I released an album of punk rock/noise pop whatsit last October. You can get it right now by clicking on any of these words. Since writing this, I have gone ahead and put the album up on all your favorite exploitative music services, which you can view by clicking on this (this is not the full list; it’s all over the place, including Jay-Z’s Tidal!). I will now also embed the entire thing below so you can play it while you read this and go “What the fuck! What the fuck! This is shit! What the fuck! Why he writes so much about it? Just sounds like a box of farts on parade, what the hell!? Is not music! Is nasty! Nasty boy yelling! Nasty guitar! I hate it! I hate him! How did I even end up on this website? No one has heard of this man? Why am I here? What year is it?” FADE TO CREDITS. TWIN PEAKS: THE RETURN.

I am writing a postmortem about the album I made because my friend Sammy said this:

“I’d be interested in hearing a postmortem analysis of your album. What things you think worked and what things didn’t work so well, in respect to the creation and promotion and distribution and so on. I’m curious about what sort of expectations you had for how it would be received and if those expectations were met.”

It was nice of him to say this because it gives me an excuse to write this without it just being something I produced purely from my own ego. Whatta scam!

The honest truth is, though I sort of like making stuff, I far more like having had made the stuff, and what I probably like more than anything is talking about the stuff I made. Disgustingly narcissistic? Perhaps! But assessing your own crap, or hearing other people assess it, or hearing other people respond to your assessment is also a lovely way to learn things about yourself and your work that you maybe didn’t previously realize and it’s also a great way to live inside an endless critical cycle forever where everything is safe and comforting and faux-academic and while you’re there you don’t have to make anything new or acknowledge the myriad of emergencies popping up every day in your crumbling empire and the global catastrophes that slap you in the face no matter where you turn!

I’ll divide this into two big fucking posts: Creation and Release. SPOILER ALERT: This is the first post. I am pretty much just writing this as a big stream of consciousness barf-o-rama, but I’ll slap subheadings on it where it makes sense so as to make it a slightly more palatable barf-o-rama. But I don’t realistically expect anyone to read this, except maybe Sammy who brought it on himself. But this is mostly for me and it was enjoyable to write and that is what matters most to ME.

Heeeeere we gooooooo!

DA MAKIN’

Length

I spent about two and a half years recording and mixing Songs for Jerks. The end product came out to be 40:36 , which I am pretty happy with because I don’t really believe albums should get anywhere close to 50 minutes because who has the damn time! Or patience!! Honestly, I’d prefer it to be under 40 minutes and would endeavor to clock in at 30-36 minutes on any future full-length release. However, in this case, there were a variety of different song styles I wanted to show off and the track list I ended up with accomplished that.

For example, even though one of my favorite music things ever is to have a catchy riff that functions as the lead in a chorus (i.e., instead of vocals), I somehow managed to not really do that on any song until the very last one I finished, “Every King.” So it was really important to me to get that song on there to round everything out. Maybe “Top This!” does a similar sort of thing but that song seemed like a huge bangin’ hit to me at the beginning of writing it, but came out to be one of the less interesting songs. So I guess I just wanted a song that did something similar, but more confidently.

This opens up the question of whether I should have cut any songs. Possibly! A 10-track album might have been nice. The problem is that by the time I was willing to admit a song was a bit weak and wasn’t coming out as good as I’d hoped, I had already expended so much time and effort on it I was like, “what, am I just going to to leave this off the album? Fuck that!” So pretty much everything went in.

For example, I feel quite strongly that “Mermaid” is the absolute weakest and least memorable song. I guess I’m glad it’s on there to the extent it’s one of the few songs not in 4/4 and it demonstrates an ability to do a functional enough Weezer/Pixies joint ripoff (every other song is just a Pixies ripoff). However, the honest truth is it became evident fairly early in the writing of it that the chord progression I had come up with, though catchy, wasn’t enough to base a whole song around. It’s definitely also the song in which it’s most evident that I got sick of trying to write more lyrics for it. Furthermore, it is structurally almost identical to “Every King” but is just a much weaker song.

Going forward, I’d be less likely (or at least I’d like to think I’d be less likely) to force a song into being against its will. I don’t think “Mermaid” had to be a boring song. I just maybe should have left it alone and came back to it at another time in my life. Nearly all of the songs are based off some riff or vocal line I recorded into my computer or phone at some point in the last decade (or even before that sometimes, for chrissakes) and sometimes I’d just suddenly have a great idea of how to build upon them. Nothing like that ever happened with “Mermaid,” but I forced a full song out of it anyway. Had I not, I might’ve been able to make it a better song at a later date.

Pacing ‘n’ That

Incidentally, I also forced “She Hurts” into being and I think it’s the second-worst song. But at least it’s fucking weird and not much like anything else on there. Why did I put the two worst songs back to back? Ummmmmmmmmmmmm…? No, actually, it was to do with some vague notion of pacing and putting some distance between the more abrasive songs and the more conventionally palatable, poppy ones. Also, these days I might think “Top This!” is actually the second worst song. Or “Douche Guitar.” I don’t know. They’re ALL garbage!!!

But I will say I am fine with how the album flows. I really just put it together the same way I used to make mix CDs for girls who didn’t want them. The only thing I don’t entirely love is the jump from “Nothing Doing” to “Every King,” but it’s not a big deal. Overall, I think I did a good job of going from noise to pop, slow to fast, ups and downs, peaks and troughs, rubbish and bollocks. I’m also happy with the deliberate change in mood after “Douche Guitar.” That’s the most blatant joke track and it’s followed immediately by the two most downer songs on the album to be like “okay, no more goofin’ around!” But then the last track ends everything on a much more positive note because you have earned it after all the boo-hoo-hoos.

Subject Matter

I am still not entirely confident about the inclusion of “Douche Guitar.” There are jokey elements throughout the album but it’s the only full-on joke song (it and “Nothing Doing” both come from the comedy band I had with friends when I lived in China many years ago). I’m glad it’s there in that it’s probably not the kind of song I want to write going forward, but it was always one that did well when I played it for crowds (I’ve played it for a surprising variety of different crowds), so I wanted a “definitive” version recorded somewhere and I figured it was better to get it out there on a first album before my forthcoming SERIOUS PERIOD (I will never be able to be fully serious).

However, it was always performed as a purely acoustic song and it has a sort of singalong folk song vibe to it. I’m not sure it works as a full-band rock song and also the concept of the song is niche enough that I don’t know that the joke really works unless you are given a bit of background of the song’s premise, which, when played live, I provide. I will now provide that background here because chances are if you’re reading this you are someone who already has the album and if that song was befuddling to you, now you can enjoy it and laugh and laugh and laugh…

If you are fortunate and privileged enough to travel, you are traveling in a continent like Asia or Europe, and you are doing it on the cheap, you will be very likely to stay in a hostel, a la the film, Hostel: Part II. In said places, there is typically a common area where you can hang out with strange travelers who are all a lot more boring than you’d hope and who will tell you about some stupid mountain they climbed and how you simply must climb it yourself.

Anyway, there’s very frequently a communal guitar in the common area. Invariably, some douche will pick this guitar up and start playing classic fiddly rock hits on it so as to impress women, with the goal of rudely getting laid in a room shared by anywhere from three to fifteen strangers (I have stayed in such a room where this happened 🙁 ). I’m not a good guitarist so I can’t get laid by playing guitar so I wrote this song out of a burning envy for these sorts of guys. In the song, the phrase “douche guitar” is used interchangeably to describe the guitar itself as well as the man who plays it, even though he should probably be called a “guitar douche,” but, look, I don’t want this to turn into a whole thing, okay?

Speaking of “Douche Guitar,” there’s other stuff I still question whether I should’ve included. “Douche Guitar,” for one, contains the word “manwhore,” which, when I wrote this song a million years ago, wasn’t something I would have thought much about, but, these days, I wouldn’t include because it’s fraught with so many questionable connotations. I think it’s not egregiously offensive, really, but, very simply, I probably wouldn’t even put the word “whore” in a song at all now, or at least not without much deeper consideration of its inclusion. Yes, I could’ve rewritten the song, but, and this is key, I am very lazy.

Far worse, in my imo, is the line in “Top This!” that goes “Lie down here beside me/There’s still time to change your mind/I’d respect you if you changed it.” I think this line can easily and understandably be read as suggesting the very real and hypocritical notion some guys have that if a girl sleeps with them, they’re less deserving of respect.

“Top This!” was, from start to finish, one of the more newly conceived songs, so I can’t blame this on it being something I wrote 2000 years ago. The thing is, it’s supposed to be a self-deprecating line. The song is meant to be about the really unhealthy thinking that if I found a girl who actually wanted to be with me, she’d have the Herculean task of having to constantly prove it and justify sticking with me because I’ve been alone for so long and hate myself so much I’d be constantly disbelieving of the situation (and one would assume I’d inevitably drive her away and would retreat back into loneliness). So the bit about respecting her is meant to be read like I’m so shit that I’d respect her for not getting into bed with me specifically. It is still an absolutely toxic and crazy way to think! Again, the perspective in the song is decidedly unhealthy. But it wasn’t supposed to be sexist. But I think it is super easy to read as sexist. Should I have rewritten it? Again, probably yes! But more on why there was little rewriting on Songs For Jerks later (aside from the laziness).

Poor Me!

While we’re on the subject of self-loathing, let’s talk about how, like, the whole album is about that. Someone asked me at one point what the album was about and I responded without hesitation, “loneliness!” because that was the theme that was obviously emerging as I completed songs. However, I later determined that the even more overt theme was self-loathing. Practically every song contains lyrics that are critical or mocking of me (or some hyperbolic version of me or some character being played by me) and even the songs that are judgmental of someone else have a hint of bitterness suggesting I’m no better than the person I’m criticizing or that some part of me is or would like to be like them.

The few times I say something positive, it’s usually insincere and soaked in irony, e.g., the end of “Mermaid” where I repeat “It’s so good to be me.” The joke is: it’s not!!! Pretty deep, I know. Songs For Jerks ends on its most upbeat song, really the only song I’d deem positive on the entire thing, but even that has lyrics like “I’ll get around to being somebody/Even if it takes me all my days/On this planet earth.” Say, that’s not really positive at all!

The strange thing about working on something for so long is that you are very likely to find yourself a different person by the end of it. I guess songs all about how I’m alone and wah-wah nobody likes me are all I had on the brain when I was writing this thing. I thought, and I still do think, it’s cool to not write love songs because there’s too many of those out there already, but, in retrospect, writing lovelorn songs isn’t a far cry. I mean, maybe these aren’t longing for love in the romantic way often done in songwriting; they’re more just like “boy, I suck!” but I still feel like you can only write the “boy, I suck!” song so many times before it stops being interesting. I’m no less lonely than I was when I started this project, but even so I now feel like I don’t much want to write that song anymore.

One of the things that started bothering me as I completed the album was I felt like I was just making angry boy rock music. Angry boys have made a lot of music throughout history and it feels a little boring to be another one of those. Perhaps I’ll never be able to totally avoid it because I like loud drums, noisy electric guitars, and screaming. Plus, I’m a boy and I’m often kinda angry. But I started wondering if this was developing into an album for incels or something. (As a result, one reason I decided to donate any profits to an abortion fund was to ward off the incels.) I don’t know that everyone would agree with this, but I think the end product came out sporadically angry, but predominantly a combo of sad and silly. Still, I can’t shake the pissy, whiny boy feeling that hangs over it all and, not that I know how or anything, I’d prefer to write songs more accessible to people who aren’t grumpy sadboys.

That said, though it ended up being one of my least favorite songs musically, “Top This!” is still probably the most nakedly honest song on there, so I’m glad, with all the winking irony throughout, I still managed to squeeze out something more earnest like that. Rivers Cuomo hasn’t made a good record in a long while, but this interview in which a sycophantic Australian man gushes over Weezer’s recent 867th release (which is not good), did contain this one moment I found relatable.

Because everything online goes defunct eventually and I don’t want this write-up to one day be as useless as those Buzzfeed listicles littered with the corpses of once-active links, in brief, in the interview, Rivers talks about what a wonderful feeling it is to be able to listen back to your own song and think “aw yeah, he gets me! I get me!” Even though I feel like it’s not the type of song I’m presently in the mood to write again and that it’s possible I couldn’t produce a song in the same vein that would have this effect now, “Top This!” is one of my few songs (maybe the only one?) that can make me feel sad when I listen to myself sing the words, so it evidently felt true to me at the time, and on some level it still rings true to me now. I followed my insecurity to its most melodramatic conclusion and apparently it worked!

Although I feel like I don’t want to write more “poor me” songs right now, at least I got one out that speaks to me (which is a harder thing to do than you might think if you aren’t Elliott Smith). I usually scoff at people going all to pieces in YouTube comments about a song making them cry or getting them through a rough patch of life. I feel lots of stuff from music for sure and I get the chills from great music that the modern youth get from ASMR videos of Thor explaining their taxes to them or whatever. But the reasons I feel stuff from listening to music tend to be unclear. For example, I get tingles from the chord change 45 seconds into this Kim Deal song, though I couldn’t tell you why. This sensation is best described from this passage in Roald Dahl’s The BFG:

‘And sometimes human beans is very overcome when they is hearing wonderous music. They is getting shivers down their spindels. Right or left?’

‘Right,’ Sophie said.

‘So the music is saying something to them. It is sending a message. I do not think the human beans is knowing what that message is, but they is loving it just the same.’

Though it has happened, it’s far, far rarer that I hear a song articulate something lyrically that makes me go “ah, it’s me! My life!” Evidently if I want more songs like that I should write them myself.

But I have to admit that even if I act all holier than thou about all the commenters whose lives were altered forever by a song, I can’t think of much higher praise than someone telling you that you hit them on a gut level, that they felt they saw themselves in your song. Because even if my knee-jerk thought to that kind of response would be something like “but the song’s not about you, it’s about me,” what they’re probably really getting at is that you gave voice to an aspect of the human experience that loads of people can relate to because you wrote something so honest. I think I would love to be told I accomplished that (at least once anyway; maybe it gets old after you hear it a bunch. I wonder if Mitski is sick of it yet).

Nobody said anything like that to me, which is no big surprise. I mean, I wrote an album called Songs For Jerks (which I am from now on going to refer to with the twee abbreviation S4J), what did I expect? Much like my very damn being, the idea is that if you can get past the goofy, abrasive antagonism, you’ll find a soft, weepy center, but I’m not reaching a huge audience at the moment, so I’m probably not reaching the people willing to engage with my bullshit that intensely. Plus, I didn’t get super-deep that often. A lot of the “honest” stuff is pretty surface-level loneliness and immature references to suicidal ideation (though I would think many millennials and gen-z kids can relate to feeling like you want to die all the time even though you don’t really mean it). Also, with the current subject matter I’ve put out, again the biggest worry is that if I’m speaking to anyone through my music, it’s just the incels. One other possibility is I am literally the only person who thinks the way I do. That seems unlikely, though.

I should also say that I’m selling myself short here, acting like every single track is about how alone I am. Your interpretation may vary, but I believe there are really only three songs specifically on that subject. However, there are three or four additional songs with lyrics that touch on much the same thing and nearly the whole shebang reeks of a general down in the dumps demeanor. I like sad, pretty melodies, so I’m not about to go all Raffi on whatever I do next, but I’d like to branch out with song subject matter. Currently, my mind is more on focusing my angry boy sounds on external bullshit that makes life horrible because, well, there sure is a lot of that these days, and I think many of us can empathize.

Songs About Nothing

Though I doubt I’ll ever be able to leave sad songs for lonely boys behind me entirely, one thing I feel I’d like to abandon are songs about jack shit. Many of the artists I admire and attempt to emulate come from the school of vocals with the purpose of sounding cool more than writing lyrics that tell a story or communicate a clear message. I might develop a basic concept for a song but I will readily abandon it for a fun rhyme or a catchy repeating phrase. My vocals are usually just about adding texture to the song by making noise and hitting notes in whatever way plays to the strengths of my voice, same as with any other instrument I use. I’m happy that the “choruses” of two of my songs are just long screams just because I thought it sounded cool. They obviously invoke a sense of anger, but, since they’re wordless shrieks, I’m just communicating angry vibes rather than spelling out something I’m specifically angry about (well, okay, I am specifically angry about something in “People Are Famous”).

With that in mind, I approached much of the songwriting for S4J with the goal of making it seem like I was writing about something but actually I was writing about nothing. I guess I was resistant to being too blunt and earnest, but I thought it would be lame if it was obvious I was just saying nonsense, so I tried to mask the nonsense or at least vaguely theme it so you’d feel like maybe I was telling you something but you didn’t know what. Basically, I tried to make David Lynch movies in song form (yes, I know David has two albums of his own, but please let’s not talk about that right now).

The song with the absolute least amount of meaning to it is “She Hurts.” With any of the songs with hollow lyricism, I would still try to arrive at something that I could retroactively apply a shaky meaning to, but “She Hurts” just doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. My lame explanation of the song is that it’s like The Crow (I mean the 1994 movie but I think the Crow’s origin story is basically always the same), except instead of a dude who gets murdered and comes back to life to get revenge, it’s a woman. However, once you get to the chorus (“And I always think it’s impressive, etc.”), that all falls apart because the lyrics there have nothing to do with anything and are literally placeholder from many years ago when I first tried mumbling whatever came to mind over the chords. I just never came up with anything better! (The repeating lyrics of the outro also don’t fit my Crow explanation.)

The verse lyrics came about because I felt the song had a creepy vibe and that accordingly it should have creepy lyrics, which is how I ended up with the rather horrid line “But the way that she suffered/So exquisite.” I was being creepy on purpose, but this line more than any other makes me cringe now. It’s very unclear what it’s about (it’s not about a goddamn thing) but it’s another one of the lines that I dwell on because it manages to sounds kind of misogynistic despite being devoid of any real substance. Another instance of lyrics I should have just rewritten? Probably! I suppose I succeeded at being creepy at least!

“Multiplex” is another song that smacks of nonspecific sexism and I regularly feel the need to tell people that it’s one of the songs that is 100% not autobiographical (but I can’t really escape the fact that I still wrote it all and recorded it, can I!). But I actually really love “Multiplex.” I’m still surprised it ended up this way, but I feel it’s the best song on the album. And, even if it’s not really about anything, I still feel like I established a pretty consistent perspective of whoever the character of the song is (not that he’s all that deep; it’s really only one verse repeated verbatim and then a bridge, followed by some mumbly wailing).

But I digress! I think, post-Songs For Jerks, one of the biggest changes in songwriting for me is going to be that I don’t want to write anything that deliberately avoids having a meaning. I’m still cool with the idea of writing lyrics to a song that are more about supporting the tone than they are about communicating a concept or telling a story, but at the very least they should do that consistently. There are a few places where I’m bugged by my weird nonsense lyrics, but the all-over-the-place meaningless of “She Hurts” is definitely the most acute example of it and it hurts (lol!) the song overall (even though I still think the name “She Hurts” is cool and it’s still a cool phrase to repeat). In the future, even if all I end up writing is some more sadboy bullshit, I’d prefer that to saying nothing whatsoever.

Nomenclature

Regarding namin’ stuff, I think I did a pretty good job!

The hardest thing was coming up with an artist name. I’ve been making music off and on for decades but never taking it all that seriously and joke names for unserious bands are easy enough. But a serious name for when you’re a real artist making a serious album called Songs For Jerks is another story. I almost just went with my actual name but my friend Joe (who sings on two tracks) said I should not do that. Joe Versus popped into my head one day and I decided it worked for me and sounded good in a bunch of ways. More importantly, just about everyone I told it to seemed cool with it. My mom said it was perfect for me. 😀 I do find it a bit immature-sounding, but that’s nothing compared to the album title, so whatever.

I am also aware that it brings to mind cult Tom Hanks film Joe Versus the Volcano, but I recently rewatched that film and it’s kind of good so I don’t mind the association. Besides, the number of people aware of this film are a dying breed, and will soon be gone…

https://www.tumblr.com/joematar/636610809231982592

The album title was certainly a choice and one I was set on long before I came up with Joe Versus. Was it a bad idea? Maybe, I don’t know. I’m sure it makes it a little harder to take me or my music seriously, for people who need their music to be very serious. It’s certainly an eye-catching name, but seemingly not one that gets many people who don’t know me to check it out.

I guess I don’t care though! I think the album confusingly straddles a line that leaves you wondering “Is it a joke? Is he serious? Huh? Wha?” and the title fits that theme. It’s also the title I had my heart set on for ages. I just wanted this to be the name. I was insistent on this being the name! Any issues with the name are moot because I could not be stopped in making this the stupid fuckin’ name!

But I don’t feel that strongly about the names for anything I might do going forward. I think I will be more malleable on future names and I would certainly like to put something out that sounds less like a huge joke. This time it had to be Songs For Jerks though, I am sorry.

As for track titles, I feel I did pretty well there, too! “Douche Guitar” is obviously a uniquely dumb title but it’s a uniquely dumb song and what else was I gonna call it? The only name that’s a bit meh is “Pity Party” because it’s just not very creative. I am sure there are a lot of artists out there with songs with that name and I knew that going into it. The title was originally “Everything is a Girl,” which is a line in the song, but the song ended up being not exclusively about my failures with women and more just about being lame and mocking myself in general. After the lyrics were done, I thought “Well, that’s what this has all amounted to, a dang pity party.” Anyway, whatever, it’s just one song title. Get off my back!

Production

That was all the wishy-washy creative stuff, lyrics and themes and junk, but now we get to the meat of things and the truth of why it all sounds like messy shitty garbage I recorded with a waffle iron.

It’s a Secret to Everybody (hope you all get this obscure and cool reference 😉 )

I did practically every single bit of this thing, from the writing to the mixing to the music videos and the social media advertising myself. I brought in other people to provide some vocals and some claps for a few songs but everything else on the album is me. For the PDF that comes with the album download, I got a friend who luckily happens to be a good photographer to take photos (she also was friends with a makeup artist who made me look beaten up; people have since asked if I was actually beaten up in the photo so she did a great job). There’s also some old photos in there taken by my mom, plus an old painting she did. I had two friends who would listen to the tracks for me, which sometimes resulted in crucial feedback. I also got a few friends to pop up briefly in the album advertisement and my friend Keran shot a few things for me that I used in music videos.

The person who did the most work besides me is Andii Foriani, who is the best person in the world and who did the whole layout and design of the cover and the PDF for me (for free, no less!). She came up with most of how it would look on her own. I was glad she naturally chose to make it very colorful as I think a good bit of the record is musically fun and I didn’t want to give the perception it was a total downer. She then went back and forth with me to tweak it. It came out looking cool and gives the whole package an air of professional completeness.

But, anyway, the music was, by and large, done by me, alone, in my room, for years… And I mention this because it didn’t have to be like that. And, frankly, it very likely would have been better and faster had I brought more people in.

All the songs (except maybe “She Hurts”) are written for a full band, so one obvious improvement would’ve been to have one of those. D’oh! Talk about a major boner! I’ve had bands in the past but they were really just goof-off distractions I did with friends (many of whom had little to no musical ability). Putting together a real band of people who can actually play instruments but making sure you click with them and that they have time to practice and record and on and on… Man, it exhausts me just thinking about it. This is obviously a personal problem and one I should likely get past for future music-making. but, well, it’s a pandemic now, ain’t it? So I will continue to justify being a freak loner musician for the time being.

I also kept the whole thing very secret from my parents. I haven’t always lived with my parents but in this late-capitalist nightmare I am one of the many millennial casualties who is currently stuck with mine again and that’s how it was for the bulk of the album’s creation. I told them I was making an album because when you quit your job and then sit in front of your computer for hours on end for years, it’s polite to at least tell the people you live with a little of what you’re doing on there, but I all but refused to answer questions about it or elaborate on any of the process. I can’t fully explain why because I probably need to work it out with a therapist but the short version is I have a big complex about people, especially my parents, sticking their noses into how I spend my time and into any of my in-progress projects. However it is I developed this complex, I’d wager it is approximately 80% their fault.

I also feel weird about people hearing me practice or record singing. I’ll perform for people but that’s when the music is done and I’m fairly confident in it. Look, Prince had the same problem, okay (or something like it anyway)? I took my secrecy to such an extreme that — and this is the funniest and most pathetic trivia about S4J — I would literally only record vocals at the times both my parents were out of the apartment. They are fucking old and don’t do a whole lot, so this is a rare occurrence, which means all my vocals were recorded during very brief windows of opportunity.

This gave the recording process a strange and intermittent timeline. When I would learn that, later in the week, my parents would be away for a day or two, I’d spend that time strumming the guitar and quietly mumbling vocals and writing lyrics I thought sounded like they’d work. I think a few times I recorded myself playing guitar and then burned the track to a CD and would sing along in the (obviously very old) car and record the best stuff on my phone.

Then, on the day itself, I’d record and sing everything loud and properly in my room, working out along the way whether it actually worked with the song and whether I could hit all the notes. If I was mixing later and found I needed to rerecord something or came up with some new vocals to sing, I’d have to wait again for a time I was alone in the apartment. Sometimes I’d have a vocal line waiting to be recorded and would suddenly be informed by my parents that they’d be going out so I’d quickly get my mic out and get to work, meaning some of the singing was hastily recorded in minuscule windows of no more than an hour. Because I was worried about freaking people out in the apartment building, I recorded the really loud screams in Keran’s basement one time when his parents were away. (I don’t actually know that this was any better than doing it in my apartment and may have scared people in his neighborhood.)

While I am admittedly allergic to editing and rewriting, this secrecy is another big part of why the album was, for the most part, written once and that was it. The biggest edits I’d typically make were cutting out whole bars because I like my songs to be short and economical and that’s easy enough to do with nonlinear music editing software. But rewriting and rerecording all-new lyrics? A luxury for the mentally sound! So, you see, if I wrote something horrible and edgy and lame, changing it was impossible. And that’s that.

The reality, of course, was that I didn’t have to take the secrecy to such a level and it would’ve been fine. (Incidentally, I did it so well that it wasn’t until I was recording the very last song that my parents came home once and heard me. My dad asked “Do you only sing when we’re not here?” Ha ha, not anymore, pal! Very cool. My stealthiness rivals Solid Snake!) Once the thing was out on the world wide web, after being a coy little freak about it for a bit, I relented and gave my dad the link when he asked for it. He was in a band when he was younger and he was impressed and could appreciate that I had obviously worked really hard to put all these songs together. It felt good that he saw some merit in it and didn’t just find it to be loud nonsense.

My mom, in contrast, is a crazy Catholic who is terrified of the album because she knows I say things like “fuck” and “shit” on it, so she’s only heard two of the more pleasant songs I handpicked for her. Some of this is my fault as I emphasized to her multiple times that it was decidedly not for her and I regret hammering that home so much, but even without that she would still be a frightened Catholic kook and I’ve learned to not be bothered that she’ll never hear the whole thing.

Anyhoo, now that my parents have heard some of my singing, I’ve gotten over the embarrassment a bit and worked out using my mom’s art closet as a wee rehearsal/recording space so I can actually work on music anytime. They can still hear me, but it’s muffled and they also don’t care. I’m the only one who feels weird about it. So this is something I’ve mostly made my peace with and now I have no real excuse except laziness to not rerecord something until it’s at its best.

Practice is for the Weak!

My singing at the time I recorded the album was pretty darn good, I think. I didn’t practice my own songs a lot in advance, but I did go for drives in which I’d put on music and sing along to it in the car. I often tried to put on stuff that challenged my vocal range and made me do some screaming and I eventually became surprised at the notes I could hit and that they sounded (far as I could tell) nice! This is as close as I came to something like a vocal training regimen and it seemed to work! I still recorded the occasional flat note, but my friend Joe has a good ear and would help me identify any instances in which something was really off and needed to be rerecorded. The only singing I still feel uncertain about is the ghostly falsetto at the end of “Top This!” It sounds weird and maybe off-key, but I tried it many times and could never get it to sound better, so it will just forever haunt me and be one of many reasons I don’t love that song!

So the singing was okay in my book. As for playing the guitar and the bass, however, I kind of didn’t practice, like, at all. I’ve technically played guitar for like twenty years at this point, but I’ve gone through long periods of barely touching the thing. Funnily enough, throughout the entire creation of my rock album, I hardly ever played the guitar. If you’ve ever let a guitarist caress you, you will know they have horrible calloused fingers from holding down the strings all the time. My callouses were all but gone while I made S4J.

I was just writing and mixing so much that actually sitting down to play guitar beyond the times I needed to record struck me as another big effort on top of everything else. I was so out of practice that, for the more complex stuff, I would literally play it enough times to get a decent take (or at least half a decent take I could splice with another half-decent take) and then would never play it again. I know the chords for all my songs now, but, with the exception of the “Douche Guitar” solo (as I’ve been playing it for ten years), I don’t think I know how to play any of the lead guitar shit from my album. Yes, I know it’s all pretty simple, but I’ve never considered myself a lead guitarist in the first place and I have no intent to learn and play that shit again!

Regardless, in retrospect, never practicing was a stupid fucking thing to do! My music is all very simple, but there’s still a difference between being punk rock and just sounding like crap. In hopes of being able to play live again one day, these days I’ve been practicing much more frequently (at least parts of songs a few times a week, plus a few covers, and a day or two of singing) and there’s a very good chance my guitar playing sounds better than it did when I recorded the album. Whoops!

Apologies to my friends who have heard this crap from me too many times already, but I’ve had nightmarish posture practically my entire life and it’s only over the last two or so years that I’ve been making a conscious effort to fix it. This remains an ongoing project (and one I may eventually get professional help with [again]) because I would sit, stand, and walk in such bizarre and malformed ways that straightening out one part of my body, for example, my left ankle, will lead me to realize I also bend weirdly at my left hip, which then makes me notice my chest pivots forward and my shoulders pull way back, and so on, and so on (for reference, please look at photos of how Donald Trump stands like an upright camel).

Anyway, I’ve come to realize I all but didn’t use the left side of my body since, I wanna say, high school? I’ve been using the right side to drag the inanimate and decaying left side around for ages and it’s given me chronic pain and weakness problems for my entire adult life. The good news is, though I still live with what I imagine would strike the average able-bodied sort as an unreasonable amount of pain, it’s so much improved to what it was that comparatively it’s like Christmas every day (as long as you keep your expectations for Christmas realistic)!

Long story short, my left hand gets tired and cramps up quickly so making the chord shapes and holding down strings is a bit rough. It’s a wonder I kept playing guitar at all because this has been a problem all the way back to when I was first learning guitar in high school. I remember asking my guitarist friend if his hand got tired when he played and he was like “What? No.” My music is pretty punky, so I do power chords mostly, but the honest truth is that in many cases I’d prefer to do proper major and minor bar chords, but my stupid fucking hand can hardly manage it! Indeed, there are many moments on the album I was trying to do proper bar chords (the first chord of “She Hurts” for example is supposed to be minor), but I didn’t pull it off, or only managed it sporadically.

The problem isn’t gone now, but practicing more regularly has certainly helped improve it some. It’s also helping me discover and work on further posture issues overall, which in turn makes me more comfortable and less weak in my guitar playing. Like, I’ve only recently realized why I’ve never, ever really felt comfortable standing and playing with a guitar hanging from a strap. I thought I just didn’t care for how it felt and would always tighten the strap as far as I could like a nerd to bring it up high and make it feel about as close as I could to playing while sitting down. But I’ve come to understand I’m actually just standing weird, which is causing the strap to slide all over the place. So I’m gradually working toward not doing that shit!

In general, practicing more often has made my guitar playing appreciably better and more confident and just standing and playing feels like another way to improve my overall posture. Also, recording is always a tedious nightmare I put off since it requires getting out my guitar(s), tuning, setting up my equipment, doing a zillion takes, etc., so if I can make at least one of those things a more regular part of my life, it makes the recording process feel ever so slightly less like a hateful chore.

So, yeah, practicing is good. Boy! What a goddamn revelation! Maybe I should’ve done it before I recorded twelve tracks of music!

Make It Shitty!

Something else that I imagine could very well be attributed to my posture problems (but it might just be that I’m a sloppy guitarist who never learned to get better) is that, when strumming, I often hit the guitar body with my pick. This doesn’t really come through on an electric guitar, but despite how much I love to rock, I surprisingly found most of my songs turning out much more acoustic-driven. I’d wager I hit the guitar body countless times over the album’s 40 minutes. I personally don’t notice it much myself, but there are specific times where no other instruments are playing and it’s obvious. The end of “Pity Party” is the clearest example of this, but the sound of the pick hitting the body twice happened to come at the end of a bar right before a transition, so I convinced myself that it worked in a rough, DIY kind of way to gently mark the incoming next phase of the song.

I’m still fine with that particular fuck-up. To my kooky ears, that little pk! noise actually does work in those spots (though I’m guessing most practiced guitarists would just go “this idiot hit the body and left it in?”), but the overall idea of letting everything be a bit shitty and not worrying about it too much became a guiding principle for S4J and, believe it or not, I now think that may not have been the best guiding principle for a creative project that took 2+ years of my life from me.

What I’m hoping this abundance of wordage is making clear is that I didn’t phone this thing in. I did take it really seriously and I did work stupid hard on it and I do still regret and fret about choices I made with it. It’s just that the things I obsessed and obsess over are not necessarily the same things that other people obsess over. I mean, I assume this is how it is for anyone creating anything. Like, David Lynch does his own sound design, which is probably a crazy extra amount of work to take on in addition to directing, editing, and (oftentimes) writing, but it’s obviously very important to him and it’s one of the amazing details that defines his work. On the other hand, he seems to have little care for how cheesy and fake a superimposed effect can look. The crappy superimposed owl from the original Twin Peaks series immediately comes to mind, but he still pulls this kind of thing in his modern work, too.

All I’m saying is that, as I completed S4J, with a few exceptions of moments I could never get to sound quite right to me, I reached a quality level that I deemed reasonable by my confused standards. And I still more or less agree with myself. I can go back and listen to it and get into it and go “yeah, this is pretty good!” But the few outside perspectives I got from friends did help me to hear things that bothered them but didn’t bug me and, when I edited the songs based on their feedback, I had to admit they sounded better. So, yeah, again, I probably should’ve accepted more outside advice. As with any creative project, you listen to someone’s suggestion and decide whether it’s incompatible with your vision for it or not. Or you at least give it a try and, if you have to agree that it’s better, wahey! you’ve just fine-tuned your own standards a lil’.

This is easier to say than do though and I’m still a big baby about a lot of stuff, but two criticisms I absolutely took to heart and tried to improve on as I continued work on the album were my tendency to mix vocals and bass really low. I don’t really know anything about audio mixing. The only prior experience I had doing it was in making this nightmarish video series (on a few of the more chaotic songs I did reuse the obnoxious effect I employ in these videos of multiple mes talking simultaneously at different octaves), but I was basically making it all up as I went along then and it was no different when it came to music mixing. I believe I was subconsciously attempting to be Steve Albini, mixing my drums loud and trying to get my vocals to blend in alongside the other instruments , rather than let them steal the show (I was probably also initially keeping the vocals low out of shyness), but unfortunately it seems I am not Steve Albini, so I just ended up with a lot of trebley bullshit.

As I said, I am basically happy with how everything turned out. A lot of it is close enough to the music I heard in my head that I can listen to it and have a nice time (there are some tracks I generally skip though). But I also won’t pretend I don’t think it could be much improved. The best way I can describe it is that there is an overall lack of “oomph.” I envisioned many of the songs as punches in the face and instead they came out like a series of flailing slaps; maybe they hurt a little bit, one of them nicks you on the earlobe by accident, yowch! but I feel the whole record could be more powerful.

It’s probably a combo of problems derived from my unofficial mission statement of keeping everything being a bit sloppy, casual, and cheap. I stuck as best as I could to making this a no-budget endeavor, less because I had no money and more because fuck you that’s how I do everything. I can’t say it truly panned out. I had to buy an all-new bass at one point because my old one failed me even after being repaired. I also dropped and broke my first mic and had to get a new one. And you can technically include flights to Denver and the goddamn Czech Republic as business expenses since I recorded my friend Joe’s vocals for one song in Denver and for the other in Czechia. (One way the “casual and cheap” mission statement manifested itself was that none of my guest vocalists were people who would ever call themselves professional musicians, but most of them were locals. Joe was the exception because, unable to consider reasonable alternatives, I NEEDED him to reprise his performance for the two songs carried over from the joke band we assembled while living in China.)

However, the acoustic guitar I used is literally the guitar I had from when I took guitar lessons in high school. I guess the way the guitar rental worked is that if you paid to rent it enough times, you eventually just owned it. My sister had taken guitar at one point too, so we have two of the same kind of classical guitar, so I don’t actually know which one belonged to who, but I picked one and stuck with it. I have always been a sloppy, inconsiderate douche to my equipment and I have a memory of long ago sticking electric strings on the guitar. Who knows how long I left them on there, or even if it was the same guitar I used in recording, but I understand that’s a good way to warp the neck and murder the sound quality.

I can say it’s pretty definite I’ve been stringing the guitar with a random combo of steel and nylon strings because I literally only just confirmed last month that I own classical guitars. Up until recently Guitar Center employees would ask me if I owned a classical and I’d go “um, yeah, I guess?” I couldn’t tell you what kind of strings were on the guitar throughout the recording process. Only like a month ago I restrung both guitars and made sure they were all the correct kind of string. I understand that steel acoustic strings on a classical guitar can also warp the fuck out of it, so, yeah, I bet that happened! Also, apologies to any proper musicians who have read this far and are mad I kept saying “acoustic” when I meant “classical.” Googling has revealed to me I am correct in calling them both acoustic guitars but it seems the steel-string ones have no specific term to differentiate them except that they’re the acoustic guitars that are not classical guitars. So I’m going to keep calling my guitars acoustic and classical interchangeably. Anyhow, we’ve all learned something. Well, maybe only I have.

Much like my acoustical guitar, my electric guitar is also the first electric guitar I ever had. I got it for my birthday in high school. It’s an Ibanez that came in like a “My First Electric Guitar” box that also included a little amp and a book about chords and such. I had to get the input jack repaired because it kept cutting out, but I don’t think I ever treated it poorly, so it should’ve sounded fine, except for that, just like with the classitic guitar, I probably basically never cleaned it and often left it dormant, sometimes for years at a time when I was living elsewhere.

That probably wouldn’t cause any problems as long as I put fresh strings on these babies regularly, but, get this, I didn’t do that shit either! Some strings broke while I was recording (I have a tendency to destroy A’s and D’s all the time), but if they didn’t, I just didn’t think about them. I do believe there were strings on both guitars that were on there at the beginning of recording and managed to hold on for dear life all the way up until the end. I am sure only the most beauteous of tones rang out from them.

Because it definitely wasn’t clangy and fucked-up-sounding enough already, I also used metal picks. I’ve always used metal picks even though nobody else does (you usually can’t even get them in stores these days and have to buy online). I did this for two stupid reasons: one, the Pixies used them on Surfer Rosa (or so I’ve heard), which is my favorite of their records, and, two, they don’t wear down quickly so you rarely have to buy more. They almost certainly wear the strings down faster than nylon picks do, but, um… I don’t have a response to that.

I showed a glimmer of rationality and used nylon picks when recording the bass. Yes, I know, good bassists use their fingers; I am not a good bassist. More to the point, I’m not a bassist. But I did determine I liked the sound of the nylon pick for the bass more than the metal pick. There were also a few spots where I wanted some acoustic strumming to sound a bit less harsh and would swap in a nylon pick. But this happened rarely. And I certainly never went so far as putting on all-new strings and making sure they were of the proper variety.

Make It Real Shitty!

Now, here’s maybe the worst offense I committed in regards to sound quality. Real musicians please leave the room. I recorded everything on a digital USB mic, the same USB mic I use for all my stupid YouTube videos and for streaming stupid video games. I didn’t think it was a big deal. It’s rather a high-quality digital mic and though my musician friend James who cares about this kind of thing told me musicians see recording with a USB mic as a major no-no, he also admitted this was inherited knowledge and not something he’d much tested for himself.

Well, thing is, I’ve since tried an analog mic and instantly found it better. I even tried another USB mic that was supposedly designed with recording instruments in mind, but it was no contest. The main difference I can hear is just that the analog mic I have (a Shure) is much more focused in what it’s recording. I get very little background noise compared with the digital mics.

The stupidest aspect of this is that I had this Shure mic for the entire period of recording S4J. I don’t even remember when or where I got it, but it’s just been sitting in a closet for ages and it wasn’t like I forgot about it; I knew it was in there. I had just so committed to my “hey, big deal, I’m a punk rocker and what do professional musicians know anyway?” recording style that I rejected out of hand having to use anything other than my digital mic. The only defense I have is that you need an audio interface to plug analog equipment into your computer and, though I had one once, I don’t know what happened to it. But I could’ve just bought a new one and, recently, I did.

It’s now my belief that at least one reason why my music came out so treble’d up is that I would EQ the background noise out of all my recordings. Like everything else, I made up my EQing process as I went along and I was never that confident in it, so I never tinkered around all that much. I had a basic strategy for getting the background noise out, but it was also one that I noted removed some of the bass from my vocals (and, I have to assume, my guitar, my electric guitar, and I guess even my glockenspiel? I actually generally left my bass guitar recordings alone because every time I tried to EQ them they sounded worse, so those bass tones are all raw af). Sometimes EQing would take too much bass out of the sound and I would just decide I had to live with a little more background noise. But the fact remains that I probably weakened many of my recordings in favor of getting rid of hums and hisses.

NOTE: I’ve just discussed this with friend Sammy and he believes the digital vs. analog is less a concern and it’s more a matter of condenser mic vs. dynamic mic. Probably yes!? The digital I was using is a condenser and the Shure mic is dynamic. Whatever. It sounds better for most everything I’ve tried so far is all I know. It’d be good if I had a producer! “Oofa doofa doo!” – My Catchphrase

It’s still possible the weakened sounds are down, in part, to my mixing. I stopped bringing the bass down so much as the album progressed (and sometimes went back to songs months later to boost it up again) and I became more comfortable with letting the vocals take center stage in most of the songs, but, man, I dunno! I’m certainly better at mixing than I was when I started. I certainly arrived at something like a formula that semi-reliably got me to an end result I was okay with. But every song was a bit different so every song was a new and confusing adventure in mixing. I asked for guidance from musician friend James or Google sometimes, but a lot of it I just did by the seat of my pants! In the end, I feel lots more confident I can mix a song to something that fits my standards than I did at the beginning of this whole thing. But do I really think I should be my own producer for the foreseeable future? Absolutely the fuck not!

My idea of what sounds like a finished song of palatable audio quality is decidedly atypical! I do like songs that sound like they’re going to fall apart at any moment, but when I say that I’m thinking of something like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ “Date With the Night” or “No No No,” which both have sections where the drums and guitar briefly devolve into discordant batshittery and threaten to derail the composition entirely. But this is controlled and planned discordance (I sort of tried to pull something similar in “Slow Story”) and it comes as a detour from what the song’s established up to that point.

My feeling is my songs start like disasters. Truly almost every time I try listening to my music again after not having heard it in a while, I cringe at like the first minute of a lot of the songs because it just sounds like a bunch of crap smashed together haphazardly. But eventually that falls away and I go “no, no, this works, I like this fine.” It’s like if you stick with the mess for a bit, against all odds, it eventually gets its act together.

But the bottom line is I wasn’t really trying to make disasters that just barely salvage themselves (according to me anyway; for others I’m sure they never do). And the aforementioned recording problems are partially to blame, but I assume a finger or several should also be pointed at my mixing. You know one thing I never even touched or considered was the left and right channels? There were times I struggled with getting a good balance of two voices singing on top of one another, but for whatever reason making one more central and one more right, or one more right and one more left, never occurred to me! (Funnily enough, right after completing the album I mixed the audio for the album advertisement and did exactly this, making some sounds more prominently stereo and dropping others to one side or the other. Revolutionary!)

Another reason the shitty, lo-finess comes off less like a cool stylistic decision and more like it’s just shitty is that the drums are fake. As mentioned, putting a band together struck (and strikes) me as stressful and exhausting, but I could at least do singing, whistling, glockenspieling, and some sloppy guitar and bass playing on my own. Drums, however, I don’t own and I don’t know how to play. You can apparently send draft tracks off to people on the internet and get them to record drums for you for a price, but please remember the S4J credo of keepin’ it cheap, lazy, and largely solitudinal (I am adding solitudinal).

Early on I considered that I might need to get someone else involved, but a combo of the EZDrummer VST, plus another one called Transient Master, made my drums sound pretty real, to my ear, as well as to the ears of anyone I let hear some of the music (or at least anyone who didn’t fancy themselves much of a musician). I pretty quickly decided these midi drums would do just fine and would fit the modern DIY vibe of the album anyway.

I now feel (and the honest truth is I always had this feeling lurking in the back of my mind) that this was a whole lotta bull! Nearly everything else being scrappy, punky analog instruments recorded through a digital mic, but then the drums being these pristine, always on-beat, perfect midi marvels makes for, I guess, a unique style… but a good one? Not really! And it doesn’t really matter that most people can’t tell they aren’t real drums. James told me a story that I am going to paraphrase from memory about a composer who once sent a draft track over to the director with fakey drums and all that. The director replied, “This sounds great, we’ll use this” and the composer was like “no, no, that’s a draft” and then the composer later sent back the finished track with all the live instruments and the director went “Oh yeah, this one’s better.”

I said before that I find S4J works for me overall and I do mean that. I still enjoy it. There are still parts that I wanted to rock that do rock and parts I wanted to sound pretty that do sound pretty. The amateurish quality is, to an extent, deliberate and sometimes works. There are mistakes that I left in on purpose and I’m still cool with them being in there. But can I honestly listen back to it and say, yeah, I hate bar chords and I wanted this whole thing to be trebled to fuck and for the drums to be fake? No and no and no. If I had the means would I pull a George Lucas and rerecord the album with proper equipment, real drums, a proficient producer doing the mixing, and then add CGI hippos in the background, after which I’d set about eradicating all copies of the original version wherever I find them? Very probably, yes.

Well, I am happy to announce that, though my overall playing ability and broken body mean I’ll never be totally unshitty, I’ve switched to my other classical guitar (which I think has less wear and tear), I’ve restrung it with nylon strings that I’ll change every once in a while and I’m using nylon picks. (I have already done some recording and compared the sound with my former style of beating the shit out of a dying guitar with a metal pick and can’t deny I like the sound better now.) I’m also gonna restring the electric guitar. Furthermore, I’m recording with my Shure dynamic analog mic and audio interface inside the aforementioned converted art closet, which seems to work decently as a temp, rudimentary recording studio as I have these curtains I can throw up and take down in short order that dampen sound pretty well.

I’m also going to next try for music with synth percussion that isn’t trying to trick you into believing it’s irl drums. Or, if I find I can’t help myself with writing music for a rock band, I’ll look into getting a professional drummer to record some stuff for me. Unfortunately, for the time being I’m still in charge of mixing and I don’t love mixing and have my doubts I’ll ever be great at it. I might have the courage to show it to other people with more knowledge from now on before I release new material, but, then again, I might not! I’m not making any promises.

SIDE NOTE: I used an outdated, pirated version of Ableton Live (same goes for all the VSTs I used) for the entirety of S4J’s production. However, out of a general malaise over having to go through a tedious and usually somewhat confusing pirating process that leaves you with unupdatable versions of everything, I recently went ahead and dropped a buttload of cash on a proper Ableton license (that I believe I still have to renew in a year, goddammit?). That said, one area in which I still advocate for cheapness if you don’t have the funds, but do have the energy and patience for is piracy. These fancy programs are invaluable, but , unless you’re a successful production studio, unreasonably overpriced. Steal everything!

How Does He Do It?!?

It’s occurred to me I’ve dipped in and out of my songwriting process throughout this tome but I’ve not really properly laid it out at any point and considered whether it’s a process I intend to stick with. This shouldn’t take too long to go over because I never established a solid process and I doubt I ever will! When Mitski was active on social media she once tweeted something to the effect of that, when interviewed, if someone asks her what her songwriting process is, if she really answered honestly, she’d have to say she had no goddamn idea how that shit happens! I am in total agreement with this.

If you’re Rivers Cuomo, you’ve broken songwriting down to spreadsheets and math equations that allow you to churn out one or two mediocre albums a year. But I expect most people faff about like I do and sometimes a song gets finished, but most of the time, she don’t! To bring up David Lynch again, I subscribe to his creative method, which isn’t really a method at all, which is why every time he does an interview, you don’t learn anything, but it sure is fun to listen to that crazy voice!

Lynch basically just says ideas come from anywhere at anytime and you have to go with the ones you really love (and make sure you get them down somewhere because if you lose them you feel like you wanna kill yourself [his words]). I’ve been recording riffs and chord progressions into PCs, and later phones, since I learned to play power chords. I’ve transferred those recordings from computer to computer over the years and I still go rooting around in them, making lists of those that feel like they have potential to be made into full songs. I’ve certainly learned that it’s usually worth busting out the guitar, if it’s accessible, to record these ideas because oftentimes I’ll listen back to some whistling or humming and have no clue what the hell made me think it was worth recording.

I get tunes in my head a lot so recording those is often where the germ of a song starts. I sometimes find myself humming tunes out of nowhere — like they skipped the step of being in my head and came straight outta my face — and then realize I like them and decide to record them. I also often pick up the guitar and start strumming and humming random crap and then realize I like it and record that. Obviously, tunes probably rarely actually come from nowhere and are regularly some half-remembered song by someone else that I’ve accidentally changed and made my own, (incidentally, this is something Rivers Cuomo has said he knowingly does).

The worst is when you outright steal someone else’s music but don’t realize it. Sometimes it’s months later before I’m able to identify the inspiration for a song and I have to determine if it’s different enough or if I just accidentally stole a whole song and have to do something else entirely. Sometimes I realize I’m stealing from myself, rehashing a song I wrote in the past. That, I am fairly certain, I am legally allowed to do.

The songs on S4J did not start in any one way. Two of them, “Nothing Doing” and “Douche Guitar,” were completely finished songs from my last jokey band. I’d never mixed full-band versions of them so they still required work, but they were definitely the most “already done.” “Multiplex” was effectively also a song from that band but significantly redone. “Get Round To It” is a really old song from my first goof-off band but again given the full-band treatment, new lyrics, a new breakdown, and new choruses. “Every King,” “She Hurts,” “Mermaid,” and “Slow Story” were all built off of riffs and/or chords I’d recorded that were sitting on my computer or cellphone.

“People Are Famous” is a song that I had recorded bits of and had it all but fully fleshed out in my head for ten years (possibly more). The only thing I had to write that was brand new were the lyrics to the raps in the verse. Everything else had been imagined before and just needed to be properly recorded. I am extremely happy it came together and is as close as it is to what I envisioned (even if I’m not a great rapper). “Top This!” was effectively the only all-new song that was conceived and completed while I was doing the album because I came up with the chords and riff one day and for some reason decided they were so great and had to be on the album (more on this and how I am stupid later).

The lyrics for “Who Cares Susan” were written early in the album’s life while I was walking around outside one day. I can’t remember exactly how the first chord progression came about but the chords for the second part are another example of a thing that was in my head and had been recorded a billion different times on PCs over the years. “Pity Party” is almost all-new like “Top This!” except for the end bit that came from an old recording. I decided early on that it wasn’t worth being precious with riffs and chords, like I had to wait to give them a good home. It seemed better to just stick these old ideas onto songs wherever they fit, strengthening the overall product.

I still think this is a good idea, to not fret over doing the absolute best version of a song or something. I guess this maybe conflicts with what I said earlier about not forcing a song into existence against its will, but with “Who Cares Susan” and “Pity Party” it wasn’t like I was saving failing songs by Frankensteining musical ideas together; I liked both parts of the song and they sounded good together and made a better song. Also, there’s no reason I can’t reuse some of this stuff to make a new song later. You don’t even have to sneak it in. You can just go “I like this thing so here it is again in a new way.” The Offspring did it with “Genocide” and “Change the World” so that makes it legal for the rest of us. (I mention this because I am right now tinkering with taking the chords from the end of “Pity Party” and building a new song around them.)

Choosing the songs to put on the album was not an easy thing to do and I still don’t have an efficient and reliable way of narrowing it down, other than the vague Lynchian thing of falling in love with an idea. But I fall in love with loads of ’em so then I guess I just went with the ones I really, really loved? I did decide to abandon some songs for being too hard to make happen with the idea of returning to them in the future. But at some point it becomes less clear why I chose to pursue one song over another other than I just had to commit or I’d never get anything done.

The process gets a lot spottier after this and it’s difficult to say how songs got finished so it’s difficult to say if there’s a good method I’d use again. If the chords for a song seem to be settled on, I will often record myself playing and singing over them so that I can salvage best vocal bits from the recording and build upon them later. Sometimes I record myself playing the chords over and over so I can try singing and lead guitar stuff on top of that.

Building out the rest of the song? I dunno how that happens. I’m writing new music right now and it’s a nonsense method. I mean, with some of the S4J songs it was, like I said before, a matter of quickly cobbling together what seemed like a workable structure and lyrics in preparation for my parents being out of town. But I feel like every song meanders in and out of my head and I barely feel like I’m doing any work (really, I’m probably not), but then a couple of weeks later I have at least a solid-enough skeleton of a song.

The only “strategy” I can really say that I found seems to work is committing to working on songs. Just telling myself (and sometimes others) that I am working on these specific songs means I’m more likely to revisit what I have so far and make some headway on it. And then hearing what I have again and letting it roll around in my noggin means I end up thinking up or humming new sections or melodies or beats that might fit with it. I end up discarding a lot of this stuff, but it’s easy to grab my phone, hum something, and add a little note to self about what it’s supposed to be and where it’s supposed to go. I do usually work on one song at a time, but that’s mostly because I’ve always struggled to focus on more than one project. But I did occasionally abandon something for a long while (writing the raps for “People Are Famous” was hard!) and then went back to it after finishing other stuff. These days, I’ve been thinking about multiple songs for a theoretical future release so I’ve just been recording little bits and bobs for all of ’em.

This is a commonly known phenomenon, but I do find I get a lot of ideas for songs right when I’m going to bed and often have to get up to quickly hum some shit into my phone and then lie down again. Also, though I must preface this with disclaimer for the kids at home that smoking weed more typically leads to doing fuck-all, there was at least one instance, when I was mixing “Get Round To It,” where I decided to get high during the process and suddenly came up with a brand-new second chorus. I believe I recorded the new vocals right then and there and those are what went into the song. Bottom line: do drugs.

I will add (and the album makes this obvious) one thing I’ve always felt about song structure is I am very much of the mind that if you can’t seem to think of a bridge or even a chorus, you don’t have to write one. I mean, think of how many big, professional pop songs shoehorn in a bridge that nobody remembers anymore just because they’re dedicated to conventional structure. Some pop songs, you can probably hardly remember the verses! If all you’ve got is a good chorus, see if you can make that fundamentally the whole song. Who’s gonna stop you? Sir Paul McCartney? Hah! I’d like to see him try!

So this is my amazing songwriting process. In essence I, uh, think about songs and record stuff when it comes to me? And then eventually I have to sit down and formally bang out the structure and lyrics (though technically these can be altered later). But that’s about it. It’s such a lazy non-process I’m not sure I can exactly analyze what worked well and what didn’t (except that I shouldn’t be afraid to abandon songs I can’t seem to get off the ground). I’d love to be more organized and disciplined with music-making (and with everything else in my life), but in trying to write new stuff now, I’m falling into the same habits, so, oh well! If nothing else, it’s comforting I can now recognize the beats of this process and know that they led me to an endpoint before, when I previously would’ve just been angry at myself constantly for wasting time.

Maybe one day I’ll have done this enough I can write songs dispassionately using the scientific method and then I can crank out multiple boring albums every year like Rivers, but, alas! today is not that day.

A Snifter More About Mixing

I rambled some about mixing earlier, so I’m not going to add a great deal here, but in regards to how mixing fits into my non-process, it’s similarly rather a mess! James has told me about a method of doing three takes and then keeping the good one, if there is one, and, if not, doing three more. Seems wise in concept but I usually end up recording whole takes, bits of takes, harmonies and backing vocals I may or may not actually end up using–all manner of trash, usually all in one recording session, so I find this disciplined approach limiting and difficult! I understand the benefit of not having a million tracks of shit you have to listen to and assess, but I probably won’t do this properly because I’m stupid. Most probably I’d need a producer keeping me in line.

Also, the new version of Ableton Live has added comping, which is a feature I know nothing about and have only watched one video about that briefly showed off how it works, but I won’t really understand it until I give it a go myself. Hopefully I can figure out how to comp and it’ll make my life a lot easier.

But yeah, for songs on S4J , I’d start out by recording the chords for the song once through on the acoustic guitar, stapling takes together as necessary so that everything was on-beat. Then I could sing and play lead guitar (or glockenspiel or whatever) over it. After recording too many takes of everything and then laboriously sifting through ’em and piecing ’em together, my mixing process was that I’d, for the most part, work on one track at a time. I don’t think I ever quite decided on an order to do things in, but I do know that a song would usually sound like a bunch of random shit clanging together until I started adding drums, which would instantly make it sound more like a real song. It was nice I got to recognize this as a pattern, because it meant I’d have less anxiety during the first steps of the process when everything still sounded like crap.

I believe this is pretty standard, but I found a lot of the song in the mixing process. I always had an idea of what I wanted the song to be, but I was never able to hear the entire thing, with every little detail, in my head, so after a point it just became about what sounded cool, whether I expected it or not. One easy example is “Pity Party,” which has that weird, monotonous, repeating guitar riff. Originally the idea was just to have that riff repeat, but, during mixing, I was chopping it up and moving it around and I accidentally played the riff layered over itself with a small delay. I liked the sound of that so I ended up making it that way for the whole song, which I think is loads more interesting than just the riff on its own.

This was previously mentioned, but I would frequently have to go record new stuff on my guitar and new bits of vocals that I’d come up with during mixing. To that end, one thing that did become part of my process towards the album’s completion was that I’d try to record all guitar work — riffs and chords — in every possible way I had available to me. This meant I’d record once on acoustic, once on electric cleanly, and once on electric with a distortion pedal. I had discovered I liked layering the different-sounding guitars on top of one another and the last songs were very riff-driven, so it started to make the most sense to just record three versions of everything and decide if one, two, or all sounded best afterwards. Not positive this is something I’ll always do; it depends on the song and it’s also a pain in the ass that requires more recording and getting more decent takes three different times. But it was one of the few steps in my process to become standardized near the end. (Incidentally, almost every song that has the electric guitar playing chords has the acoustic guitar mixed under it playing the same chords, because, after trying it once, on “Mermaid,” I believe it was, I usually found it produced a stronger sound that I liked.)

The only other obvious thing I learned was to not worry too much about levels until the end since I was going to have to bump the volume on a lot of the tracks way down anyway. All my songs inevitably are recorded and layered so that they naturally blow out the levels, so eventually that has to be remedied.

Oh, and the last thing I’d do is make sure the song sounded good to me on my headphones, which are the good but not insanely expensive Bose QuietComfort II headphones (recommended to me by James) and then I’d burn it onto a CD to play through my car’s ancient stereo system. That gave much shittier-quality playback, but it would amplify different aspects of the music and would sometimes expose something a bit wonky that I’d then go back and change. I assume listening through a more modern car sound system would only paint a clearer picture of how the song actually sounded. As mentioned, I also would send the songs to two friends who gave me a bit of feedback that would sometimes lead to further changes. And then sometimes I’d listen to the song months later and hear something else that would bug me or that was missing so I’d go back and change it again. Now that’s what I call a process!

Familiarity Breeds Contempt

I’ve lied to you a little bit in downplaying the processlessness of my process because, in writing, recording, and mixing 12 damn songs, I did inadvertently get a bit formulaic in some ways. And I’m not too happy about it!

You see, one problem with having studied very little music theory and just makin’ stuff what sounds good to yer, is that if you pick up your guitar and “randomly” play stuff that makes you feel nice, frequently you’re bound to find yourself “randomly” playing a lot of the same shit!

The honest truth is that, under all my screaming and beating the shit out of guitars with metal picks, I love catchy, pretty, poppy crap, so I naturally fall into playing the same chord progressions again and again. Some of this I’m aware of and sort of fine with. The Pixies’ “Where Is My Mind?” and Weezer’s “Say It Ain’t So” are two fantastic songs that are also nearly the same song with a slightly different chord order. I’ve come to recognize over time that this is my favorite chord progression and I fall in love easily with songs that use it. Three other songs I can think of offhand that I loved at different times in my life that are the same or nearly the same song are “Bill Gates Must Die” by John Vanderslice, “France” by Destruction Island, and “Tomorrow, Yesterday” by Noodles.

S4J is the first album I’ve fully mixed but, with all the junk I wrote for my former joke bands, I’ve technically generated enough material for three albums and I’ve always allowed this chord progression to be at least one song on each. Actually, on S4J, it’s two songs (because one of them is “Douche Guitar,” which was brought over from the last joke band). I’m not bothered by this! It’s a great collection of chords and, though I maybe should rely on it a bit less eventually, I expect I’ll end up writing more songs using it yet.

What I am bothered by is Pachelbel’s Canon in Motherfucking D! Maybe you’ve already heard, but this is the most clichéd chord progression in music history, a lovely, simple group of four chords that accounts for something like 90% of the big pop hits you hear on the radio. You can easily find plenty of YouTube videos demonstrating this or just listen to “Hook” by Blues Traveler, a cynical hit song that mocks you the listener for loving its catchy, overused sound!

I like Pachelbel’s Greatest Hit as much as the next musical simpleton, but I’m inclined to try and not write songs using it because it’s so damn overdone and uninteresting. Or at least that’s what I tell myself! In reality, I’m such a doof and so guitar illiterate that I haven’t noticed I’ve written at least one Pachelbel song in every one of my last music projects until long after I’ve fleshed the damn thing out! I very rarely write out what my chords and notes actually are, and I certainly don’t jot down any of that iV V iv business or what have you, so I rely heavily on the shape made by my left hand (I imagine it like it’s drawing a line) as it moves along the guitar neck. I’ve written Pachelbel songs in the past, thinking I’d cracked some revolutionary new chord formula, just because the hand movement was different, because apparently I’m totally stumped by the concept of octaves!

Get this! At some point along the way, I mixed up the Pachelbel hand shape with a different clichéd chord progression! For a good long while I was of the belief that the pop-punk progression that was huge during the terrible late-nineties/early-aughts pop-punk explosion — which I remembered as making a T-shape on my guitar when done with power chords, and which you can hear above in Blink-182’s “Dammit” or, like, almost any other Blink-182 song — was Pachelbel and I thought that as long as I avoided that T-shape or anything that sounded like it, I was fine! But this isn’t even Pachelbel! “Basket Case” by Green Day is Pachelbel as hell, but this shit isn’t. In fairness to me, it’s one chord different, but it is not the real McCoy!

Anyhow, remember how I “came up” with the chords and vocals for “Top This!” and thought “I’ve DONE IT! This HAS to be on the album!” Well, yeah, that’s because I didn’t fucking realize I was just pulling a Pachelbel and it took me pathetically long to recognize it. (The only saving graces are the few moments where I switch it up ever so slightly by repeating the last two chords before going back to the first.) If it makes you think of “Basket Case” at all that’s probably because it starts with palm muting and it’s the same fuckin’ song! I think it might even be in the same key (I am not bothering to confirm this). It also took me forever to recognize that Pachelbel is one of my go-to bridges and shows up on S4J twice more as such! Piss me off!!

There’s another extremely simple bridge I always fall back on. To describe it in my chumpish manner, Pachelbel is (in power/bar chords) a chord on the A string, a chord on the same fret on the E string, move down 3 frets and play the A chord there, and then do the E chord on that same fret. The other bridge I’ve been shoving into songs without a second thought for ages is just this except you move down 2 frets instead of 3. This shows up twice on S4J. Again, not something I realized until near the end.

With this second go-to bridge of mine, because it’s not Pachelbel, it’s less of a crime, but I’d still like to make music that doesn’t sound the same all the time, so I’m doing my best to avoid it. I still have at least one old song I probably want to give a new coat of paint one day and bring back with this bridge, so I might pull it out again one day, but for now I’m trying to ease off. And Pachelbel is outright banned! I’m not saying I’ll never touch it again, but it almost feels like cheating. Hey, this thing I came up with sounds catchy! Of course it does, you idiot! It’s Pachelbel! Whatever I put out next, it oughta have no damn Pachelbel.

There’s some boring structural stuff I did a lot as well. Four songs basically never change their chord progression at all. I’m not that upset about this. As I stated earlier, I’d much rather a song putter along doing the same thing throughout rather than force a new part into it that doesn’t work. There’s a lot of amazing, catchy songs that do this, like Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Run Away With Me.” “Not Too Soon” by the Throwing Muses is one of my all-time favorite songs and it doesn’t change chords a lick! I’m also pretty sure a lot of the first Sleigh Bells album does this and who don’t like that? 9 out of 10 movie trailers from the early 2010s can’t be wrong! Regardless, just to shake things up, I am trying to be a little more complex with songs these days. Complex for me is not that complex, mind you, but yes, usually some more chords. Wow!

Many of my songs are also structurally the same song. I try to let the song develop however sounds the most interesting, but I fall into patterns and, if I’m having trouble writing the thing, I have a structure that’s easy to slap together and call it a day with (the only time I remember consciously doing this in a threw-my-hands-up-and-went-oh-fine-whatever way was with “Mermaid”). I’d say the two obvious basic structures on S4J are:

• Verse > Chorus(?) > Super-Short Verse > Chorus(?) > Bridge/Breakdown/Solo > Big Booming Wall of Sound Chorus That Mixes in Elements of All The Other Parts
• Song That Sounds One Way > Sudden Transition to What Kind of Sounds Like A Totally Different Song

Some songs don’t fit this structure and some at least do a slight variation on it. I mean, if you’re working in the poppy rocky field of music, you do reach a point where you’re not sure what else you’re meant to do if your goal is to be on some level catchy and fun. Plus, I really love ending songs with a big fat wall of sound that ties all the earlier parts of the song into one noisy whole at the end. So it’s hard to escape these formulas of mine and I probably won’t manage it all at once, if ever. But I’m gonna try!

In Part II, I talk about the release and promotion of Songs For Jerks. It’s a bit better organized, but is even longer than this part, fuck you!