It’s no secret I grew up listening to the Cure, Joy Division, Xymox, Cocteau Twins, and Depeche Mode; I had the hair and wardrobe to prove it. “Where’s the funeral?” Wouldn’t you like to know!
Chorus and Flange is something I worked on over the summer of 2016 with a singer – amazing talent with some notable international acclaim, but right before recording, they suddenly had to take time off from everything for a bit, as people sometimes need to do – which ended up being a few years.
So, it came down to just me: writing, performing all the instruments, recording, engineering, and now, singing. While it can be said, technically, that I am an internationally known vocalist (a couple dozen people across four continents are doing a lot of heavy lifting), I am aware my voice is, to put it mildly, limited. I tried to make it work. At least it’s a genre that can be forgiving.
Track Descriptions and TMI
“Honor thy error as a hidden intention” – Brian Eno, Oblique Strategies
A key part of the project was setting up rules for how a song is produced, and one of the rules was: “break one or two rules on each track.” I made a full five-piece band in my mind and arranged the parts, mostly, so this band could play the songs live with a set of equipment. Most of the takes in the final edit are the first time I played the part, let alone record it.
I wanted to keep the lyrics simple and the themes complex, and I believe I have at least accomplished that goal.
Alright, I admit it; I also like Disco. Instrumentally, there’s a lot of Nile Rogers and Bernard Edwards influence. Vocally, there’s probably some Cerrone or Giorgio Moroder influence in there too. I say this only to excuse the sparse lyrics. Repeating “It’s so good” and “I feel love” for nine minutes slaps/bangs/grooves, so there’s hope for me.
The first track I finished was Haunts Me. The lyric: “Will we ever know if this is real, or just another layer/lair of our dreams?” For good or for bad, it’s one of the cleverest lines I’ve ever written. Half the time I’m singing “layer” and the other half, it’s “lair,” and not even I know which is which. They sound different, though.
I had recorded a really decent guitar solo for this, but it got lost in a system reboot. Each attempt to recreate it was worse than the one before it, until I just gave up. It’s out there now, and I can’t take it back. And it Haunts Me.
“When I hold this Forget-me-not, it brings back the memory it set. I could only hope and wonder, have you forgotten me yet?” It’s a weird dichotomy: wanting someone you care about to get over you and move on so they can be happy while also not wanting to be forgotten. Far too often, you get neither. Sometimes they don’t, either.
The guitar solo is so high, half of the notes use the pickups as a fretboard.
The Same For Me has probably the sloppiest guitar work ever recorded by man or beast. I could have “fixed” it, but this is a song about not caring. I might have even gone out of my way and edited in extra sloppiness. You’ll never know. For a song that was supposed to be so sparse, why are there 48 multitracks in one section?
There might be some Psychedelic Furs influence showing on Silent Weapons/Silent Machines. It was intentional. I hope you noticed.
Entire Universe is a song about life, the universe and everybody and nothing. It’s in the classic pop song arrangement, loaded with all the pop song cliches. I regret I didn’t modulate up a half-step for the final chorus. That would’ve been rad.
I wrote half the lyrics in 1997, the chorus and one verse, but was stuck. For the next twenty years, this half-song would rattle around in my head, and any more ideas were dead ends. When I decided to finally figure out how to play the tune to record this, I tried the verse I had (“and nothing will change…“) as a bridge, and once I did that, it took about an hour to come up with the verses.
Ordinary Moment and Forget-Me-Not appear on the soundtrack of the feature film Book of Evil, available on Tubi.
Ordinary Moment was the idea of a song about a normal, unremarkable event. Not nothing. Few people experience true nothing regularly, and when they do, it is either a chance to relax or it’s a terrifying void. This is an ode to the status quo and the everyday, which is unique to each individual, but at the same time, the feeling is universal. It’s just the essence of whatever a person’s completely used to.
Running was based on something I came up with on the Magnus Chord Organ. It just seemed to breathe. I layered in a ton of hand percussion tracks. It reminds me of a beach.
Overall, the songs touch on social awkwardness, regret, social politics, the political process, existential dread, and the creation of reality itself — if it actually exists.
There are also fewer than 175 unique words on the entire album.
If you enjoy this, feel free to support the project and download higher-quality versions of the tracks (bit rate, not performance). You could probably just ask nicely, too.