Jandek Albums of 2020 - Reviews

2020 was the year that Jandek released more albums than any year yet (ten). Of course, though, they're all live albums recorded in years long past. Considering that Jandek impressively performs completely new and unique music during every live show (only very rarely doing live versions of songs from old albums), it makes sense that Corwood Industries wants to release every recording of a live show as its own album. 

I'm past the point of having any sense of order in which I post my Jandek reviews -- if I try to post them in the order that I wrote them, it would be a lot more work for me because my older review drafts are much sloppier and longer. So I'm going to take a huge leap forward and post a bundle of reviews of relatively new albums for you all!

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Berlin Sunday: Laid back rock show with Sheila Smith on vocals. Not super memorable except for the faster songs, you can just skip this one honestly. 6/10

Manhattan Saturday: Nearly 3 hour non-stop noise rock performance across 3 discs. Wow, I have to admire the musical endurance and the energy. But the music is pretty standard Jandek-style noise rock, with only a few exciting moments. 6.5/10

Boston Friday: Avant-garde jazz album not far off from London Thursday, also pretty long. Not necessarily essential but if you want something similar to the other jazz albums, definitely check it out. 7/10

Montreal Sunday: Pretty creepy, haunting album that matches the album cover very well. The harpsichord gives it a slightly gothic, despairing tone. Meanwhile, the flute and saxophone occasionally goes back to the jazzy theme of the last few albums, and then the guitar adds dissonance. The style is generally very sparse and quiet and focuses on the emotional intensity of a moment rather than the energy of the performers. The lyrics are quite confessional and raw and center around death. The music is really inaccessible; this is probably one of the most difficult Jandek listens at 2 hours long total and with a couple of the most depressing tracks being over 30 minutes long. However, the raw emotion and subtlety evoked from this performance and its uniqueness are undeniable. 8/10

Fort Worth Saturday: Another accessible album with country blues influences (i.e. fiddle and banjo, country-ish lyrics and vocals), pretty similar to Hamman Hall! But it’s a little boring and long. Regardless, gotta love some relatively accessible country Jandek. Some parts are also genuinely hilarious because of Sterling's overly dramatic country-imitating vocals. 7/10

Rudyard’s: Jandek does so many genres on these live albums and we finally get to the Jandek funk rock show! Sterling plays guitar (noisy and weirdly melodic, similar to Houston Thursday) and sings with some band members who play wonky bass and drums with groove and rhythm. The crowd is unbelievably invigorating too - they react to every lyric, the cheering is great, and they even chant to the beat at one point. The CD consists of just one song titled “Two O’Clock Sun” with a few different sections. The lyrics are simple and charming, they’re like a stream of consciousness throughout a narrator’s day. It’s certainly a fun show and I understand all the hype around it. It boils down to the fun Jandek funk song, and it’s not as profound as his best work and it doesn’t try to expand beyond one idea despite being an hour long. Basically, that’s why I’m not calling it a top 10 Jandek album or anything, but I still love it, of course. 8/10

Grinnell Saturday: An instrumental chamber performance with Sterling on piano, plus band members on oboe, violin, and double bass. It’s basically a fully instrumental version of the brilliant Atlanta Saturday. However, this isn’t quite as coherent, with slightly more amateur-sounding instrumentalists. Sometimes they don’t even play in the same key as each other. And it’s a lot more boring, actually, since it’s 2 hours long and there are no lyrics. There are still some pretty sweet melodies here, and you have to love the more accessible Jandek performances. 7/10

Amsterdam Saturday: Pretty standard, relatively short noise rock performance with rather poetic lyrics. I guess it’s got pretty good bass too. A few fantastic highlights like the first song, but it drops off aside from that. 6.5/10

Aarhus Sunday: I finished all the previous Jandek albums a month ago and I waited the entire month for someone to upload his 2 most recent albums to the Internet so I could finally finish the whole Corwood discography and…!!! Well, this isn’t that big of a finale. It doesn’t really bring anything new to the table. It’s your typical Jandek experimental rock show, with a very slow pace, calm droning vocals, and a long length; the main point of interest is the piano, which is played by two instrumentalists: Sterling Smith and Phil Todd. It’s slightly jazzy especially with the piano and Alex Neilson’s avant-garde drumming. It’s fine and non-offensive but it’s just so extremely skippable. 6.6/10

San Francisco Saturday: 2 hour show with the usual noisy rock style. The most unique part is Tom Carter’s bass, which is highly distorted and loud, making the show sound more like a duet between two guitars. The lyrics here are also pretty depressing and pessimistic. “Stop Hurting Me” was a highlight, the bass there kept a memorable kind of rhythm. But there’s also “Alone”, the most suggestive song I think the man ever wrote. It’s pretty hard to judge such an enormously long show though… I might raise my score if I relisten to it and get a better feel for it, but it’s also unlikely that I’ll do that considering the amount of Jandek live albums to revisit. 7.4/10

Mr. Berry's Classroom

Old nonfiction essay from 2020 that I rediscovered.

Mr. Berry’s classroom at my high school was one of the strangest rooms in the school. It wasn’t arranged or decorated very aesthetically. Unlike the social studies or math teachers’ rooms, there weren’t many educational resources hung up on the walls. There were, instead, some pieces of ‘art’ that represented Mr. Berry’s personal interests. A poster of the band Nirvana. A painting by Picasso. A white board with the tournament schedule of the debate team with a poop emoji plushie taped on top of a section of the board dedicated to the “bleep list”. A folder with a picture of Taylor Swift saying “Permission slips go in here”? Yeah, this is where it starts to get weird.

Mr. Berry was not just an American Literature and AP Language teacher, but he was also the debate coach. The debate team had their practices every Tuesday and Thursday in his classroom after classes ended. Moments after his last class ended, the debate kids would come rushing into the classroom and start stacking chairs on top of the desks. They would put their laptops on top of the chairs and start opening up word documents, which contained evidence for debate rounds. The assistant coach Mr. Hausman would stand up and say “Speaking drills, 30 seconds” and watch everyone get ready to start reading at the speed of light. In policy debate, you have to read your evidence as fast and clearly as possible to overwhelm the opponent with your arguments. Every practice, they would all read super fast at the same time for 13 minutes straight. The first 8 minutes was a standard speaking drill, and the remaining 5 minutes was for a torturous “clarity drill”. The coaches would pick some sort of punishment to make the debaters’ reading harder, whether that was having a pen in your mouth or having to say the word “watermelon” in between every word. 

It goes without saying that their practices could get very chaotic. Debate kids can be very loud and outspoken. The events and “inside jokes” of debate can get pretty crazy. It gets so crazy that the coaches felt the need to make a “poop list” (but in other words) next to the tournament calendar. Every time a debater makes a tremendous fool of themselves, their name and their fault goes on the list. This included when varsity debaters would accidentally tell freshmen about debate things they weren’t supposed to know about yet, like sneaky argument strategies. 

Jandek - Lost Cause - Review

https://corwoodindustries.com/product/0759/

Lost Cause is one of the most unique Jandek albums and definitely worth a listen for anyone who's trying to get through the highlights of his discography. The album is generally split up into a very accessible and warm first half, and a crazy avant-garde second half. The first half's set of acoustic blues songs include fan-favorite masterpieces, the dark "How Many Places" and the heartbreaking "Crack a Smile", which was covered by someone as big as Jeff Tweedy of Wilco. The second track, "Babe I Love You", is sparsely produced, but is also Jandek's poppiest acoustic song. It features some of his most infamously absurd lyrics, such as "Baby, I love you / Look outside / Genitals".  

The middle tracks "God Came Between Us" and "I Love You Now It's True" feature more experimental and repetitive strumming, similar to the earlier Jandek albums, but are still very engaging songs that show growth in songwriting and guitar technique.

“God came between us, God came between us

And he lit our hearts on fire and put it out with oceans

Nobody’d ever see us, nobody’d ever know

But God came between us, God came between us”

We can't go without mentioning the final song, "The Electric End", an unexpected 19-minute behemoth of a full band going nuts with free improvisation and noise rock. The guitar goes wild, with hints of blues influences, with Sterling shouting random things and a crazy wind instrument entering a few minutes in. Revisiting this track after listening to the whole Jandek discog, it's still an impressive feat. 

Overall, Lost Cause is one of the most varied and thoughtfully-conceptualized Jandek albums of them all. 

9/10

The Making of "Gazing"

Lyrics and music inspired by a dream from 6/30/2021

Written July 2021

“Gazing” was (out of these) the last song I dreamed, the last song I wrote, and naturally the last song on the album. In the dream, I was watching an R&B style music video -- all I remember is a blue sky and a woman dancing -- with lyrics appreciating the musicianship of shoegaze. However, the lyric was, oddly “I see you’re standing straight” -- which doesn’t make sense because those musicians are supposed to be gazing at “shoes” or the pedals on the floor, right? So it was fun to integrate that into the lyrics somehow. The instrumentation in the dream had guitar, as well as a synth and drum part that sounded exactly like “Hip Hop Is a Way of Life” by Kim Hiorthøy, an experimental electronic song that I absolutely adore.

I’m really proud of the guitar on this song. The short guitar intro was the first thing I came up with, using already well-known chords, but that didn’t sound enough like what I heard in the dream. After noodling around, I came up with chords that sounded exactly like the dream. Making up completely new chords is always fun. 

The biggest challenge was to make the song as close as possible to “Hip Hop Is a Way of Life”. I don’t know why I had to make it so similar, I just had to because I loved the song so much. I borrowed several melodies and sound design quirks from the song, but still tried to keep it original. I tried to get help from Tobias to design the “clarinet” sound to be like the original song, but I ended up using the one I produced anyway. Tobias mostly ended up helping to improve drums and the chorus synth. I wish the clarinet was mixed even louder so you all could hear my effort in making it the closest clone to Kim Hiorthøy as I could, but I recognize that would’ve been a little obnoxious. 

The Making of “June 18th”

Music inspired by 2 dreams from 6/18/2020 and 6/18/2021

Written July 2021

“June 18th” is easily one of my favorite songs I’ve ever written, but it was also one of the easiest to write. Almost all of the lyrics and melodies were just taken right from the 2 dreams I had - both of which were somehow on the date June 18th, exactly one year apart. The song is probably just the most straightforward love song I made. What I find interesting is that, after I dreamed the lyrics “I got a box with your old ID”, the account of the subject person got deleted for some reason, meaning he lost access to all our old texts and now only I could read them... the song manifested itself into reality. 

I had another dream that there was a song where the first half was sung passionately by Jandek, an avant-garde folk musician, and the second half was sung by pop songwriter Fiona Apple and produced with a chamber pop style. Like Jandek usually does, I improvised the first half of the song on guitar with random made-up chords. I’m glad I got a good one on the first take. 

For the piano and strings in the second half, I just played what felt right in my heart -- but for some reason, part of me thought it wasn’t good enough for a long time, probably ‘cause I’m not a pianist or string arranger. I eventually decided this arrangement was good enough, though, especially because the person who I dedicated the song to told me that the demo made him cry. With some help from a collaborator Will to make the string arrangement more dramatic and professional, I re-recorded the song and was very happy with it. 

The Making of “Hinman Park”

Lyrics and music inspired by a dream from 6/21/2020

Written July 2021

The song was inspired by a brief dream that I only remember vaguely; at the end of the dream, I knew I had committed a crime, and I had gone to the nearby park to wait until I knew I was just going to get caught anyway. I started to hear the song as a soundtrack to the dream. My dreams about serious crimes and tragedies are emotionally resonant for me, especially when it’s about me doing something I wouldn’t have wanted to do. In the lyrics, I compare the image of standing in the park after committing a crime to the feeling of waiting with anxiety about completely insignificant circumstances. 

I didn’t remember what genre the song from the dream was, so I took this song as a blank slate, and chose arrangements that I thought would fit the thematic atmosphere. I recruited my previous collaborator Mestup to help me with the piano. I wanted something more detailed and dark as the song progressed, but I couldn’t come up with anything beyond simple chords. Thankfully, Mestup came through with an absolutely gorgeous composition for the rest of the song on the first try, and the song was almost done. After spending a lot of time pondering over how to complete the song, I added the minimalist synthesized string arrangement. 

The Making of “Only a Hunter”

Lyrics inspired by several different dreams

Music inspired by 2 dreams from 10/14/2019 and 7/1/2020

Written July 2021/November 2021

My goal for the album was to be as eclectic as possible, so of course, I have to include a dance-pop/club-influenced song. The song is about various situations in which you just become evil when you’re by yourself (“The club of the hide, the things I hide, the things that you can’t see) -- especially in a dream, when the mind is unhinged. Because of the album flow, I had to put this song after “Poor Face”, but it does kind of hurt because that song is about how we don’t have to live like animals, but “Only a Hunter” is basically about living like an animal (“Whoa, place is allowed, only a hunter”). 

This was definitely the hardest song on the album to make. For the first demo, I was too embarrassed about my electronic production skills to make anything substantial. I made a generic synth and beat to convey what I basically wanted with the song, but it was nothing like the dancey house music that was in my mind. I gave Ramiel this demo to mess around with, and said that I was hoping for something like deep house and the group Everything But the Girl.

But it took maybe 20 iterations and back-and-forth changes of this song to get something that resembled the final one. A big problem was that we had disagreements over the genre influences of this song -- should it sound like drum and bass? No, that doesn’t sound like it did in my dream. Then Ramiel suggested that it should be really crazy and experimental, deconstructed club-esque, because then it would “fit” the sound of the rest of the album. But like, I didn’t really need this song to be experimental or deconstructed, or for the album to have any kind of genre cohesion -- I just wanted to recreate my dreams. I repeatedly had to show the evolving song to my other friends to get some outside perspectives on it because something was clearly going wrong and I was stressed out. Ramiel still helped a lot, though, by making a genuine house beat for the song. They made some really wildly different versions of the song that I would lift small ideas from, to gradually get to the perfect version. 

The Making of “Theme to Being Stuck in a Dream”

Lyrics and music inspired by 2 dreams from 8/27/2020 and 6/28/2021

Written June 2021

I had a dream that I heard a 20-minute Sonic fan soundtrack or something that was so viscerally horrifying that it made me close my music app and throw my headphones across the room, and I was too scared to listen to it again. The beginning was plunderphonics-influenced, with samples of songs that were similar to the work of The Caretaker, but it gradually turned into something like harsh noise that was devastating and sent tingles down my spine. I wasn’t sure whether I hated it or whether it was the best thing I’d ever heard. So, of course, I had to recreate it. I decided to make this a track within the album instead of its own album because I thought that would be an insane idea. 

My idea for the basic structure of the song was to start with instrumental plunderphonics, fade into harsh noise and spoken word, and then end with a repetitive ambient melody. 14 minutes of experimental hell with something somewhat poppy for the last 4 minutes would be such a cool effect. Where would this ambient melody come from, though? I had an epiphany during a lucid dream. I was in my house in the dream, and when I realized it was a dream, I tried to wake up, but truly couldn’t. As I struggled to open my eyes, a simple, sad melody on an electric keyboard was playing; as I listened to that strangely beautiful song, I implicitly thought, “this must be the theme to being stuck in a dream”. And so the lyrical theme for this long experimental song evolved into “being stuck in a dream”. I was so enthusiastic about this beautiful song idea that I finished writing it on the same day I woke up with it.

“Writing” this song was weird because, instead of making chords or melodies, I was writing descriptions of dream sounds. For the lyrics, to convey the experience of dreaming, my structure was inspired by the stages of sleep. The spoken word section is the early stage of dreaming, during slow wave sleep, where dreams are vague, surreal thoughts. It doesn’t feel like sleeping; when you wake up, you usually deny that you fell asleep at all. I wanted to express the feeling of trying really hard to sleep, when you don’t realize that you’re sleeping already. In a state of delusional insomnia, you start thinking these weird urges that keep you from sleeping, like “I can’t sleep unless all of my body parts are laid down like rocks and thoroughly put to sleep individually”.

Except the lyrics of the spoken word section weren’t written for this album. I reused my old lyrics from a 1-minute song called “Shape Your Arm” from Requirements For Sleep. When I wrote “Shape Your Arm”, I attempted to start with a dark, experimental, electronic part with lyrics that expressed that insomniac experience... but I was extremely inexperienced with production and songwriting in 2019, and had no idea how I was gonna do that. So I just said, fuck it, I’m going to speed-read the lyrics and just make the song super chaotic, even if it doesn’t accurately convey the experience of insomnia. At least no one else has done that in a song yet and I can be unique, I think. 

3 years after writing “Shape Your Arm”, now that I have some experience, and people who’re willing to collab with me, I think I can finally make what I originally wanted to do with “Shape Your Arm” and convey insomnia and slow-wave-sleep dreams. So I just lifted the old lyrics directly for the new song. I revisited my a capella demo of that “dark experimental electronic version” of “Shape Your Arm”, and lifted the melodies for the brief singing parts. That was a super complicated 3-year process to write a song, but I hope that makes sense.

The final section of the song is inspired by a lucid dream, which happens during the REM stage. I sang it over the ambient melody that I heard in my own lucid dream, which I mentioned earlier. Lucid dreams sound like the most fun and cool experience, but it’s not really been that way for me, sadly. I’ve tried to live out my fantasies in lucid dreams, but I’m apparently not very skilled at conjuring things to appear in the dreams. I just see empty space, or end up walking around an area that’s something I could already see in real life. And if I do get a person or thing to appear, it’s usually silent and emotionally empty, like some kinda clone, or the dream visual starts turning black and I start waking up. These are interesting experiences to write about, but I wish I could have a “normal” lucid dream. 

While producing the album, my main collaborators were Tobias and Ramiel. Because of their different creative processes, I decided to give songs to Ramiel that they could take a lot of creative liberties on. On the other side, I gave songs to Tobias that he should be able to make according to my precise vision. I gave an outline of “Theme to Being Stuck in a Dream” to Ramiel... all I had on the page, for the first 7-minute section, was a vague description of the song that I heard in my dream. I said that it was made up of “samples”, and I wrote down some experimental songs that could be an inspiration. I was pretty scared how it was gonna turn out because I’d given such a vague description of what I wanted. 

But somehow, it turned out really good when Ramiel sent me their composition for the first instrumental section of the song. I guess the inspiration tracks that I provided were enough to communicate the vibe! Ramiel decided to only use samples of my old songs, instead of songs from random other artists, which was an excellent call. I hadn’t even considered doing that. Even though the “Sonic soundtrack” from the dream had more of an “old music” vibe like The Caretaker, this still worked really well with samples of my music. Being a big plunderphonics fan, Ramiel also used some clever sampling and editing techniques that put my song snippets into completely new contexts. 

And for the middle section of the song, I already had a “noise” song that I’d made ages ago that catalyzed the production of this whole thing. This has an even weirder backstory, so buckle in. During an awkward video call with my online friends, I was playing guitar, Joey was playing keyboard, and Tobias pulled up FL Studio and said he was gonna sample us. I said jokingly, “turn it into harsh noise”. Tobias took a 7-second sample of us playing and heavily distorted it, making an intense noise song in about 10 minutes. Everyone was laughing hysterically when he played the tune for us. After the call ended, I took the noise song and played around with it a bunch, making it into more of a Dark Ambient style. 

Months later, Tobias asked me if he could use the noise song as the closing track on his next EP. I hesitated to allow him to include it, because I was planning to also use it on my album -- but Tobias suggested that we could both use it, and it would actually be pretty cool if people were listening to my song and recognized that part from his EP. It kind of felt like a joke because this thing was absolutely grating to listen to, but “Flood” ended up being the final track on Carndye’s The Darkest Day EP, and I have a featured credit on it.

The final section of the song was straightforward to make, as I produced it myself with synthesizers. I considered adding another collaborator, but I was happy with the version I made on my own anyway. 

The Making of “Sleep Through the Quiet Lust”

Lyrics and music inspired by 2 dreams from 5/20/2020 and 7/17/2020

Written June 2021

The lyrics weren’t about the events of any dream in particular, although they are about sleeping/dreaming. The title lyric was sung by my church’s band in my dream, which is why it sounds a bit worshippy. Almost all the lyrics of this song came from what I heard in 2 dreams, with very little conscious lyric-writing. Because of that, it was extremely easy to write. 

I mentally debated over the album title for a long time. I couldn’t name it "Requirements For Sleep 2" because I’d already made something called Requirements For Sleep Version 2.0 when I re-recorded my first album, and that’s extremely confusing. I settled on naming it after this song title -- I felt like it was symbolic of the themes of most of the songs on the album, and it was also a lyric that came entirely from a dream. 

Making it was pretty easy and straightforward. I re-recorded the vocals at my school library’s free vocal booth, which is an awesome resource to have. The progressive vocal takes got better and more powerful. As I played the song live, however, I realized that the complexity of the guitar rhythm makes it extremely hard to play at the same time as I sing the lyrics -- they have such different rhythms that I keep twisting them up! 

The Making of “Airpush Down the Stairs”

Lyrics and music inspired by 2 dreams from 7/27/2019 and 2/19/2020

Written March 2021

The lyrics were inspired by some kind of cartoonish dream where I defeated a robot villain. But now he’s about to die, and something that he needs to live has just fallen into the water. I could go underwater and grab it for him and show him mercy, but I could also just come back up and lie “I couldn’t find it” and let him die. In that dream, the lyrics “I can’t find it, I couldn’t find it” played during a drum solo of a rock song, which was an alternate-universe version of the vocal break during “100%” by Sonic Youth. 

The second half was inspired by a barely memorable dream about pushing a baby stroller down the stairs for some reason, maybe to just get it out of my way. This is where the title “Airpush Down the Stairs” and the lyric “I’m gonna lower the secret baby side / You didn’t notice that I was alive” came from, which I always laughed at as extremely ridiculous. 

I decided to combine these two narratives with an overarching message about how the person in these dreams just isn’t who I really am; I’m not the kind of assertive, selfish person from those dreams. But it also feels like everyone around me is that person. 

Another easy-to-make song without collaborations. The drums were somewhat difficult because I don’t know how to play drums, and I don’t have my drums or recording equipment properly set up. I recorded the vocals both high and low to see which one I liked more, but then I realized that they sounded weird and cool when I put the high and low vocals together -- so that’s what I did. 

I recorded the ending that references “But When I Know Who I Am” before I’d even started the other song, which is why it sounds so weird. 

The Making of "I'll Be at That Point"

Lyrics inspired by a dream from 9/6/2020

Music inspired by 2 dreams from 4/17/2020 and 6/20/2020

Written March 2021

The song has pretty straightforward lyrics that deal with an interaction in a dream about religion and its emotional implications for me. 

I made a demo of the song in early 2021, but I’m not sure why I did so, because the demo was extremely similar to the final song. I was submitting the demo for a school project because my professor wanted a portfolio of creative works that I’d done outside of class. But I just learned that there’s no point in making sloppy “demos” if the final version isn’t that hard to make. This song was fairly easy to make because of no collaborations, but it was still difficult to get the vocals right -- about 5 or 6 vocal sessions in, I finally got one that was acceptable. 

 

The Making of "But When I Know Who I Am"

Lyrics inspired by a dream from 11/30/2020

Music inspired by 2 dreams from 12/9/2019 and 9/30/2020

Written December 2020/March 2021

This song was inspired by a dream where I saw a boy from my elementary school (who inexplicably appears in my dreams a lot) as if we’d gone to the same school again. In some strange dream situation, I’d come back from the future to prevent him from dying. He was sitting in a small, empty room in the school, and I knew that he was going to stay there forever and die if I didn’t help him. I couldn’t think of anything to tell him to make him leave except to make a false love confession. He jumped up and started following me around school as I was just doing a bunch of people’s errands. 

The two lines that came from dreams were “And the blood came rush before me, / But we always knew our lines” and “But when I know who I am / There are so many things to add”. These are obviously both lines packed with meaning... I carefully found a way to weave them into the narrative about the boy from elementary school. The title lyric of the song was heard in a dream in which I was listening to one of my favorite albums from my early teen days, Sondre Lerche’s Heartbeat Radio. However, I later realized that the song he was singing was not real... even though it sounded extremely similar to that album’s style. 

I set out to make something as similar to Heartbeat Radio as I could. My friend Tobias makes electronic music that I really admire, under the name Carndye. I showed him “I Cannot Let You Go” by Sondre Lerche, along with my demo. In two amazingly creative sessions, we crafted the instrumental for the song that somehow turned out exactly how I wanted it.

 

The Making of "Poor Face"

Lyrics and music inspired by a dream from 5/18/2020

Written June 2020

I learned about deepfakes in my computer science class during my senior year of HS and was absolutely mortified by the concept of them. Of course, soon enough, I was having nightmares about how deepfakes could be used for evil purposes. I dreamed that my family and I were watching a TV trial about a teacher whose identity was defaced by a repulsive deepfake. In the same dream, I heard a song that went “Light crying out from the moon”. It was hard to write the song to convey the meaning of the dream, but not get too into the disturbing details. 

This was perhaps the first song to be finished completely, and one of the easiest to make, because it didn’t involve any collaborations. The vocal ending was somewhat improvised, being written and recorded right on the spot. The high note was a struggle but people say that they really liked that part so I guess it’s fine. 

 

The Making of "Bodies Fall Apart"

Lyrics inspired by 2 dreams from 5/13/2020 and 6/22/2020

Music inspired by 3 dreams from 3/9/2018, 11/10/2019, 12/21/2019

Written June 2020

I had ideas to make “Bodies Fall Apart” either rock or electronic-influenced, but I ended up settling on indie/experimental rock. “Touching and mutilating bodies, insane!” was a lyric I came up with all the way back in 2018 that I somehow remembered. “There’s something about the way he moves that made him fall apart” was a dream-lyric that I knew I had to incorporate in some kind of slower ending section. 

The lyrics were inspired by the events of a handful of dreams in which bodies were weirdly morphing. A memorable one was where I found a drawer in my old house that had two dolls realistically modeled after me and my brother when we were very young -- but when I tried to pick up the dolls, they started melting in my hands as if they were made of slime. The lyrics were difficult to write because of how weird it was to convey these dreams through the lyrics. I’m sure they still come across as very cryptic and absurd, despite my several rewrites. 

After making a chaotic demo with no real energy and completely out-of-sync guitar tracks, I used that as a starting point for how to improve for the final version. Being mostly a self-produced song, making the core parts was relatively easy. I finished most of the song in mid-2021, being one of the first things I did for the album. However, the difficult part was the whistling. I asked what seemed like all my friends if they knew how to whistle, and they all either said they couldn’t whistle or just bailed on me/forgot about my request. Finally, in Spring 2022, I found some friends who were eagerly willing to whistle on the spot - three friends, in fact. “Bodies Fall Apart” was, I think, the first song I started recording and the last song I finished recording. 

The Making of "Flower"

Lyrics inspired by a dream from 5/12/2020

Written June 2020

When recording “Cabin”, I randomly edited the piano riff backwards, and realized that it could make another song. It was inspired by a dream about being in a stadium for some event, and sitting next to a girl whom I didn’t know anything about, except that her name was May and we’d both gone through some kind of assault experience. Chaos started happening on the stage as some men revealed that our assaulters were in the audience, and people were screaming and running out of the stadium. I guided the girl outside to help her out. She seemed depressed that the event had been disrupted and I tried to offer her a flower, but she rejected it.

I started to explore the city with my new friend, first going to my middle school, where we seemingly trespassed into some areas, but were allowed by a kind custodian to wander. Then we went to the museum where my mom works at and ended up in the staff area. Instead of going to the right exhibit, the girl wandered off into an unfinished, mysterious room that was off-limits; she got scolded by a woman who mistakenly called her “Blossom”. 

The dream was very chaotic, and incoherent at times; but I find it fascinating how the different places we explored represented the ways in which that girl was violated in her experiences, and the flower could have represented lost innocence.

I reached out to Joey again for the piano because he’d already made “Cabin” with me, so I should also make the song’s sequel with him. While it was extremely difficult to play the piano and also edit the piano to get the precise tempo (in retrospect, I could’ve done this song myself to make it way less complicated), I really appreciated Joey’s creative contributions; he composed the piano bass and gave other suggestions. The vocals were hard to record, taking at least 5 vocal recording sessions. 

The Making of "I'm Always Watching You 3"

Lyrics inspired by several different dreams

Music inspired by a dream from 4/11/2020

Written April 2020/June 2020

After the release of Lowercase in April 2020, I started to seriously spend more time writing the dream album. For those past few years, Sondre Lerche’s Pleasure (2017) was an extremely inspirational album for me. His song “I’m Always Watching You” is a confessional song about stalkerish behaviors. He also released a more mellow version of the song titled “I’m Always Watching You Too” that he said came to him in a dream. Of course, I dreamed about a third part to this song series that was fast-paced electropop for some reason, and had the lyrics “I want it so bad, but I don’t need it so fast”. 

At that time, I was having an absurd amount of dreams about finding someone’s “secret” social media accounts. I wrote the lyrics with a similar ironic and self-hating tone to Lerche’s song. So of course, don’t take the lyrics to this song literally. I also felt like experimenting with some new guitar chords, so I decided to make the first half of the song on guitar, and the second half more similar to the electropop song I heard in the dream. 

I first made a demo of the song in GarageBand that was not too far off from my vision of the song, except it was just cheaply produced. My friend Ramiel expressed interest in producing the song, so I let them try it. However, the first versions of the song didn’t really match my vision for it; they diverged from my demo and assumed that I’d want a more lowkey art pop song instead of the intense electropop from my dream. It took a lot of back-and-forth communication about how I wanted the synths to sound, and how the melody should go, to finally get a version of this song that I was pleased with. By the end, I’m very pleased with how much this song matches my vision, and I’m glad we spent as much time and effort on it as we did. 

The Making of "Cabin"

Music inspired by a dream from 7/28/2019

Written November 2019

The piano melody for “Cabin” came to me in a dream that took place in a cabin at a campsite. I wrote a poem that was a stream of the first words that came to mind as I hummed the “cabin piano theme”. The lyrics were abstract thoughts instead of a narrative, so I almost considered scrapping the lyrics because they didn’t fit the album concept -- but I was so proud of the lyrics that I decided to keep them on the album. 

I also have a theory that the main piano riff on “Cabin” was my dream brain’s warped representation of “Apartments Exterior” from the soundtrack of Yume 2kki, a game I was playing a lot at the time. Ironically, the game is also about exploring a dream. 

I recorded and released a demo of “Cabin” in late 2019, quite a while before the album would get finished. When making the final version in early 2022, I wanted my friend Joey to collaborate on the song. He’s a very talented keyboardist, and has access to different pianos and keyboards. I’m not super happy with how it turned out, as it sounds quite lo-fi, and I could’ve modified the lyrics. But a lot of people say they liked it, and no one’s complained yet that the demo was better, so that’s good. 

Sleep Through the Quiet Lust: Conceptualizing the Album

This is the first in a series of posts where I will discuss the making of my 4th album. Here are links to the rest of the posts, where I discuss the process of writing and making each song:

The Making of "Cabin"

The Making of "I'm Always Watching You 3"

The Making of "Flower"

The Making of "Bodies Fall Apart"

The Making of "Poor Face"

The Making of "But When I Know Who I Am"

The Making of "I'll Be at That Point"

The Making of “Airpush Down the Stairs”

The Making of “Sleep Through the Quiet Lust”

The Making of “Theme to Being Stuck in a Dream”

The Making of “Only a Hunter”

The Making of “Hinman Park”

The Making of “June 18th”

The Making of "Gazing"

The album Sleep Through the Quiet Lust is the sequel to my first album from 2019, Requirements For Sleep. I hesitated to make music and release it because I was extremely unconfident in my abilities, but I got motivated to teach myself guitar and write songs. I had a lot of song ideas from my dreams, so I decided my first album would be a compilation of dream songs. Requirements For Sleep was an ambitious album idea that I ended up recording in only 2 weeks at age 17, with only one month of experience playing guitar. Some were imaginary songs by my favorite artists that I dreamed about them singing, like “Ekans” being a dreamt-up Sondre Lerche song, “Smart” being a dreamt-up Kate Bush song, and “Trumpet Hollow School” being an imaginary Talking Heads song. I was quite embarrassed to release something that felt so unfinished and unrealized, but some very sweet comments from my friends encouraged me to keep going. 

I still had dozens of dream songs ideas, so as early as one month after the release of Requirements For Sleep, I just knew I had to make a sequel. I started to keep a dream journal in late 2019 where I wrote about every single night’s dream in as much detail as possible. I had important, emotionally significant events from my dreams that I needed to write songs about, so this time, the lyrics of the album would be inspired by the narrative events of the dreams. 

In August 2019, I wrote my first song for the dream album, “We’ve Set Up Your Yahoo Account Now”. This was about a dream in which I discovered my Yahoo email had been created without my knowledge in the year 1980, and had received an ancient email with a very creepy image. This song ended up being way too trivial and silly for the album, so it was quickly scrapped. I never finished any demo of it. 

While writing the album, more dream song ideas popped up from day to day. Overall, during the album writing process, I had a backlog of about 70 short song ideas from my dreams that I’d recorded sleepily on my voice memos. I ended up writing my favorite 18 songs from that list, and then narrowed it down to 14.