Constant Companions Closeup #5: CADMIUM COLORS
(also on bandcamp and spotify!)
Once again, welcome back to the Constant Companions Closeups - a series of in-depth dives into the songs off of my latest album, Constant Companions! Last time, I wrote a whole diatribe about my OCs while talking about I Wish That I Could Fall, and today, we're eating paint! Cadmium Colors featuring Soneji of Project Mikan!
Consider this a content warning: this post will discuss the pandemic, struggles with mental health, and suicidal ideation/attempts. I'm hoping it'll ultimately be uplifting, but the discussions at hand are incredibly heavy, and it wouldn't do this song right to be vague. Please be warned.
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Let's talk about COVID.
At the beginning of 2020, I was in the midst of a long-term break from making music. It wasn't completely cold turkey, and I might not have even called it a break if you'd asked me at the time, but things were dire. I was still dealing with the burnout I'd sustained from the making of Autumn Every Day; I'd had my ego bruised by a live performance at a house party that went so hilariously bad it'd hurt even the most stoic performers (imagine watching an entire packed room of people clear out in 5 minutes flat from the already hyper-exposed vantage point of being on stage in front of them and knowing you single-handedly caused that lol); I had just moved across the country, and was preoccupied with trying to make ends meet as a 22 year old dealing with pure adulthood for the first time.
I was working a shitty minimum wage job at a discount clothing store I will not be naming, slogging through late-night shifts that wouldn't get me home until 3 am some nights. I had friends and roommates, but they were all just as overworked and exhausted and dealing with their own shit as me. I was mentally ill and unmedicated. Suicidal ideation was rearing its ugly head at my lowest moments.
Then, as I turned 23, a global pandemic shut the world down, my grandpa died with me being unable to attend his funeral, and I had a catastrophic mental breakdown that suddenly turned the voices in my head into a deafening cacophony of self-inflicted malice.
In hindsight, I think being 23 kinda just does that to you
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Fast forward to 2021. I was back at my retail job with the pandemic raging in full force, my sense of self was held together with duct tape, positive self-talk essentially didn't exist for me, and I was the loneliest and lowest I had ever been. I was working the fewest hours I could get away with, and still, almost all spare time I had was taken up either by work or by my recovery from it.
This was around the time I got an email from Crypton, of all places - the people that make Hatsune Miku, for anyone uninformed. They wanted a remix of the song Happy Synthesizer for a Digital Stars compilation. I could not for the life of me tell you how I lucked into this or why they reached out to me of all people, but they did, and I was deathly determined to prove myself worthy of it.
This was August of 2021. I was staring down the barrel, languishing in what felt like only half of a life, fantasizing about death and trying to twist my thoughts into something that could at least keep me blearily shuffling forward another couple days. It was untenable.
(I'd also recently been diagnosed with OSDD 1b - this is a whole can of worms I can't really open until we talk about Breeze Blows, but it's important to at least mention that coping with this was a significant part of this turnaround.)
It's melodramatic, but I had only two options - make things again, or die.
I finished that remix within 24 hours of getting the stems, and I will gladly toot my own horn about it - it's really fucking good, in my opinion. Bittersweet ended up coming together in a mad dash over the next couple months as well. I was making music again.
Even though I was exponentially busier, things paradoxically got easier. I made the creative process a priority in my life, and not only did it give me an outlet for everything that had otherwise been eating away at my soul, but it struck a chord with other people who had been struggling as well. Things just... started getting brighter.
So I kept making music and living and yadda yadda blah blah here I am. This is all a lot of words and very personal stories of mental health struggles to say this:
One: The line between being an artist and being one of countless people forced to work jobs that go nowhere, that put their life at risk, that force them to strip parts of themselves away - it is a faint and transparent line built on circumstances of class and privilege and luck. Making Art and being an Artist aren't magical elevated states of existence, but something anyone is capable of if given the space to nurture their creativity. I believe the world should be a place where any person can do this.
Two: It's easy to convince yourself that art is meaningless in the face of the world at large. And yes, revolutions aren't fought by poetry and paintings, and people aren't fed through songs. But art is a source and a medium for connection; Art is how we find beauty in a disorganized and entropic world; Art is what we come home to and what words we write and pictures we paint and songs we sing to remind us that people matter to us and love is real and life is worth fucking living. Maybe that's corny and stupid, but it's true.
Three: So help me God, I will never work retail again in my entire life.
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This is another song that is heavily inspired by artists like Prefab Sprout, Peter Gabriel, Kate Bush, and other artists of that ilk - very 80s, very flowery and sentimental lyricism, focused on telling a story. I greatly admire songs that aren't afraid to paint otherwise banal or ordinary scenes in abstract reverence!! I wanted the verses to contrast heavily with each other in that way, with verse one's relentless poeticisms (prosaic practice of depravity) and idioms turned on their head (suspending innocents above their disbelief) against verse two's incredibly straightforward depiction of a factory worker's circumstances.
The flowery language might have worked against me somewhat, though! I've seen a lot of folks that thought the ending was darker or much more defeatist than I intended, and while some of that is just inevitable with a work of art, I want to be clear.
Translator's note: this means "don't kill yourself, you idiot"!!
As you may have picked up from the previous post in this series, this song does heavily feature a leitmotif or two predominantly performed under pudgy pretenses. I'm not going to go on that whole novella-length spiel again, but rest assured knowing that this song, too, is one that makes me think about my OCs. Since it's something many people missed, however, I will take a moment to point out that this song quotes none other than Autumn Every Day off of my album of the same name!
Painting and visual art have been something of a reoccurring obsession of mine in my own art. I grew up around visual artists, have always been friends with many visual artists, and generally have a really intense love of it as a medium and a mode of expression. However, there's also always been a sense of... well, I don't want to call it jealousy, but it's jealousy. I've tried many times to start making visual art of my own, and I have made some things, but it's been a struggle, and I worry sometimes that my eye has permanently outstripped my ability.
However, in my quest to toss out grand expectations and simply have fun making art, I did recently pick up a cheap little drawing tablet! I'm excited to be a beginner at something artistic again...
Finally, I want to thank a couple people: Soneji of Project Mikan for the gorgeous, soaring saxophone solo; friend_xp for the mindboggling MV editing; and especially my good friend Que for the GORGEOUS painterly art that goes along with this song! Que's style was just perfect for this, and really tied the whole thing together immaculately!! There's no joke or deeper lore or anything I just fucking love Que's art go follow!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
And with that, I think this post is complete!! If you have anything else you wanna know about, ask away in the replies! Tomorrow will be Breeze Blows with Marcy Nabors and Marlow Jacobs!!!
MAKE ART AND BE GAY
