Meanwhile

The ninth track off of Inchoatery. The other side of the story.

Picks up, musically, where Tell It All left off, and carries over the octave-heavy guitar solo stuff from that as well.

In many ways this is a bookend to Pathetic, both in terms of theme and in some of the harmonic structural decisions I made in putting this song together after much of the rest of the album had been written.

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posted by cortex (4 comments total)

I really like what you've done with the whole album. It holds together really quite well, especially considering the timeframe and recording process. Production-wise, our album was a lot easier, even though it's 2.5x the length, than I'd imagine yours could have really been, as yours was all tracked individually. it's really quite staggering, and I have to give you major kudos.

I'm going to download your full album from your site...like, now.

P.S. Do you have any cover art for this one?
posted by askmeaboutLOOM at 8:21 PM on March 18, 2010

Maybe I missed this one on the demo, or it's gone thru significant changes, but it has a really epic sound that holds the weight of the entire album on its shoulders. You've really managed to synthesize what has come before, and create this moment of reflection that is really powerful in the context and concept of the album. It's really what I like the most about your RPM submission, the concept album approach! I hope to manage one myself, one day.
posted by abc123xyzinfinity at 10:51 PM on March 18, 2010

P.S. Do you have any cover art for this one?

Not at this point. I wanted to worry about the music and not eat up anymore time than I knew I already would on random distractions, so album art was a non-starter. I didn't have a name for the damn thing until the end of the month.

I might try and sit down and put something together for it in the long run, but at this point the whole process of recording music is so abstracted for me from the "put out a physical artifact to sell/distribute" model that doing album art and such almost feels like cargo cult stuff—if I'm not going to do something with it, what is it for?

Which, maybe it's just for me, and there's nothing wrong with adding ancillary stuff to the music making process just as a personal thing. But I guess all the stuff at the new music blog is more of an answer to what's important to me on that front. I'd rather write about how I made this album than, like, take pictures or make drawings about it. That may change for future album projects, I dunno.

You've really managed to synthesize what has come before

Yeah, one of the good things about doing the album how I did—with the early demos to be able set everything side by side and think about it as a whole before I ever got down to really recording the thing—is that I was able to think about which pieces would tie to each other lyrically and thematically and harmonically and so on. I could sit down and figure spots where, if I wanted a little melodic hook or something to add texture, I could use a riff off something in another song and sort of latch things together that way. I also made a number of small revisions and additions to the draft lyrics once I saw how one or another song could act as an echo or a setup for another.

Really, this song and Tell It All before it and finally Rewrite after are almost a suite, the basically the third act of the album, and aside from bringing in the ex-girlfriend to the story a little this song also sort of acts as the time-is-fuzzy bridge between the breaking down of the protagonist in the previous song and the rough attempt at conciliation and closure in the next one. I felt a little weird about the sort of extended solo in this one at first but I ended up feeling like there's been enough going on lyrically in these two songs and enough coming up in the next one that just having a sort of big instrumental passage might make a nice break.

One of the things I mean to do at some point is write up a blog entry about all the explicit doublings and patterns and references between different parts of the album. I touch on a number of them in the individual writeups for the songs, but it might be nice to put that all in one place. It's one of those things where on the one hand it makes the record seem a bit more complex (and does make writing/rewriting it cohesively a bit more of a challenge, when everything is kind of strung together in a web like that and changes have consequences not just to a given song but to the whole narrative), but it's also useful and kind of inspiring—I could sort of make more story than I started with just by making explicit connections between things that started out unrelated.
posted by cortex at 8:07 AM on March 19, 2010

Damn, cortex, this is my 4th try at commenting. Just can't describe how awesome I think this is.


!!!!!1!
posted by snsranch at 2:37 PM on March 19, 2010