Of songs I’ve recorded and released, This Body Is Mechanical (But This Forest Is Not) is one my favorites. And relatively speaking, it seems to get a  lot of attention, so I thought I’d write about it.

This song really started to take shape with an image in mind: a robot, on the outskirts of a futuristic, highly industrialized metropolis, examining trees along a roadside while pondering its existence. I’m pretty certain this scene was taken from something Xine, my wife, had either said or sketched.

I decided early on that this was an excellent opportunity to over-use a pitch corrector on the vocals to the Nth degree, because the song would be from the point-of-view of a robot. I often joke about all the “robots” in mainstream pop these days, but the truth is, I actually enjoy the sound of pitch correction as a vocal effect. And to me, for some reason, it seems to accent the pain in a person’s voice. Maybe it’s because pain takes on a degree of starkness while enveloped in “perfect” pitch correction. (Almost like showing some aspects of the human condition in a “perfect” dystopian society, like in Logan’s Run or Aeon Flux).

Writing the lyrics was an easy, flowing process (same with the music), but the most interesting thing was that the song acted as a pre-echo to a lot of topics I was to become interested in (minimalism, consciousness, finding answers in nature). It’s truly shocking how often this happens in music: an artist records something, and when they look back on it, they realize that their subconscious mind was somewhere their conscious mind hadn’t caught up to, yet. I wonder if artists working in other mediums experience the same thing… my guess is yes.

As with most of my stuff, My Body Is Mechanical (But This Forest Is Not) is available for FREE on Spotify, for FREE download on bandcamp.com, and it’s also on iTunes if you really want to donate your hard-earned money.

Have a good day in The Forest. ;)