THE MUSIC

Like Isabelle, my last release, the lyrics for Little Sister go way back. The truth is, I probably would have recorded this song five years ago if not for one nagging fact: the chorus and verses use the same chord progression. I kept putting the song on the back burner, just in case I found some way of switching it up that I liked. But every time I played through it, Little Sister would tell me, “This is right. This is how I’m supposed to be.” I finally wised up and listened to her; not surprisingly, she knew what she needed.

The only other thing I can think to say about this song is that it has my love of Neil Young and Oasis proudly shining through.

THE ART

A lot of my music stems from my subconscious; a lot of my lyrics know something about me before I do. Some of them are even written in my dreams. Little Sister isn’t really one of those songs, though. Sure, it most likely represents a wide range of relationships with friends and family that I’ve had over the years, and my subconscious has probably evaluated, compared and learned from them, leading to the distillation that is this song… but the lyrics don’t offer up much mystery. The cover, on the other hand, does.

What this cover means, I can’t tell you. But something inside said it was right for this release (drawn ~2010, I believe). I haven’t tried to decipher what I’m telling myself with it… not sure I ever will.

This song is available for free here and should be on Spotify soon. It’s also on iTunes.

THE MUSIC

This song is definitely one of my more experimental ones (thus far), and I’m not so sure it’s for everyone. The lyrics sat in a notebook for years, waiting to be put to music, and the original concept, which can be heard in the song’s beginning moments, waited in my head. The time eventually arrived where Isabelle NEEDED to be explored. So that’s what happened. It was supposed to be a fairly easy song to record, but like so many of the “easy” ones, it spiraled into a monster. It took a lot of time. It took a lot of time, AND I don’t think many people will enjoy it that much… but I’m proud of it. :)

Also, this song is the recording premier of The Doctor, a guitar given to me by my good friend, Alice.

THE ART

The artwork goes back many years (~2003?). In fact, it was my first attempt at painting. It’s drab; a perfect cover for Isabelle.

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. ;)