About this time last year we did a series of ‘behind the music’ #tbt ‘Toms Room’ posts. Now we’re gonna run a series of ‘behind the music’ #tbt ‘Naths Room’ posts. These shall be written by none other than Citizen X himself.
TRACK 06 MILLIONCHOLY (BEAT BY CLAMS CASINO)
IMO is one of the strongest songs I’ve ever written. I remember I was living in a tiny little room in a crowded party house - the kind with bins overflowing with beer bottles and pizza boxes and all the appliances and facilities are broken or in the process of breaking. I had no money, no job, no car and was struggling to find work as it was coming into winter (which is the quiet season in Byron Bay which means work opportunities are slim). I had been job hunting for weeks and this one particular day I went out again and came home empty handed and demoralised to a trashed house and an empty food cupboard with no money in the bank and I think I just freaked out. I don’t know exactly why, but caught a bus to Ballina on some ‘I need to fix my life right now’ type shit, put my ipod headphones in, listened to a couple of beats, found this one, came up with the opening line “I got a million reasons / to want a million dollars / and probably a million reasons why I havent got it” and by the time I had ridden the bus to Ballina and back I had written the whole song.
When I arrived home there was a bunch of people drinking and smoking on my front porch looking like they were gearing up for another big night of partying. I was broke and stressed so I bypassed their invitations to join them and instead locked myself in my room to record the vocals to this new song. I remember I tracked it in less than 3 takes. It was just one of those songs that seem to channel right through you. I think at the time we were still working on finishing the Toms Room project, but we knew instantly this song would have to be for a solo Citizen X project - one which could potentially be a sequel of sorts to Toms Room. So in a way this song was the catalyst for the inception of the Naths Room project too.
The beat is ‘All I Need’ by Clams Casino off his ‘Instrumentals’ mixtape that came out in 2011. I was (embarassingly) late to discover it but Canvas showed it to me sometime near the end of 2012 and I lost my shit. Clams Casino and Kanye West are still my favourite producers to this day. The whole tone and tempo of pretty much everything Clams does seems to suit my rapping style so well that I’ve actually had to stop myself from rapping to Clams beats in order to keep moving forward and pushing myself instead of relying on something I know is guaranteed to work.
Its kind of hard to explain, but I think the whole ‘Millioncholy’ concept is based around the idea of having nothing and wanting everything but at the same time not being sure if having those things would lead to a sense of happiness anyway... the complex feeling of melancholy that comes with that realisation, combined with millions of percieved problems and solutions compounding all at once is what had me struggling to explain my mood as anything other than ‘Millioncholy’...
Download ‘Naths Room’ featuring ‘MILLIONCHOLY’ by Citizen X for FREE from https://lostbrain.bandcamp.com/album/naths-room
Cheers