OK, so here it is: the first new song (written or recorded) in well over a year for the Cute Kids project. I’m calling this a ‘demo’ as it so far lacks a vocal track - and it’s a little rough around the edges - but for the first time doing this in quite a while, I think I threw off a decent bit of rust!
And hopefully this is the start of a renewed period of creativity. Also I don’t have a job. So we’ll see.
Please let me know what you think!
Exciting news! I got back to the UK from Korea on Monday, and I’m already back in the studio / my dad’s house’s bathroom.
I’ve tracked the acoustic guitar to three songs so far… A potential ‘intro’ for the next CDR, a cover of ‘King Of Carrot Flowers, Part 1’, and an unnamed song in Dm with a sea-shanty feel.
And now I’m equipped with my brand new iPhone (product placement), I’m able to keep this blog updated on the goings on during the whole recording process!
Lyrics:
I think I’d do it all again. The only question now is ‘when?’, and as for you, you’ll just be thankful for the change. It might take more than what I’ve got, but at least we’ll say we took a shot, and if we fail, we’ll go in a spectacle of flames. ‘Cause if someone else might have noticed, the whole thing might have had a purpose. We’ll be looked upon as doing something big. And if I leave something behind - even a spark in someone’s eye - that’s my reward for all the things that I just did. And in a year I might just ask, ‘have you fulfilled your chosen path, or are you trying your best, but you need just one more year?’ I won’t hold it against you. In fact, I may just give you two. I’d want the same compassion if you were standing here. Oh, so break the corners of my mind, which need someone to analyse as if my life was on the line. Oh, in you I think I’ve found the one who’ll tolerate me ‘til I’m done, and understand that what’s inside is not right. And as with 91% of everyone I’ve ever met, I had a life and thoughts before I learned your name. It’s more than likely that I will, once I forget your favourite film, find myself free to carry on in the same vein. But if you have the right effect, you’ll play until the story ends, and I’ll be in the bleachers hoping that you do. ‘Cause I’ve convinced myself for now that it is far beyond my power to dictate whether or not I’ll be with you. Oh, so break the corners of my mind, which need someone to analyse as if my life was on the line. Oh, in you I think I’ve found the one who’ll tolerate me ‘til I’m done, and understand that what’s inside is not right.
Context:
I kind of tacked this song onto the end of the demo ‘compilation’ I was making, but despite (or because of) the fact that I didn’t spend too much time on it right before I had to leave for New Zealand, it’s one of my favourites to listen to, and one of the most charming.
The hand claps track is something I’ve attempted on songs before, and perhaps to avoid repeating myself too overtly, I set out to come up with an unnecessarily complex hand-clap pattern that would be difficult to get an audience to clap along to when played live. The singing and guitar, on the other hand, was sculpted to be as easy as possible for me so I’d be comfortable opening a set with this song, which I did a few times pretty successfully.
Stylistically, I was going for Neutral Milk Hotel, both in the music and some of the lyrics. The song itself adopts one of the grander themes I write about - what does it all mean? - but on a personal level it’s about the anxiety I had about moving abroad for the second time, since I was asking a lot of questions of myself at that time.
Hopefully, the next time I post, it will be with some new, original content!
A cover I like to play of one of my favourite songs, ‘End Of The Movie’ by Cake.
(Source: cutekidsdontsellrecords)
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Reid And Marcia's Summer Of Fun
(Summer Comes But Once A School Year)
Lyrics:
In times of crisis when the summer kills with its longevity, when my Nintendo cannot save me from the strength of my ennui, I’m made to contemplate…I’m made to entertain ideas about how I’ll be famous one day, how I’ll start a band one day. It’ll never happen. I lay out in the sun and listened to the Reverend Horton Heat. A lack of clouds above can make the planet’s movement feel discreet. Once again I’m here to stay, and once again it’s not OK with me. It’s the same time but a different day. What’s gone around has come my way again eventually. Oh, once you’ve started, you can never end, once you’ve clawed me in. Oh, once you’ve started, you can never end, once you’ve clawed me in.
Context:
This song was the last one I wrote and recorded for the Summer Comes But Once A School Year CDR, by which point I think I’d probably worked out what I was doing, recording-wise. It’s one of the most ambitious, with plenty of different guitar lines and panning vocal effects, and yet the one over which I probably struggled the least.
It’s largely a hate letter to the early part of summer of 2007, during which I was feeling increasingly upset about what I was supposed to be doing. The band that had been such a large part of my university life had been gradually degrading for several months, and was now ceasing altogether with my impending move to Amsterdam. I had finished my exams and was frequently bored (I really did lie out in the middle of an empty field, listening to Spend A Night In The Box, and staring at the blue sky), and all I could think of was forming another solid band into which to pour my ideas and enthusiasm, but it seemed like I’d never manage to get it done.
The introduction melody was something I’d written for the aforementioned degraded band when we were working on our second EP in winter 2006-07, but was never used until this song. The distorted chords were an attempt at simple Green Day-style punk, and the lead guitar part in the verses was inspired by early Get Up Kids. The ‘doo-doo’s were only originally supposed to be Reel Big Fish-style trumpet parts, but I never bothered to record over the placeholder vocals, while the fading, repeating background vocals were just an attempt to do something interesting to pick up the empty-sounding verses. And as with most of the songs from that CDR, this song used the built-in drum machine of my Zoom multitrack since I was recording it at university, away from my real drums.
The names Reid and Marcia came from a website I had found about ‘Cuddle Parties’: non-profit, non-sexual meetups where people “explore consensual touch and affection”. This song was originally titled ‘Reid And Marcia Are The Co-Creators Of Cuddle Party’ after a direct quotation from that website (which is still up by the way), but Reid and Marcia instead became the names of the boy and girl characters on the front of the CDR, around which Summer Comes But Once A School Year is loosely conceptualised.
A new re-edit of the video to A Self-Destruction Song, originally filmed and edited on the 6th-7th September 2008.
Lyrics:
I know you know you’ve hurt me by now, but the price to pay is small as long as you stick around. Oh, it’s worth the scars and maybe a broken heart if you stay. And I don’t mind if you buck the trend because everything I do has led to this shining moment. Oh, I’d jump through hoops if only you would ever ask me to. And I don’t want you to think that I am sad, but did the ones before me leave because you treated them as bad? Oh, I’ll persevere. Denial will keep me here with you. I have a heart where you have a hole, but that’s OK as long as you know! I know you’re better ‘cause we belong together.
Context:
This is perhaps my favourite Cute Kids Don’t Sell Records song, owing to its shortness, it’s easy playability, its subject matter, and its video. And yet I wrote it very quickly in Amsterdam in late 2007 simply because I was looking to make a song with the harmonica I had just bought.
As is the case with most of the songs written during my year in the Netherlands, this song is about a girl I had liked called Nancy. By this point, I knew that my crush on her was unrequited, but despite the fact that I was starting to get emotionally hurt I continued to entertain the notion that she would eventually realise how great I was. All I was doing was perpetuating denial, but for some reason it felt like the right thing to do.
So I wrote this song to try and snap myself out of it; I hoped that once I wrote down exactly what was going on, it would finally click that I was being self-destructive. I guess it worked!
The main guitar progression of the song is borrowed from ‘Chinese Translation’ by M. Ward, and the major-to-minor drop on the G chord is something I do a lot in homage to Chris Fogal from the Gamits. There is also a Smiths lyric (as the video titles point out) from ‘I Won’t Share You’, and a reference to the Dawn Parade’s ‘Hole In My Heart’.
I recorded this song in the summer of 2008 for the Jeliza-Rose EP, and it’s length encouraged me to attempt to make an accompanying music video, if for no other reason than to have something interesting to put on my Myspace page. I just wanted to do a straightforward performance video, with different versions of myself playing the four parts. The concept for the titles describing artefacts in the frame was influenced by the video to ‘Wild America’ by the Sweet Homewreckers, which in turn heavily references Wes Anderson’s directorial style.
There are numerous interesting nuggets to look for around my room, but I didn’t plant anything. That’s genuinely what my room looked like that summer. However, since my room was too small to fit the drum kit against that particular wall in the video, I had to push my bed aside for that take. If you look to the left of frame whenever the harmonica-player is in shot, you can see the edge of the Idlewild poster on the wall, which should be behind where the drum kit is. (Incidentally, the hat worn by the bass player is also clearly on top of the wardrobe…) Continuity was never my strong point.
(Source: cutekidsdontsellrecords)
Context:
This recording links together the full-band versions of two seminal hip-hop songs I like to cover - namely Skee-Lo’s ‘I Wish’ and Jay-Z’s ‘99 Problems’ - and was included on 2010’s A Counter-Culture Holiday CDR.
They were both recorded for the first time during the summer of 2008 (with the ‘I Wish’ cover ending up on the Jeliza Rose EP that year), but I had another crack at mixing them a few years later as a far easier alternative to recording my 4-song hip-hop cover medley.
As I’ve mentioned before, the original pieces of music played underneath my neurotic white-boy rapping were both borrowed from earlier Cute Kids songs: ‘99 Problems’ is a reworking of ‘Reid And Marcia’s Summer Of Fun’, and ‘I Wish’ uses the music from an instrumental track called ‘Jupiter’ from around late 2006 which I never finished.
There are a few lyric changes; for example, “dollars” becomes “sterling” and “trunk” becomes “boot” (I’ve got to remember my roots, y’all), and the girl in ‘I Wish’ is renamed Leonie after a girl I knew in university.
When I recorded the drums to this song, ‘Pinkerton’, I set up a camera and filmed the take as I was doing it. Here’s the video (complete with terrible drum posture)!
Lyrics:
How can you think when you’re talking into your own ears, when the days run into one but you’re clutching onto Pinkerton and all you need is a charming man or two or three to forget you’re not to bother anyway? Is it the waves that stop you from flying out across the sea? No? The skies must be your cage; they conspire to keep your feet in place. You’ll see one day - if you’ve opened up your eyes by then - that a story’s not a story until it ends. I could be your diary if you would just confide. A record doesn’t listen, it just speaks in repetition then dies. Oh well, I guess I’ll see you at Green. Your life is fine, or it was until you got off track. In a matter of an instances, you’ve tumbled foul of hopelessness. Just rest assured, though you might fall and skin your knee, you’ll see that’s not the kind of girl you wanna be. And yet in your dreams it’s much safer that you take a chance and awake back in your bed where you’ve evaded all the consequences. How cool is that, girl? (But it won’t get you to where you want.) But to you it’s overrated; happiness. I could be your diary if you would just confide. A record doesn’t listen, it just speaks in repetition then dies. Oh well, I guess I’ll see you at Green.
Context:
This song was written in Wellington at around the same time as ‘Lime Green’, and makes use of the same NOFX-inspired punk drumming as the other folkish songs intended to make up the A Counter-Culture Holiday project. In fact, the non-sequitur instrumental outro of ‘Pinkerton’ was originally the opening part of ‘Lime Green’, as these songs were supposed to be sequenced one after the other; an allusion to the Get Up Kids’ ‘Stay Gold, Ponyboy’, from Four Minute Mile.
As you would expect, there are numerous lyrical references to Weezer’s Pinkerton, specifically ‘Why Bother?’, ‘Across The Sea’, ‘The Good Life’, ‘Getchoo’, and ‘El Scorcho’, as well as another Weezer song ‘Only In Dreams’, the Green Album, the Smiths ‘This Charming Man’, and even a line from The Matrix. In the process of linking all of these references together, a story was forged about an introverted girl who likes to victimise herself for being unloved and trapped, with her desires and hopes only being acted out in her dreams, but whose obsession with burying all her problems in pop records means that she’ll never actually improve herself.
I was listening to Pinkerton a lot in New Zealand, and set out specifically to write an homage to it. If anything, the girl who is obsessed with that album is probably me.
(Source: cutekidsdontsellrecords)
Lyrics:
I would rather have a state of mind of stable peaks and valid troughs, if it would help me stay in line. But with over-analysis, I give myself a solid shot at counting eggs I haven’t got. Would you ever call me paranoid if I would ask of you to try that it might pull me from your void? Now, with you I’m struck with a fear that you will take what you have brought without a second moment’s thought. That’s the reasoning that breaks a man and leaves him stranded where he stands.
Context:
Right after I’d finished playing a show in my college’s bar in early 2009, a student approached me and said he was planning to write and direct a play to be performed at the annual campus summer festival. He had enjoyed my set and thought that my style fitted in well with his idea for the play, and asked if I’d be interested in writing some original material for him and performing it in character. I agreed.
I ended up contributing two brand new songs for the play, which was performed as planned that July. One of the songs was a double-act, with me playing the guitar accompaniment to another cast member’s singing, while the other song was to be sung and played by me alone. Since I had never really acted before (I was always more of a techie than a performer in school drama), my lines in the production were kept to a minimum, and my character was kind of the ‘mute musician’. But the songs were well-received.
After the play, I took the music from my solo song and wrote some new lyrics for it, adding full-band instrumentation to make a track that was originally supposed to go on that year’s demo, but I kept it off because I was never really happy with the recording. It always sounded too ‘rough’ to me.
The main instrumental section was heavily influenced by ‘You Are On My Frequency’ by Dave House, with the electric guitar parts my attempt at imitating Chris Fogal from the Gamits, and the acoustic middle section a rip off of ‘Ma Petit Loli’ by Nous Non Plus. Since I wrote the original song thinking it would only be heard once by a roomful of people, I didn’t really make much of an effort in disguising these influences. The title borrows from a Morrissey song called ‘Michael’s Bones’ and a Gamits song called ‘Audrey’s Davenport’, neither of which have any lyrical influence or relevance at all. The guitar riff, which wasn’t part of the song until I got around to recording it in late summer 2009, was based on the riff from the Thermals song, ‘Now We Can See’.
(Source: cutekidsdontsellrecords)
Lyrics:
If I’m still here in a year, the last thing I want you to say is you to say you said so. You’ll find the day I disappear that you can only count on the ones you never let go. I’ll see your eyes drawn to my face, and though I’ll hold you tightly as if I’d never been home, you’ll learn - much to your dismay - that there’s no point in reading a backwards palindrome. You say nothing to remedy the situation. You’re still the girl I knew before; nothing has changed about you. I find it reassuring. You’ll spot my fundamental flaws, but you will just ignore them and still enjoy the show. You say nothing to remedy the situation, and in the meantime I’m forced to wait for you to be all alone. Nothing can remedy the situation.
Context:
I wrote this on my Les Paul, which explains why it has more of a funky rhythm (and more end-of-line licks) than if it had been conceived on an acoustic. It also uses some more complex chords that I learnt especially, because I was trying to shift away from the simple, open chord progressions that I had been relying on.
It’s basically an imagined conversation with a friend of mine, in which I was admitting to becoming a little disillusioned with life and only staying happy by distracting myself with travels, since I was unsure where I was supposed to ‘be’. There’s plenty of lyrical reference to homesickness, one’s sense of belonging, and old companions. And in the end, it turns out that the friend was the home all along, but her being in a relationship with someone else - being otherwise occupied - was the reason for the absent sense of belonging.
Another one written in Amsterdam in early 2008, this demo was recorded a year later in my final year of university. I didn’t get around to recording a full version of this song with drums / bass / guitar until summer 2009, and even that’s not really finished yet.
(Source: cutekidsdontsellrecords)
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To Victor, My Spanish Friend In Estonia
(The Summer / Winter Demo)
Lyrics:
Motivate yourself to finally get the hell out of here. Retain your mental health, but - above everything else - remember odds are stacked against you so whatever you might do, keep your goal clear. Your chances of success will be impaired if you suggest that everything will work out OK anyway. To Victor, my old friend, you’ll find your freedom in the end of you try. That’s if you try, try, try (I mean you’ve really gotta try) ‘cause Estonia’s not a place to let its custom slip away or simply fly by, but with every dream I have you’ll one day stumble off the map I know everything will work out OK, my friend. So keep your head up and rearrange your life to survive, ‘cause a hostel in Tallinn can’t contain the ambition in your eyes. You’ve taken everything; a strategy you’ll need to win, so you think. But the facts you’re presenting don’t seem at all like the real thing. Instead, they lack consistency and that can truly confuse me and I don’t need that. Your chances of success will be impaired if you dare to suggest that everything will work out OK.
Context:
The inspiration for this song came from a trip I took with a friend to Estonia, where we stayed in a hostel in Tallinn run by a bizarre, shaggy-looking Spanish vagrant called Victor, whom we eventually became sure was a drug dealer. The circumstances of that trip were such that we had an unfathomably hard time actually leaving the city (having to alter travel plans, being too hungover, being unable to locate the train or bus stations), and so afterwards we concocted this whole back-story about Victor; that he was a Spanish traveller who, like us, had become trapped in Tallinn and was simply forced to take up work as a drug-dealer-cum-hostel-manager until he could make his eventual escape.
The song is basically a letter to him from ‘the outside’, urging him to continue to pursue his exit from Estonia, because while leaving is certainly possible, it is nonetheless essential that he remain focussed on his goal at all times.
This is without a doubt the most autobiographical song I have ever written, and the one within which I have included the most in-jokes. I actually never really expected anything to come of it - it was sort of a throwaway joke - but out of the handful of songs I ended up recording from the many I had written in Amsterdam, this one sounded clean enough to include on the Summer / Winter Demo.
The music is very simple (it shifts between the F chord and the D chord throughout) but I like the distorted electric guitars and acoustic guitars playing in tandem. And this bassline was probably one of my most enjoyable to record; I don’t usually put a great deal of effort into bass parts, instead tacking them on as something of an afterthought once I’ve gotten the guitars down, but this one fell right into place. To play the open noted F drop, the bass required a capo, which is the first time I’ve done that.
The vocals, despite sounding clean enough, were a pain to record because of the long note for “eyes” I hold right after the middle section. The idea was to sing a single word for long enough to allow the backing vocals to sing an entire rhyming couplet underneath. I have a notoriously low lung-capacity making sustained notes difficult, but I felt it was imperative to include confirmation that Victor was supposed to be a drug dealer, which I had been unable to squeeze into the main lyrics.
(Source: cutekidsdontsellrecords)
