I've been working on these songs for an incredibly long time, so, naturally, I have a lot of things to say about them. A lot of these things probably wouldn't interest anyone besides myself, but I really, really need this catharsis. It's tough keeping such a big thing to myself for so long! With any luck, dear reader, you might also find these little anecdotes entertaining, or better yet, they may reveal something about the songs (or about myself) that might help you understand them better. Or maybe not. Who's to say! The Rescue a song about vicarious love I wrote in an email to a friend that, over the course of writing the Rescue, I "constantly flip-flopped between feelings of immense pride and satisfaction, and feelings of intense shame and incredulity that I would create something so ridiculously poppy, or even so happy." The Rescue is the result, I think, of the part of me that creates indietronica like Cupcake and Window working at absolute peak capacity. I often feel like that part of me is an idiot, and is hindering my progress towards greater, 'weirder' and/or more 'mature' songs, but I guess that's a bit stupid, isn't it? I can't tell myself not to write pop music, or not to be happy. It's just in my blood, and I have to accept that. Thankfully, I managed to accept it enough to complete the song. I'm currently more than a bit sick of it, but when that wears off, I think the Rescue will end up being one of my favourite songs of mine (definitely a favourite to play live). I love that it opens the album with that cute lo-fi effect, and subsequently, with those cute lyrics… Maybe it's a little contrived, or just plain saccharine, but I guess that's who I am! (Oy vey.) Fun Fact!: all the harmonies were recorded in a very shallow cave, fitted out with a bench to serve as a resting point on a beautiful harbour-side bush trail. It was a surprisingly comfortable recording environment…! Braden+ a song about WE-RL This has an interesting history… Interesting to me, at least, and I'm the one typing here, so shhh. "Braden" is a post-rock instrumental, which you can find on my Soundcloud, based around a recording of my dear friend Braden playing the guitar. It's accompanied by a sample of Steve Roggenbuck, who we both adore, reading his poem 'somewhere in the bottom of the rain.' I really liked the song (it feels a bit like a guilty pleasure), and wanted to add it to future live CxDr shows - but how do you play post-rock live without a band? You don't. Instead, you remix it into fricked-up beats music. In every song I write, I try to do a minimum of one thing I've never done before. There are a few in this one - the drums are, generally, unlike anything else I've programmed, and there's some novel pitch-shifting which I'm particularly proud of - but you might notice that this is the only song I've written where the bass isn't constant. In other CxDr songs, it's almost always just a smooth sine-wave playing the length of the measure… Here, it's actually interesting! It's alarming that I don't do this more often, and I certainly plan to. Fun Fact!: www.youtube.com/steveroggenbuck - you're welcome. Sister a song about falling For such a melancholic song, Sister was a damn lot of fun to write. The structure and sounds were sketched out in December, but most of the progress on the song - writing lyrics, recording vocals and guitar, finessing everything - took place over the two weeks in mid-January I spent cat-sitting for my friend, with a huge empty house to myself. I descended into an unparalleled creative frenzy. Normally I find ironing out the kinks in a song to be painful and arduous, but the song was coming out just how I wanted it to, and I was just having so much fun! The cats would sit on the piano stool and watch me belting out the high harmonies in the dining area, and they seemed pretty chill about it. I also spent my time during this creative period producing my friend North Korea's concept album about the Jersey Shore, and starting work on my Adventure Time covers EP (which I am now totally free to work on, yes!!). Fun Fact!: the booming percussion right towards the end is just me tapping on my friend's dining table; and that weird scratching sound that ends the song is a fricked-up sample of Eric Wareheim calling his pet rascal. Our Heartless Master a song about ending the world Heartless was the most recently started song on the album, arising (as many songs do) from late-night sampling practice. I'd chopped up drums from This Will Destroy You, piano from Bon Iver, and vocals from Vanessa Carlton, and was having a great deal of fun just mucking around. Somehow, at some point, an actual musical idea emerged, which would become the ending refrain; lyrics were written very shortly afterwards, and work began! Perhaps it's strange that this, the most acoustic / 'organic' song on the album, is placed in between two of the synthiest, but my sister Tess and I spent a great deal of time trying to find the perfect track order, and this is where we arrived. Tess considers this song the "end of Act I," with Act II encompassing Window, You Tried, and Okabe, and Act III the rest. So, let's go with that. Fun Fact!: "pinpricks of the heart" is a reference to Karl Popper's negative utilitarianism, which the song is all about. Mmm, I love me some moral philosophy. Window a song about pessimism … or more specifically, the pessimism created by hanging around an optimist. This was basically the yin to Okabe's yang, in that I spent *so long* working on these drums, but actually loved every minute of it. I'm currently feeling about Window what I felt about Sister when I was working on it. (By currently, I mean twenty minutes before the album's release, waiting for the final render to export. I feel FANTASTIC.) Of all things, Window started off as a remix of Sweetie Belle. I wasn't focused on that goal for long, though - it quickly became an exercise in programming unique drum patterns and working with Drum Racks in Ableton. Somehow, along the way, a chord progression got thrown in to the mix. Then lyrics. Then five-part harmonies. You know how these things go. The lead vocals were incredibly difficult and incredibly fun to record - I enjoyed tapping into my inner nasal North American. Fun Fact!: this whole song is a fun fact, baby. It's got a guitar AND synth solo in it - how much more fun can it get?! You Tried a song about really fucking up Another strange beginning: YT started life as a remix of a track from the Halo 4 OST… I pillaged the competition page for orchestral stems, and discovered while doing so that literally every entry was terrible generic EDM that didn't sample creatively, or even coherently. I got so frustrated, I decided I'd make an instrumental hip-hop remix - that'd show those lacklustre producers! That'd show them all!! I ended up not doing this (half because of uni exams, half because it was a stupid idea, let's face it), but later on, the project morphed into an original song using the same soundboard. Not that I pick favourites, but in a funny way, YT ended up being my favourite track, because of how closely it matches the song in my head. On almost all the other tracks on LNL, I'm trying to write songs that end up texturally and emotionally huge, and it turns out it's *really hard to make music commensurate to that desire. I think the Rescue juuust makes it, but I often feel like the climatic sections of eg. Sister or Okabe, by virtue of my amateur production, aren't as awesome as they could / should be. Because of its restraint, the finished product of YT ended up 99% identical to the purest form of YT that exists in my head. (There's always a margin of error.) Fun Fact!: I wrote the lyrics to the chorus, as well as the majority of the instrumental, in November 2012, and only finished writing the verses in June 2013. Okabe a song about futility The main chord progression and drum line for Okabe arose from a jam on my LPD at 3am one fine April night. It took quite a while for the song to gain any structure - it was borderline beats music for some time. Most of the song, as it developed, was written at the piano, which maybe you can tell from the arrangement. The drums… augh. I tried to be true to my original LPD jam and keep them unquantised and wonky, but not too wonky. This was a huge task for me. I want so badly to grow out of the habit of working with strict, quantised drums (and four-on-the-floors…), but every fibre of my being screams out against it! The last three weeks before I 100% finished were spent listening to Okabe on repeat - I'd find a drum fill I hated, change it, re-export, re-listen, find a new drum fill I hated… I'm really happy with how the trombone came out on this, at least. I need to use more trombone. Fun Fact!: the "I can only take so many times / this is fucking killing me inside" vocals were recorded through my laptop mic while sitting in front of my pal areographe's house, waiting for him to come home from work and let me in. You can hear a whole lot of traffic heading towards a nearby highway. I love it. Airships a song about floating away Old habits die hard. The first version of Airships was a short, rubato guitar piece, full of lovely arpeggios and smothered in reverb… But of course, after recording it, I wondered what it would sound like if I chucked a bunch of beep-boops and a four on the floor over it. Et voila: instant chillwave. Maybe I'm not proud of that fact, but I'm proud of how absurd this song actually is while still (imho, ymmv) being completely listenable. It transitions into 5/4 at really strange times, the instrumental melodies are almost timeless, and the chords modulate like a motherfucker, especially in the guitar solo (which was written + recorded by my dear friend and fellow Dr Spaceman member Lee - thanks, buddy!). Somehow it all gels together… I think. Then again, when I played it to my friend Michael, he said it made him feel disorientated and nauseous in a completely unique and horrible way. So uh. Sorry about that, dude. :c Fun Fact!: there is a very subtle sample of this fantastic video somewhere in the song. See if you can find it! www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qzb87qir7Cs Remember Me In Your New Life a song about letting go This is actually a remix of my pal areographe's song "jodorowsky," which was itself a remix - one in a chain of plenty, as part of the 'exponential remix project' that began with Wolf in a Spacesuit's "Anger". (There are links to all the remixes at www.soundcloud.com/cherax/remember-me) I tried to make my remix almost completely unrecognisable, just as areographe did with this. When it was done, I passed my stems on to Lottery in Babylon, but I don't think he ever got around to doing anything with them… This was one of my first real forays into instrumental hip-hop, and it really set the tone for my later beats (at several points during the writing of Daybreak, I had to slap myself on the wrist and tell myself "stop ripping off Remember Me!"). You can definitely expect more ~beats~ out of me in the future. Possibly even more rap. Definitely more filtered samples of conversations for ambience. Fun Fact!: the particular conversation used here is a Skype conversation, in which my American friends talk quietly about Katawa Shoujo and Team Fortress 2. Lost No Longer a song about leaving your home and making a new one This was the first song from the album that I began working on - if my computer isn't lying, the project file was created in late April 2012. I didn't work on it constantly in that time, but still, it's certainly taken a while to finish! Despite how much my production abilities and songwriting style have changed since back then, I still really like this song, and I had always planned for it to be an album closer (especially after I wrote the outro). It sounds absurd, perhaps, but this song has always had a strong connection to Minecraft in my head… This is not to say it's a song about Minecraft! (No, I've written one of those before, and one is enough.) But the song is about discovering and exploring new lands, and I connect this in my head with the unexpected beauty that Minecraft's random map generation creates. If you've ever tried a 'nomadic' playthrough, you'll understand. Hopefully. Aside from that, though, the theme ties in with what the album feels like to me: a solidification of the idea that I am a musician; something that I can point to and say, "I did this, and I am going to keep doing this for the rest of my life, because that's what I do." It took me a long time to realise this about myself… but it's smooth sailing from now on, baby. Fun Fact!: if you listen close enough, you might just hear Mitch Hedburg on the track. "If you ever find yourself lost in the woods… fuck it, build a house."