phone calls and talking to strangers and asking people for things), partly feeling a childish sense of the collaborative nature of film cramping my nascent style as an artist, partly because having a social life was a new and very important thing to me which was really cramped by having to be on sets at 8am on the weekends. the symbolic point of no return was when we were supposed to have this special night where we screened our first semester capstone films for the older students and i skipped it entirely (i was ashamed of my film, which i thought had a good script but which was marred by my inability to get a performance out of a bad actor who i had chosen because he looked like how i imagined the character in my head and so that i would not have to audition anyone else) to attend an early screening of the life aquatic at the student union (i remember wearing a paisley shirt and drinking out of a bottle of champagne before the movie and also how much we listened to the seu jorge bowie soundtrack after).

the semester after i quit film school, i took a postwar american lit class and read for the first time lunch poems by frank o'hara. (i remember a long stretch of college where lunch for me was a snicker's bar, a bag of chips, and an icee). i've written about how meaningful his work was before, how it was

such a revelation because all the poetry i had ever been given up to that point was either antiquated or academic or opaque or corny or depressing or all of the above at once, i hated poetry, but this little lyric spoke to what inside i had always wanted (my) art to be able to do, which is to be a beacon, a chuckle, a sparkle, a spring in your step, a reminder of what is gleaming and good and possible. when we talked about the poem in class and were sharing our eager college sophomore surface level readings of the fun lists of happy nouns the professor asked if anyone had looked up what "beachheads" or "biers" were and what they were doing in the poem and of course we hadn't so he told us (beachhead: "a temporary line created when a military unit reaches a landing beach by sea and begins to defend the area as other reinforcements arrive", a reference to the landings during world war 2 where thousands of human beings rushed from the sea into carnage; bier:"a stand on which a corpse, coffin, or casket containing a corpse is placed to lie in state or to be carried to the grave") and showed us how in that turn, the poem is not abandoning the joy it started with but, amid violence and horror and death which strain our capacity for hope and dreams of progress, still trying to reach for it, to grasp at these baubles for solace

and there will be a future episode with a setting of another one of his poems ("ode to joy (to hell with it)")") that i think is one of the best things i've recorded. today, instead, you get this weird rendering of "having a coke with you" where in the verses i read the actual poem and then that collides with this kind of pop punk chorus with dumb silly lyrics i made up quickly because i didn't have the confidence that not having an actual chorus would be "enough", but now listening to it in retrospect it feels like "too much" (the guitar is also treble overload). still i like listening to my twenty-one year old voice saying this poem, which was how i would have wanted to say i loved someone if there was someone that loved me too.

13. some rap songs

the first CD i bought with my own money was the soundtrack to the 1999 remake of godzilla, which i liked multiple songs from (jamiroquai, rage, the wallflowers cover of "heroes" with e-bow lead guitar) but which i bought for "come with me," the puff daddy song built on a sample of led zeppelin's "kashmir". as a devoted daily total request live viewer and you know just human being living in america, i had of course listened to and enjoyed other rap songs, but "come with me" is the first memory i have of being genuinely obsessed with one. i was addicted to how powerful it made me feel, like a rollercoaster of testosterone, words surfing the waves of the riff. i would listen to that one track on a loop (i don't even think i had my own CD player at the time, so i was listening to it on soft foam headphones wired into our family computer), trying to fill myself with its energy.

for most of the rest of high school, i went fully into a classic rock rabbit hole (with limited exceptions for the "the band" garage rock revivalists of the early aughts) and ignored hip hop, but my freshman year of college, a mind-expanding time for anyone but definitely for me, saw the release of danger mouse's the gray album, which combined acapellas from jay-z's the black album with loops and chops of beatles songs (something that was only fully possible because of the recent release of the beatles rock band video game, the isolated instrumental tracks which were required for the game to work having leaked). you couldn't have designed a better hip hop entry point for the 18 year old version of me and i listened to those remixes over and over, first for the beats that defamiliarized these songs i knew so well and the magic of how their fragments were put together into something new, but then also increasingly for the words, how funny and clever and aphoristic jay-z was, the effortless charm and virtuosity of his flows, a love which then led to listening to the originals on the black album and moving on to the blueprint (and kanye/just blaze chipmunk soul, a sound that will forever shine in my synapses) and beyond. this was also the semester that kanye's "all falls down" (which as a lover of lauryn hill's mtv unplugged i was already predisposed toward) / the college dropout blew up and those songs were just undeniably good and catchy. in the latter half of college, MP3 blogs and data CDRs fueling a neo-backpack era, i was most obsessed with a tribe called quest and digable planets and the roots.

one of the songs that i recorded around this time in our chronology but won't be playing for you in full here is "let's do the gang bang", which was based around the idea that cole porter was kind of the playful linguistic vanguard of his time in the way that rappers were with language in the present day so what if i made an old timey sounding jazz song (i had gotten a plugin that made recordings sound like wax) that was kind of "you're the top" vibes but the topic was gang bangs hahahahaha. i thought this was so clever and hilarious! it was ironic, of course, i did not "support" gang bangs, that was what made it "funny", and yet like so much of the ironic isms of this era the irony has no meaningful target or purpose—it's just empty, a "joke" that normalizes and reifies instead of critiquing. other songs i won't play for you: covers of some of my favorite jay-z songs ("girls, girls, girls" and "hola hovito") where i rap the n word (a word i would never have said, but thought there was absolutely no problem with rapping, what else were you supposed to do?) and recite a panoply of racist and misogynistic stereotypes (i thought because they were affectionate (in the chorus he's saying he loves girls!) that meant they couldn't be offensive) and a halloween song punning on the notion of "spook" being a racist term for black people and a nickname for undercover CIA agents to talk about me as a white rapper and how i related to hip hop (the least interesting and most problematic (yet also most common!) topic for any white rapper).

i'm embarrassed by all of these, as any decent person in 2024 would be (i thought i was a decent person in 2007, but it is hard to square that with the traces that remain). my first rap god puff daddy is now of course a living breathing moral stain and in a similar vein i don't listen to kanye anymore, even though he's probably the most important musician of my adult life and a massive influence on my own work, because i can't enjoy his songs the same way now knowing the rabid anti-semitism and fascist ideology that live in his mind. obviously if you are this far in this post, i claim no purity ring or moral high ground: these are lines i've drawn for myself in my feelings and i think they're different for everybody (i highly recommend the book monsters: a fan's dilemma by claire dederer, for a fuller exploration of this phenomenon).

this week was the release date of tyler's chromakopia, which i've listened to straight through a couple of times and is amazing—rich, textured, weird, playful, epic. earl sweatshirt is my favorite rapper alive but i didn't get as deep into early odd future or tyler as i think i otherwise might have because at the time (what felt like mostly) tyler's tendency toward aggressive transgressions and slurs repelled my white liberal sensibilities. i haven't gone back and listened to the old stuff much (though today i did return to the song where i first heard earl, "molliwopped", and it still hits, a fun-size candy bar of ego dope) to find out whether i'd feel the same way or not (like it matters, maybe that music just isn't for me), but i love the albums he's made in recent years: he's still messy and complicated and wants to push buttons, but he's also a sophisticated and mature artist.

i was not a sophisticated and mature artist in 2007 but there are two rap songs that i recorded around this time that i still feel fond enough of to let you hear. one is an original called t.s.a. and is a profane [extremely just blaze voice] public service announcement (t.s.a. stands for titties service announcement) about breast cancer awareness and how i was happy to examine any and all breasts for safety (i had touched 0 breasts at this time in my life, though a friend who liked flashing people when drunk enough had flashed me once), built around a post-"hustlin'" octave down vocal hook (my voice cracks on the verses like i am a teenager, but also one of my favorite lyrics in my oeuvre is "your titties is objects, they're the apples of my eye / but behind 'em is your heart and that's the whole pie"). the other is a cover of tell me when to go by e-40, a song my friends and i were obsessed with in college when it came out. for a variety of reasons, i'm glad that i didn't try to do the song straight but instead rock it softer, crisply whispering in your ears back and forth across the stereo field, the chorus rising over fields of piano and brass and cheap synthesized brass, my ghost riding the whip.

14. end of the world

i have an extremely good memory and always have had all my life (the fact that i have also had a practice of obsessively excessively documenting my life for the last decade or so certainly helps more recent years). my extremely good memory is a thing which is often a point of contention between deborah and i (wherein she believes my memory to be more fallible or limited than it is because how could i possibly so confidently remember such small and meaningless details and i get mad bc it feels like she's invalidating my truth).

given my generally extremely good memory, i always am the first to recognize when it turns out to be wrong, both because, despite my extremely good memory, i would never be foolish enough to say it is infallible, and also because usually the divergences are interesting to me (i usually think things about myself are interesting and this is why you are reading these posts). the strength of my memory is also context dependent. while i'm great at remembering facts and things that happened in the real world, for example, my narrative memory is weak: i basically always forget most of a book or movie or TV show almost immediately after finishing it, which is sometimes annoying if i actually need to remember it but mostly a blessing since it means that i can revisit my favorite things over and over again and feel their eternal sunshine (i have a friend who reads a lot but never rereads and i just can't imagine this life).

in the palace of my memories, i have always been so sure that i recorded this cover of "imitation of life" by REM some time in the summer or fall of 2008, when i was living in korea and deeply alone, no friends and no love, my new adult life mostly monastic (but devoted to my writing rather than god). when i think of this recording, i remember very vividly sitting on the floor of my tiny high-rise studio apartment one night and feeling very sad and when around 2:30 during the minimalist build-up of the last chorus i sing "no one can see me cry" and my voice cracks, i remember it was because i was actually really crying there in the apartment, what barthes would call a punctum.

however, the historical record (old blog post) shows that this imitation of life was actually recorded and released in october 2007. i was still not quite an adult, living with my mom and our dog in a mostly empty house in florida that was refusing to sell and after my japanese teaching job had fallen through because the company was having serious financial problems, i had passed another interview for a similar job in korea and was waiting for a visa (i knew nothing about korea that i had not learned in childhood tae kwon do lessons (i.e. nothing) but it was more money, lower cost of living, and i had no other ideas for earning a living). my recording studio at that time was a dell laptop my parents had generously bought me to take abroad and which i used lying on my stomach on the floor of my last high school bedroom to record this. there would have been reason enough for me to actually cry then too, so maybe i did, but i don't trust the memory now.

the reverb here is too big and cheap and the drums aren't mixed loud enough and the stereo image could be wider and the vocals less overdriven but i like some of the jangly chug of the guitars and the live-ish dynamics. i don't really know the REM oeuvre very well, because to the me of this era most of their music seemed wordy and/or sad, neither of which were my favorite musical characteristics (sadness being a thing i've never needed music to reinforce, but to escape, and lyrics being another void in my memory), so the main memory i have of their music is no doubt's cover of "it's the end of the world as we know it (and i feel fine)" on the live MTV show at the dawn of the new millenium, when people were not sure whether the world was about to end but still wanted to dance together.

15. in the box, in the cave

i have always recorded my music on computers. as a classic rock fan, i've read many stories about the process of making music in the pre-digital era, how they famously spliced sections from two takes of "strawberry fields forever" together to get the final song, adjusting the speed to make them (mostly) match at the join, and of course as a millenial indie rock nerd i fetishize the sonic grain of the TASCAM portastudio as much as anyone, but if i'm honest, having made music with computers for so long, actually working in those ways mostly sounds like a nightmare, even as i have to acknowledge that the limitations of the analog approach (for example, having only 4 or 8 tracks and so needing to "bounce" down multiple tracks into one slot to free up space for more) contributes to the aura of the recordings (and also probably to accepting imperfections and calling things done because you don't have another choice and your studio time is almost up (another source of aura)).

while my recording process has always been digital, this song, after a lot of people(september 2007), still represents a paradigm shift in my means of production. up until this point, i'd been recording my songs in an app called Sonar. recording apps like Sonar are called "digital audio workstations" (DAW) and DAWs are meant to replicate all the features of a studio (capturing audio, editing, mixing, mastering, effects) "in the box" (the box is the computer). i don't remember exactly why i picked Sonar to start with: probably it seemed like something a lot of people were using and (probably more importantly) i found a working pirated download of it somewhere. for this new song, though, i had decided to switch to a groundbreaking new app that i was reading about, Ableton Live.

Sonar and traditional DAWs involve working horizontally across a series of rows. each row is a track (an instrument) and the x axis of the program represents the duration of the song, such that the left edge of the axis is the beginning of the song and the right edge is the end. this is a much more convenient way to work than tape (cutting and pasting sections involves keyboard shortcuts instead of magnifying glasses and scissors and tape) which enabled new ways of working. producers could assemble songs from much smaller sections: take the first verse from take A except this one line in the middle which is better in take B. they also didn't have to make final decisions about reverb or EQ or the balance between tracks, since those decisions could be deferred forever in the space of digital infinity.

but while digital editing was much easier than physical tape, it still followed the same linear thought process: the difference more a matter of degrees than of kind (see: this video of quincy jones (rip) and herbie hancock using one of the earliest DAWs). ableton's paradigm shift was to introduce a new dimension to the process of composition. instead of a stack of rows playing linearly like strips of tape, now imagine a spreadsheet where a column is an instrument and a row is a "scene" (a section of a song, which can be any arbitrary length), such that every cell in the sheet is a particular sound in a particular section. you can trigger and manipulate and rearrange these cells into scenes more freely than in traditional linear arrangements, which allows for a much more flexible and improvisational approach to assembling songs than the traditional way, where you can try different combinations of parts in real time, more like a live instrument (thus the name) than a tape recorder.

this song is also the first time i'd really worked with samples (ableton was also the app to popularize the new technological superpower of "warping" samples, changing their timing without having to change their pitch). it's built around a recording of the opening two chords of satie’s “gymnopedie no.1”—in one layer, i've reversed the loop so it floats like a cloud and in another layer i'm playing the same chords forward, staggering the second layer so that the the reversed chord lines up with its forward sibling. the tonal shifts for the different sections are just pitching the samples up a few semitones. the title and the lyrics are inspired by "after walker evans" by sherrie levine and michael mandiberg's "after sherrie levine", as well as a course in byzantine art i took my last semester where i learned about the status of the copy in icon painting (where icons represent a direct connection to the divine, are the divine, rather than just representations of it) and wrote an essay talking about walter benjamin and the aura and i'm thankful when she handed our papers back the professor sarcastically said "a lot of you are very interested in walter benjamin".

i was interested because he wrote so beautifully, but, as the lyrics fumble at, at the time i was actually anti-aura, all reproduction. when asked the classic matrix stoner conversation of "if you could take the blue pill or the red pill which would you take" my answer was immediately "blue pill", which i didn't think of (at the time at least) as a willful ignorance of the horror and injustice of the world (those things weren't real enough to me to even think of, speaking of ignorance) but instead a rejection of a pervasive cultural authenticity fetish for the "real" and the "original" that i could never really understand. i was an art history minor and considered myself quite knowledgeable but at that point in my life basically my entire experience of fine art was either seeing printed images in books or scanned ones on the internet or projected from slides in a darkened lecture hall (plato's cave is a horror story but for me it was a romance) and because they were all i'd ever known, i didn't think of those experiences as lesser than. i've since been to many museums and had transcendent experiences in them that were dependent and i still don't think of them as lesser than. art can be so powerful that i think even when we can't get everything from it we can [mick jagger voice] still get something if we try and the something is still worthwhile to me so that's why i keep trying.

16. scorpio season 2024

i have not had the energy to write or play music for the past couple weeks as my body mysteriously broke down in new and more unpleasant ways every day and most of my spare energy from not doing my job (which aside from a sick day and a half i kept doing both because i am a little capitalist worker bee freak and also it was a good distraction from thinking about my surely impending death) was devoted to riding out the day's and (mostly) night's discomforts (from within the tunnel of a three day straight headache i did feel deep gratitude that i have not really felt this level of all-consuming discomfort before in my life, which i know is not true of many people, and i felt ashamed at the way i have silently judged other people in the past thinking they weren't "really" suffering),

all these tangible ills then of course compounded by meta-anxiety about what larger things they might signify about the durability of the flesh container i live in on this mortal coil which, as i sought medical treatment (i'm thankful i have a job and health insurance and we do not yet live in a world of medical leadership by rfk and dr. oz!!), was also not helped by things like a particular test result being so abnormal that in the UI of the "patient portal" the tooltip with the number was cut off by the edge of the screen or a doctor reviewing my test results writing me a late evening email through said portal with the sentence "if you have any new or worsening symptoms, you should have a very low threshold for going to the emergency room" which as a recovering hypochondriac is like the best/worst thing you could say to me and like on top of all of this injury, the insult that i have not been able to do the daily intense aerobic exercise upon which my mental health depends for the longest time in like...15 years? and i have little appetite and even my favorite foods taste blah and, cherry on top of it all, my primary coping/enjoying mechanism for life (weed) seemed to no longer have any effect at all on me (but i guess silver lining i've never successfully taken a tolerance break before and so having had one imposed upon me i'm hoping i'm gonna get high AF when i'm back at it). anyway, do not worry about me! i am (i think successfully) diagnosed as anemic and getting my iron up and feeling more like myself every day.

but scorpio season is supposed to be my seat of power and this year it was a total fucking bust for me personally (but you know kim there's people that are dying in a genocide). this song, phoning it in, is another instance of the "writer's block song" personal microgenre i've previously discussed in this series, where writing a song is not driven by any particular idea or meaning or melody or whatever (though i do like the watery arpeggiated electric piano riff at its core) but just "i want to make and release a song." in this particular instance, i had just received a major influx of attention to my blog after it was mentioned in the new york times (more on this to come), which felt like the biggest thing that had ever happened in my entire life, and i felt that now people were actually reading, that i had an audience, i needed to keep the content flowing, and that day cranking the spigot this is what i could get to flow out. i continue to crank the spigot today and this is what i could get to flow out.

17. hillssongs pt. 1

at this point it becomes necessary to communicate that at the time of this song's recording in the fall of the year of our lord 2007, i thought that without a shadow of a doubt the most important cultural artifact in the entire fucking world was the MTV reality show the hills, which at the time was airing in its third season and at the peak of its popularity, after (at the time) innovative synergistic foreshadowing across the secondary texts of tabloids in the weeks leading up to the third season premiere supercharged the core onscreen drama of the dissolution of a female friendship with offscreen frisson.

there is an australian megachurch called hillsong known for courting celebrities, perhaps most famously another musical justin (bieber) during his rumspringa (it is also wreathed in crowns of scandal: see documentaries 1, 2). this episode's song, "won't you please be friends", is the first in an unfortunately not small series of what i'll call hillssongs, a dumb pun name that nevertheless touches the even dumber truth that for the years 2007-2009, the hills was basically my religion. that's not even really an exaggeration: i was an evangelist, it was my community and my source text, the event around which i organized every week. i thought and talked and wrote about it day and night, rejected any critique of it by outsiders i deemed untrustworthy or insufficiently open (richard lawson at gawker and alessandra stanley at the times were my enemies), and spent my days making works (songs, formal analysis, theories, fan fiction) in thrall to its power and glory.

i would eventually lose my faith and in retrospect i really wish that i had not spent some of the most artistically formative and productive years of my youth almost solely and with great intensity making fan content about a tv show about the lives of blonde women working in the culture industry in los angeles, a place i had never been and would not visit for another decade, but you couldn't have convinced me to do anything else at the time. as an artist (cough scorpio) i have always wanted to do exactly what specific thing i want to do at any given time and this is what i wanted to do then.

i don't really want to write much about the hills qua the hills (i already wrote way more about it than any person needs to in one or several lifetimes!!!), but to focus on the context of this series, in theory, being obsessed with a popular television show solved a lot of the (song)writing problems i'd been having. i did not have to write "writer's block" songs because there were always new things to say about the show! plus these songs were "relevant": there was a built-in audience who might find it interesting to listen songs about the show (since nobody else was making them!) as opposed to "normal" songs which had no market. the weekly release of episodes and need to comment in a timely fashion gave me a structure to force me to finish things and be consistently productive. over time, the subject matter also unblocked me emotionally: i felt like i could be more earnest through the veil of the projections than i could writing about real feelings.

in practice, this song, won't you please be friendsin which i perform a sort of jokey lounge act couples therapy for my two favorite television characters, still does not really have much of anything important or intelligent to say (global warming, the 2008 financial crisis, and xenophobia are used as punchlines for the more important issue of this friendship, "agit pop to agitate your heartbeats") regardless of whether it playfully situates heidi and lauren in the historical context of television friendships like ethyl and lucy and mary and rhoda and monica and rachel or makes a pun (that i am still proud of) of nielsen families (my childhood dream job) and the cult classic harry nilsson album _nilsson schmilsson_. i thought i was such a visionary at the time and i don't think that now but i'm grateful this first record of my years of obsession with something stupid still exists (apparently before this i did a cover of "unwritten" by natasha bedingfield but i don't have a copy of it and i am also grateful for that).