dog | 2020

FFO: the microkorg and microdosing | lofi experimental raw

i miss my dog. i’m still upset about it but it’s okay.

we had a good life together. his name was django. he liked peanut butter and he disliked the mailman. i told him he needed to be less predictable than that. he decided that his personal rebuke to dogdom would be to not play fetch. i think that made the dog park less fun for him. as always, i blame myself.

so it goes.

anyways this record is pretty out there. ben, eli and i wrote the bones of “it is easy you can be me” in the winter of 2018 when they travelled up to buffalo from their apartment in brooklyn in one of our earliest attempts to get the band back together. you can hear a much more “finished” version of the song on our record ‘Winner!’.

that session got added to my pile of demos that continued to fill my laptop, justifying the refusal to finish them for one reason after another - in retrospect i blame my inaptitude as a recording engineer. my determination to not learn how to master that craft led me down rabbit holes that added nothing to the creative process - in fact, quite the contrary. the old Ira Glass quote about one’s taste as a creator being above the level of one’s ability at first applies. I was taking it really hard for many years, not knowing if I was, in fact, any good at this thing i love to do. i have a lot more fun making it now that i allow myself to finish the songs. i believe that there is no “in fact” when it comes to being good at something as wide as the idea of making music. you have to go more granular to find the good and the bad.

if you’ll let me: I am very, very bad at making croissants. I am more of a baker than one who has never tried to make croissants, in that I know how awful mine have turned out. i don’t want to be a good baker. the dough sticking to my fingers is like hairs stuck to the back of my tongue. i do want to be a musician. so i will continue to finish my songs and i will share them. and we can all think to ourselves if we think the guitars sound bad or the synth sounds good, or if the butter should have been five degrees colder, or if the songs or boring. we can say so on message boards and to our friends. and the world will keep spinning and i will be a musician and that will be fine. i’m trying to think that way more.

anyways - the rest of the record was made of similarly collected bones and bits of songs i had found from 2017-2020.

it was now the middle of the pandemic. it was winter in buffalo, it was the year of The Big Breakup, i was beginning my battle with my addiction to work. i was lonely, i felt old, i felt out of control of almost every facet of my life and i lived in a tiny shitty apartment with django. at the end of december i was told by my boss i was required to use my week of PTO.

having spent 2 months of that year already in complete isolation during the infancy of covid , i was not tremendously excited by the idea of not working for a week - now here 5 years in the future i would cut off my arm to have a week with django and no responsibilities. hindsight and all that. who knows anything at all, really?

most if not all of the lyrics are stream of consciousness and done within 3 takes or so. i tried to use my uncle’s microkorg for all of the synth textures. midi felt too perfect. i don’t remember if i succeeded at that goal, and i never will because years later the hard drive with all the stems on it was stolen from my home along with every power tool i owned and my childhood guitar.

i think it can feel confusing, this record - like a person who is desperately trying to re-find their sense of self, while actively trying to kill their ego. it’s not too sure of who or what it is. it sounds flawed and grainy. recording engineers may tell you it sounds like it was recorded by someone who doesn’t know what they are doing - and it was and it that way it is cohesive.

i’ve tried to do other versions of “puzzle pieces you had once misplaced”, as i think that’s the most “song-like” song on this. it’s never felt as right to me as this version - made with mostly room mics in that old completely untreated spare room of my shitty apartment.

“you were stolen memories” followed by “it is late in my life” are maybe the angriest songs i’ve written since my band’s first couple batches of whiny, pop-punk, boy music (i have love for those songs, too, but I wonder why i was so angry back then).

there’s a special place in my heart for these songs. as strange and disorganised as they are.

if there was ever a time to tell someone you love them, this is the time. it’s always the time really, but maybe this can be a reminder for you today.