Drenched in Drama

Despite "My Vampire Bite" being the first album I recorded and felt like I NEEDED to release under my new direction and name because, at the time, I thought it was the perfect melding of noise rock and indie pop, this is the first album I actually recorded after deciding that I bought an acoustic guitar, I might as well use it for something because it was definitely more of a fit with my mindset and what I wanted to do than anything I had been doing.

I just didn't know what it was that I wanted to be doing. I wasn't even sure to what extent I wanted to include the acoustic guitar, whether it was going to be an enhancement or the main instrument and if it was the main instrument, was it going to be clean or was it going to be me'd up, since I have a tendency to take things I've recorded and just completely destroy them because its the only thing that sounds good to my ears at the time. All I knew was that I didn't want to make something obvious, certainly not anything I'd been listening to, which at the time was mainly anti-folk, psych-folk, acoustic punk and rockabilly/psychobilly, and this album kind of sounds like all of that and in that regard, I kind of failed to really make something different in my mind, so I was hesitant to release it because it was just this obvious straight forward thing musically.

I'm not currently sure why thats such a horrible thing though but it was at the time, since I was obsessed with making an experimental mess that could also be seen as a pop masterpiece. Something that was more accessible then I was used to making, just not so accessible (to a certain audience) that (that audience of) people would start expecting just that and nothing else and thats what this album seemed like, something that would cause people to expect a specific sound and concept and I didn't want to be anyones source for anything, I was more than one sound and concept. I don't know if any of that thought process makes any sense but thats what was in my mind.

Anyway, another problem was, I wasn't really sure about it lyrically because there are a few obvious songs on there with pretty direct and upfront in your face themes but a few of the songs are pretty much just obscenely self-referential meta inside joke type things and I didn't know if they were good standing on their own or if there was going to need to be some sort of long drawn out explanation like how One Mile Creek is from me jokingly saying that if I made a straight ahead country album (because I originally bought the acoustic guitar to record some songwriting demos of country songs to shop around for someone to sing them because despite thinking they were really good they would never work with me singing them, at least not convincingly), it'd be like I was a compulsive liar that needed punched in the face, so I might as well make a song about lying and facing the consequences... and sometimes I take jokes too far.

Indie Pop Hip Hop Post Country Punk was a response to someone that, after listening to some cover songs I made to try to get a feel for what I was doing, they said "What is this indie pop hip hop post country punk crap, you should be making something really noisy and angry, like grindcore or something." and I already knew there was going to be a large segment of people that were going to listen to whatever new stuff I was making and just think it sucked, so this was like a pre-emptive strike of sorts, like, man, I already knew it sucked, tell me something I don't know. But, if you had any knowledge of me, you'd already know this is who I am anyway, so maybe you can let me have my freedom to create whatever I want to create.

Static Eccentricity was sort of an extension of that, in that if you want noisy static, well, uh, heres some static at least, haha. The song needed some verses though, so I decided to subtley make fun of aging punks and goths who take things too seriously. Like this one person who freaked out on this kid because the kid was wearing a Social Distortion shirt and didn't know that Social Distortion was a band and not just a really cool statement, I switched it to the Misfits because Static Age fit more with the chorus but basically, there's sort of a story of its own in the song but the story behind the song is about me not making noisy static and ridiculous punks and goths who should be too old and grown up to care about ridiculous things like teenage mall punks/goths being too young and oblivious to know about their favorite bands.

Now, having said all this, you'd think that "Socially Stunted Freak" was really about the music I'm making, basically saying hey, I'm a freak, I'm going to make weird references to things and just be weird in general, if you don't like it, maybe you should go away, but actually, that song is about a conversation I had with some people about how normal I seemed because when we were teenagers they thought I was kind of... a socially stunted freak. And not that I wasn't and not that I'm not still a little in some ways but I wondered what going on a date with the person they described would be like because there's no way I was THAT much of a scatterbrained freakshow.

A New Day is pretty much just me wondering how good of a song I could make using my harmonica and lyrically, I guess there's the tongue in cheek idea of now I have the right ingrediants for it to be my time but it isn't really about anything other than what I did and/or talked about that week, like singing Josh Turner's "Long Black Train" at karaoke because I'd heard it on the radio and thought it was cool but didn't know the words, so sang along while reading the teleprompter and sung the "there's victory in the lord" part obliviously and then a second later, realized just how uncomfortable I suddenly was after I realized what the song was really about and couldn't really get through the song without laughing and feeling self-concious, so I sat down, came up with new words, so that I could sing it again and redeem myself and so I made it a song about there being big trees in the load instead of victory in the lord. And, other than that, you can pretty much figure out all the rest of the references, like I was obsessed with "Aching to Pupate" by Regina Spektor, discussed the song "If That Ain't Country" by David Allan Coe, watched Come See The Paradise, things like that. Its pretty much just pop culture references set to country folk blues.

And in the same line of random pop culture references, the song Depressed Like Little Outer Space Hell Eggs is really about an antidepressant commercial I kept seeing featuring a lonely egg and thinking I'd been depressed before, almost enough to know what its like to feel like an egg with a rain cloud following it around getting shunned by other eggs, it must suck to be that egg, I really empathize with that egg, that egg deserves its own song. So, yeah, if you remember the commercial, I haven't seen it in a while, so I don't think its still running, but if you do remember it, now you might get a bigger kick out of the song than you otherwise would've without the backstory.

The rest of the songs are pretty much self-explanatory, as well as real americana music because if anything is american, its things that sound like they should be on the Jerry Springer Show. Also, Over The Rainbow was written and recorded more recently than the rest of the songs but if anything belongs on something subtitled Electroacoustic Poetry Meltdown, its that.

PS: Re-listening to this... it kind of sounds like an experimental mess, I suppose, but I was mostly remembering the feeling of making it, since it didn't feel all that experimental making it since most of what I did were things that were too easily done for me to consider them truely experimental considering all the work I used to have to do pre-digital recording as well as the fact that what I did wasn't really new or different to me but compared to, like, most other things and for other people, I guess this is an experimental album. Probably even a mess.