some words about ‘life in real time.’
i’ll always have a soft spot in my heart for the shortened, anticipatory instrumental intro. cole made this track; with jordan & michael’s help. it’s swirling & vibey, it sounds for a moment like something is going to happen but then it doesn’t; it’s etherial & pleasant, which we thought was a cool contrast to the biting sarcasm of…
where to begin.
written in early 2014.
recorded in early 2015.
my favorite song on the album; written while listening to a bunch of the killers & ben folds five.
michael made the track over a year ago & within 6 hours of having it in my inbox, the whole song was finished. it wrote itself; it’s weird how when you’re fighting to understand your artistic blocks, they tend to reveal themselves to you through the art itself: the frustration of not being able to write a song ends up being the part of you that writes the song.
as feels painfully apparent, this one came at a time when we were being pulled in a lot of directions over what we were supposed to do next; 2014 was a hard year to make sense of being in a pop rock band, because a lot of our tour-mates & favorite bands were either breaking up (which we didn’t want to do), chasing to the much more hardcore / modern pop punk side of the spectrum (which is an awesome genre, but felt wasn’t us), or, worst of all, trying to squeeze themselves into the cookie-cutter of hyper-generic commercial musack— for instance, we did a session with a few writers where we were told “less words, less specific, more general, just say happy things, now B HOOK WITH OHS OR AHS OR BAHS OR DAHS OR NAHS!”
what was even more frustrating was that the songs turned out pretty good. they definitely sounded like the kind of thing that might have played behind a target commercial. if they’d have sucked, it would have been easy to ignore them. but instead, it resulted in a lot of internal struggle.
ultimately, we decided they weren’t us, & my frustration with those songs & that struggle led to a grand piece of satire— where to begin. i’m happy with it. i think it’s pretty aggressively honest. originally, before the big band explosion & ba-de-das, i’d planned to answer the “where do we go next?” question— with a verbal, spoken, “i don’t know, some vapid & meaningless B hook?”
but of course, the vapid & meaningless B hook is the part of the song that i most look forward to. music, ain’t it a thing?
back to life.
written in 2014.
recorded in 2015.
i’m intrigued by how obsessed artists are with the freedom of youth. there’s something about the period of time after learning to drive & before being sucked into the real-world vacuum of taxes & monotony that is constantly, obsessively heralded as the time of ultimate freedom. i don’t know about other people, but my youth wasn’t like that; my youth was a time of learning to dwell within & experiment with the bounds that were set for me. my youth was about trying to win debate tournaments & stay out of the way of people in high school who didn’t like me.
the only real freedom that was involved was emotional freedom, & that was something i had to allow myself— i loved a lot harder & cared a lot more back then, before i learned not to, & started to develop this thick skin of adulthood. & i think that’s why we romanticize it. the freedom of youth is in it’s stupidity— bold, reckless, vulnerable stupidity.
i wanted to write a song with characters that embodied that innocent, emotional freedom; idealized characters that sound like they could be protagonists of a young adult novel, who genuinely believe that youth isn’t a time in your life but a way of viewing it, & that ‘people only grow up when they’ve got nothing better to do.’
i reference a lot of my favorite art from that era of my life— ‘I’ve got a $20 bill…’ is from a Brand New song. ‘The only thing that matters is how well you can walk through the fire’ is Bukowski. ‘Stay Golden’ is so oft-referenced that it out-shines the book it comes from (i had to alter the syntax for the sake of rhyme, by the way).
who we were with.
written in 2013.
recorded in 2014.
i’ve written about this one at length, & talked about it often, so i’m afraid my analysis of the song has over-shadowed my feelings about the song itself. but i guess that makes sense, because the song is itself is probably over-thinking relationships anyway.
it was written over a track that cole, lucas, jordan, marcus & michael made while i was out of town. evidently the track had some structural errors, but i wrote over it anyway, which is why some of the verse lengths are weird & feel random.
it was written after seeing after watching several relationships, my friend’s & my friend’s parent’s, that fell apart because the expectation of the relationship, the desire to just ‘have someone,’ the words used to describe the relationship, overshadowed the important parts. it’s a pretty basic theory— for better or worse, settling for less or creating more, we learn to love who the people who are around us.
talk about it.
written in 2015.
recorded in 2015.
jordan made this track, which is why so much of the instrumental bed is crazy guitar. he gave it to me a year ago & it had so much vibe that i spent 6 months trying to write to it, but every time, i’d fail the tone. then one day, one line made it all make sense, & the rest of the song happened.
every relationship i’ve ever been in has reached this moment, the point where it’s bursting forth with feelings & hang-ups & hold-ons, all things worth talking about, & it’s so overwhelmed by them that the only rational response is to talk about none of them. one in particular that i think was my main reference for writing was one of those back-and-forth, 2-am-text kind of relationships, & i can remember thinking very distinctly one morning, “she likes how i make her feel, i like how she makes me feel, & we don’t give a shit about each other.” & neither of us really wanted to talk about it.
you to believe in.
written in 2013.
recorded in early 2014.
‘if i ever lose my faith in you, there’d be nothing left for me to lose.’ - sting.
there’s a lot of shitty things; & i spend a lot of time thinking about those things. i’m generally disappointed by politics, & the media, & celebrity culture. there’s a tremendous amount of hurt in the world & we ignore most of it. people are starving, the Earth is on its way to being completely broken, & if you let yourself be fully empathetic to all of that suffering, you’re never going to keep your head above the water. so what, in this vacuous wasteland of a planet, is there to care about? what’s left to believe in?
guard.
written in 2015.
recorded in 2015.
cole made this track & wrote this chorus & sent it to me. other than tacking on some verses, it’s end-to-end his creation, & one of my favorite pieces of music on the album. the way it makes me feel— completely swallowed by the sound— perfectly captures the lyric. he’s written a lot of phenomenal songs; i think this might be my favorite.
sentiment.
written in early 2015.
recorded in 2015.
i think this song is about cinnamon….
cole wrote the chorus of this song, & i think found a very cool way to speak directly to the questions that everyone asks themselves in every relationship: am i really into this person, or am i into the idea of them? are we great, or does it just sound great in my head? do i love them, or do i love the story i’ve written for us in my head?
i hope i was able to honor that. in the social media age, where we can observe air-brushed versions of everyone’s lives, i think it’s easy to create a picture perfect narrative of how your relationship story is going to go before it actually happens (i do this all the time; i’m a serial first-date wedding planner). the problem with that, of course, is that it’s not going to go the way you want it to, regardless of how well it goes, & when the story in real life doesn’t match up with the story in your head, there’s bound to be friction. but alas, i can’t stop myself from doing it. i’m a slave to the sentiment.
next to me.
written in 2014.
recorded in 2015.
it was my soft, simple, sappy comedy ode to the 2 am walk home from the bar with the girl who’s impossibly out of reach.
because i think it always goes like this: everyone looks so big, so out of reach, too good for you from up close, so you disappear into self-consciousness & ignore the human parts of them. then, past 2 am, people start to unravel & become who they really are, & you realize that all of the impossibility of them was in your own head— just like you, they’re afraid of the future & afraid of what the world has in store for them & afraid of being alone. & you realize you were close the whole time, you just weren’t letting yourself be.
sleep.
written in 2015.
recorded in 2015.
when i heard this track, i think i saw the song before i wrote it. the instrumentation sounded to me like the 2 am, dark blue moment where the thing you’re most afraid of keeps you awake, so you stare out the window with your head on the pillow & wonder what the point of any of this is. the age & gender & struggle of every character in the song is different, but they’re united by that moment, the sky they’re looking at, & their desperate need for sleep to find them.
i hesitate to write too much about it; to explain the position of each character is to over-complicate it, so i’ll just leave it at this: i very carefully considered every line in the song, how the characters felt, & how the world felt about them. it’s one of my favorite songs that’s ever found me, & i hope it finds you too.
also, jordan’s guitar solo is incredibly tasteful.
say my name.
written in 2015.
recorded in 2015.
cole wrote this song; it’s a fantastic love song, but i can’t speak much to it!
reunion.
written in 2013.
recorded in 2014.
for reunion, i had the unique experience of being somewhere (a bar in our home town in south dakota) & feeling a song write itself in a single moment, like a different me was sitting in a room with a piano above me sending words down. i talked about the idea for it quite a bit here:
https://youtu.be/mIUi8McaMOM?t=4m37s
but the basic gist is this: everyone’s lonely, especially in their early 20’s. we go places like bars to feel like we’re not, but what we end up doing is comparing our lives to the people around us & feeling even more lonely. but at least we don’t have to be alone.
that’s the kind of thing that gets better, right?
