I feel strange and sad that I’ve let the world change on me…
It all started when…
A friend told me I should be promoting myself on TikTok.
The good news is, this inspired me to really cut to the chase on my songcraft, ensuring all the songs ended up between 3 and 4 minutes, and my shortest record to date, just 28 minutes long for the eight songs here.
The bad news is, it made me feel like a dinosaur.
And really, TikTok wasn’t even in the top five things that were making me feel this way, coming in as it did on the heels of these:
The international geopolitical order and domestic political institutions became increasingly frayed and dangerous. The principle on which my vision of what the world order should be—Westphalian sovereignty and self-determination—came under attack from all corners, and thus my politics became increasingly orphaned from those of any major political faction in my home country.
The entertainment media around me became increasingly dominated by a few large, unwieldy behemoths stomping across an increasingly sickly and mass extinction-prone ecosystem.
Climate change continued apace, making literal mass extinction seem more likely by the day.
The pandemic left me at home, with time passing, with no clear prospects of building the kind of family life I had planned for, and my friendships and social networks winnowing as I age.
And perhaps most importantly, I came to increasingly understand how much armor people carry around to adapt to the dangerous environments around them, and how everybody has different fears and orients their defenses against those. This is true for individuals fearful of, or recovering from, the traumas and damage of their lives, and it’s also true for groups, as my theory of the identity matrix lays out. No one can really understand what someone else is going through, and this is where I believe most hurt comes from in this world, from misunderstandings, misalignments, and mutually incomprehensible narratives and fears. We are all in a security dilemma, always, same as the armored dinosaurs that preceded us, and same as whatever will come after us.
And so I wrote this record, in my view my best to date.
For the record I am still not on TikTok.
Strange and Sad
I was feeling extremely down and in danger of the serious depression that had marred my early 30s returning. I had a long text exchange with a friend who was trying to comfort me. I took my half of the text exchange and sang in almost freestyle over this pre-existing beat I’d cooked up. The instrumentals here were originally intended to be for a happy, peppy little ode to Manhattanhenge. The only problem was that I couldn’t come up with good lyrics and the whole thing seemed contrived. And then this song stole the beat. So you have this twitchy, anxiety-ridden stream-of-consciousness therapy session over a bouncy dancehall-style beat. My kind of song.
“Strange and Sad” specifically, and “Edmontonia” more generally, was wholly composed in the heart of the pandemic lockdown when I had nothing to do but practice singing and playing the bass guitar. I also began a long and demanding quest to find to the perfect bass guitar, during which I purchased, sold, returned, resold… I dunno, 11 basses? A dozen? I lost count. I started the journey with two, and by the end I had four, and was content.
One of those is a Fender American Professional Fretless Jazz Bass, sunburst with rosewood fretboard, that I got on sale at Sam Ash. I deliberately set out to use the bass on every song on this record, and indeed it appears on five of the eight songs here, and so I hereby christen it “the Edmontonia bass.” “Strange and Sad” is one of the five. For this song, I was inspired by Tony Levin’s fingerstick technique but, lacking the wherewithal to build fingersticks of my own, I just took a fancy chopstick from a set I’d received as a party favor at a wedding I’d DJ’d years earlier and just whacked the hell out of the strings with the chopstick. Put a little compressor boost and wah pedal squelch into the mix and you’ve got the attack-heavy bass tone you hear on this track.
There’s An Island on the Other Side of the World
Unable to find anything on Disney+ or Netflix to watch, I was chatting with a friend and I noted that the increasing dominance of a few massive high-budget franchises was leading to derivative storytelling that crowded out a more complex cultural ecosystem, which was generally falling into decay. I texted to my friend, “it feels like the Late Cretaceous around here.”
He responded, “What will be the meteor?”
The next day I wrote this song.
And if you’re wondering what a fretless J sounds like with a chorus pedal on it, it sounds like this.
Where You Take and Take and Take
A song about desire in general. Originally it was going on another record, so it did not feature the fretless J, rather my old Warwick $$ Corvette. (More on that later.) I had just gotten a Boss OC-2 octave pedal, and this was the first time I used it, creating an excellent doubled bass groove. Native Instruments’ Arkhis patch was the source of much of the atmospherics. The line about iron being molded from weapons to bells and back again is inspired by an observation in Amor Towles' “A Gentleman in Moscow,” which for many reasons is the perfect book to read in a pandemic.
Like Birds After the Rain
I have a song bank of potential song titles I sometimes add random phrases or thoughts to without any idea what the song will sound like or be about. This one had been on the list for at least a couple years before I came up with this bass groove on the fretless J, paired it improbably with a vaguely Afrobeat type of drum pattern, and came up with these lyrics in a matter of minutes. I was dubious about this song at every second of its gestation until its completion, whereupon I realized I absolutely loved it. Birds are contemporary dinosaurs, so it fits the dino theme.
To Each Their Own Armor
The heart of the record. I had a close friend who was struggling through some trauma caused by the actions of someone else, and all her defenses were arrayed outward against a dangerous world. Meanwhile I was unhappy with my very different life choices and so all my defenses were about trying to be forgiving, most importantly to myself for not building the life I’d wanted. So our respective defenses were misaligned. Still we were able to help each other.
Around this time I went back to the American Museum of Natural History for the first time in many years, and I stood in front of the museum’s fossil Edmontonia on the fourth floor. This song basically is a dialogue between me and the Edmontonia, from which the entire theme of the record—extinction, time passing you buy, fear, and respecting the defensive fortifications of others even if they seem incomprehensible—developed. All set to a groove that I really like. One of my favorite songs I’ve ever written.
Nebulous
My former bandmate Mikhail Sapozhnikov is incredibly prolific and often lays down these two- or three-minute jams where he plays all the instruments, and sometimes he sends them to me for vocals and lyrics. This is one such song which we collaborated on years ago—2014? 2015?—that I forgot about until I realized I was writing an album with a natural history vibe and I recalled this song and asked Mike to send the instrumental over. I quickly laid down an updated take of the vocals and here it is. Because Mike did all the instruments from his home in the state of Georgia, this is one of three songs on “Edmontonia” that does not feature the fretless J.
Azureland
Sometimes lyrics and a beat are put together and don’t work, so each needs to be put in storage until its match appears.
So it is with this one. I had a beat I was very proud of, but the vocal line just… did… not… work… with my voice, with the song, anything. So I gave up.
But I kept coming back to the lyrics, which are among my best I feel… so I then reworked them into a totally different song… this one. Descending slides on the fretless J are really prominent in this tune, especially on the bridge at about a minute in, where a wah pedal and Boss OC-2 octave pedal combine to create some gnarly mwaaaah. Mikhail Sapozhnikov laid down an excellent guitar line here, sending me two different versions, a clean version (which you hear early in the song) and then the same line with digital effects added to get more of a lead guitar sound (which comes in on the outro of the song). Two identical takes, the second one with a glitzier tone but fundamentally the same, fits the song’s main themes nicely. I seriously considered naming the whole album “Azureland” or even moving this song to a new album of that name, but ultimately the dinosaur theme won out.
Archipelagos
A little ballad about friends leaving and going to distant places where I may never see them again, be they political tribes I don’t belong to or actual archipelagos like, say, the United Kingdom. It’s also in its way a farewell to my Warwick $$ Corvette, a bass guitar I purchased in 2007 that was, for most of the next 14 years, my only bass guitar. It was my sole possession to survive Superstorm Sandy. (My 7-foot-tall storage space took five feet of water. The bass was the last item I didn’t take with me to Italy for grad school, so it ended up in a water-resistant bag on top of the pile and survived. Tragically, my 1976 Gibson L6-S guitar was not on the top of the pile, and did not survive.) When I was depressed, it was there for me. When I was adrift, it was there for me. I wrote multiple albums with it. It anchored my previous album “Doggerland.” But my bass tone preferences evolved over time, and a day came where it was time for this amazing instrument to find a new owner. So I sold it on Reverb. I used it on this song, when I was just learning how to play chords on the bass, something that really works up the fretboard on a Warwick because it has 24 frets instead of the usual 20 of a Fender bass. And this ended up being the final recording I ever made with it. So… thanks, old friend.
