I decided to write some notes about each song for today’s release, just to give them a bit more context. I think that’s something really missing in the digital age. I don’t miss the format of CDs so much — they scratched easily and skipped if you moved too much — but I do miss the booklets. One of my favorite moments of buying a new album was flipping through the inserts while I listened for the first time. All the lyrics, recording notes, stories and images gave the record a bit of relatability. So I’m trying to bring a little bit of that sensation back.
Tall Tale No. 5:
This song was partially recorded in a traditional studio, which is rare for me. I was asked to produce an album, back in 2006, and I was paid in studio-time. So I tracked the drums and guitars during that week, and I later added the vocals and other instruments when I got back home. I was already finished with “Ghost” at this point, but hadn’t started writing for “The Roots” yet. So this fell somewhere in between. Lyrically, this one is directly autobiographical, but some of the events are out of order.
Mind Ur Manners:
This song came about while writing for “The Family Tree” series (I wrote most of those songs in a two year window, between 2007 and 2009). The track started as something for piano, but once I started chopping up the drums it took a very different turn. The end result landed somewhere between the Electric President and Radical Face sound pallets of the time, so it sat on a hard drive until I did the “Patients” experiment.
Home:
This song was a B-Side from Ghost. I found it again after I had already released the Anniversary edition, which was unfortunate. So I uploaded it to YouTube instead, after the O’Shea Brothers used it in their “Happy Medium” skate video series. I kept getting emails and notes from people asking me to upload it to streaming services, which is a large part of what inspired this release.
Body Song:
This was originally part of an experimental side project called ‘Mother’s Basement”, where two other local musicians and I did assignment-based songwriting and documented it on a website. How it worked: we each wrote down three different ideas on scraps of paper then drew them out of a hat. This song came from the assignment – record a song without any traditional instruments, only using sounds you can make with your body. So it’s all vocals, claps, hitting stomachs, snapping, etc. Lyrically, the track is about a nightmare I once had (I used to keep a nightmare journal) where I was in a morgue and had to reach inside a stranger’s dead body, and something unknown licked my palm.
Mathematics:
This was originally going to be an Electric President song, intended for “The Violent Blue”, but there was an issue with the recording. Some of the files were corrupted so I only had an early version of the recording. So I wound up rerecording everything myself for the “Patients” project, turning it back into a solo song. I remember attempting to make something that sounded, and felt, like a mental disorder – something manic and chaotic and twisted.
Strange Organism:
One of my many instrumental experiments. I do these all the time, but I often move on before developing them. But occasionally I’ll go through old harddrives and see what they sound like. Listening to this one many years later, something about the mood stood out to me so I decided to include it as a sort of intermission.
The Voice of Our Age:
This is the earliest song in the collection. The original demo dates back to 2002, and I wound up re-recording it in 2005. This is one of the first songs I wrote when I first circled back to making music in late 2001. I had just lost both of my novels in a harddrive crash, and the idea of writing fiction at the time made me feel ill. So to fill my time, I started writing songs again. It was yet another track that had slipped through the cracks until I decided to do the “Patients” project.
The Coldest Hands:
This song was written during the “Sleep Well” period with Electric President, but I wound up finishing it on my own. As such, it was another “doesn’t quite fit either project right now” sort of song, so it sat idle for a few years. Lyrically, it’s about watching yourself become the thing you’ve always complained about, and the horror of how easy that can be.
Elephant:
Originally written during “The Family Tree” songwriting period, I recorded this one in between “The Roots” and “The Branches.” Oftentimes, when I get a new microphone, I will record an entire song with only that mic to get a feel for it. I had just gotten my first fancy one (a used Neumann U87), and this recording was my first test. I must have moved on quickly, because I forgot I’d recorded this at all and only rediscovered it when backing up some harddrives during the pandemic.
The Emperor Has No Bones:
Another track that came from that “Mother’s Basement” project. The assignment for this one was to use the Beethoven 5th Piano Concerto (“Emperor”) as a launching point for a new piece. I riffed on the second movement, but was actually having trouble with a faulty cable at the time. I decided to lean into all the weird noises and see what might come of something harsh and ugly against such a calm melody.
If You Come Back to Haunt Me:
This was another track from around the ‘Ghost” period – just before, to be precise. A lot of that album is about grief, and being haunted by loved ones. This track is no different, only it has the added angle of acceptance, and how we can even get used to people’s absences, and the holes they leave, after enough time has passed.
Welcome Home (Early Demo):
When I first released “Ghost”, it wasn’t particularly well-received. Welcome Home became some kind of runaway success over 3 years later, after being picked up by Nikon for an ad campaign in the EU. It was a surprise to everyone around me at the time (me especially), and I was asked to quickly put together an EP as a follow-up. So I made a couple instrumental versions of the song that could work for the closing of the EP, and I chose “Welcome Home (Reprise)” from that set. But I recently found this recording, which was based on the very first demo I made of the song. I remember thinking it was too slow at the time, but discovering it again while building this release, I liked it more than I thought I would. So here’s another version.
And that’s it. Not going to ramble on about anything extra today. But I will have another album coming later this year, so I’ll start sharing more info about that pretty soon. Until then, I hope everyone is well.