Liner Notes: if not a river

"I can learn to be blank / saying I to abyss / in darkness my delicate "I am" / not in echo" - Dan Beachy-Quick, 'This Nest, Swift Passerine'

Liner notes are great. We established that last week, right? And a bummer thing about being a bedroom band is no physical releases? So why not do them on the blog? Yeah, you remember. Today, I’m looking at my second album, if not a river, from 2017.

Why revisit this album now? Well, I made some music videos. You might not call these videos “technically sound” or “all that interesting,” but you have to remember I consume a lot of THC. Wait, that’s later. The buttoned-down way to talk about my process here is I take a lot of walks. Shit, before moving to West Ridge? I walked everywhere. While I’m walking, I’m noticing things. Little things that I think are cool, or little experiences I want to preserve. I can’t, though—when I go back and watch these videos, I do not get fully transported back to the initial experience of wonder that made me reach for my camera. My first thought is, “I’m glad Past Me gave Present Me this little memory, that I can now experience again anew.”

One motivator for this project was a Defector article from Corey Atad, called “Good, Bad, or Invisible, CGI Makes Movies Unreal.” Here’s a pull quote that sums up a lot of how I felt trying to do this:

In one of cinema’s earliest recordings, Auguste Lumière and his wife Marguerite are seen feeding their baby daughter Andrée. The footage, shot by Louis Lumiére, lasts only about 40 seconds or so. Presented as part of the Lumière Brothers’ first-ever commercial public film screening in a 10-film program on Dec. 28, 1895…the short made an impression that has persisted more than a century. A perfect representation of what the Lumières called "Actualités,”... Maxim Gorky and Georges Méliès would both later describe their experiences attending that first screening at the Salon Indien…recalling the particular fascination they and the rest of the audience had in seeing leaves on trees in the background moving in the wind. There, at the birth of cinema, the medium made itself indispensable—not by showing people something they’d never seen before, but by capturing something of the quotidian and making it present.

So yeah! Think about phrases like “capturing the quotidian and making it present” or “in 1895 leaves on trees moving in the wind but seen on a screen was basically a miracle.” Then consume some THC, full-screen the YouTube on your computer, put on your most noise-cancelling headphones, and let’s watch some music videos.

cover art by me, I believe this is Pratt Beach? (credit: Chris Corlew)

if not a river

Regarding the epigraph: I didn’t read Dan Beachy-Quick’s This Nest, Swift Passerine while I was writing this album, but I was trying to channel it. This album is the last thing I wrote before my son was born, and it was written with a lot of late nights trying to enter into an altered and transcendent consciousness. I’ve said before that I believe all art exists out there in the aether somewhere, and you just gotta go find it. These songs are me trying to dive and swim really deep into the art ocean, often with Jasper “Jack” Daniels as my co-engineer. For a lot of reasons, this type of record can’t be made again. Still, it’s what I’m most proud of as far as solo work goes. May it groove and soundtrack your day pleasantly.

blue-fingered dawn

This song feels spare and effects-obsessed in a way I wouldn’t write now, but these are two of my favorite riffs I’ve ever written. Pretty sure I was listening to a lot of Minus The Bear writing this song. Who writes a minor key beach song! I do.

This video was a fun day with my kid. We had some free time, I think we’d just moved to West Ridge, and I wanted to see what The Beaches With Parking Lots were like. This is one of the ones you see if you get off around Lawrence. I don’t remember its name but it starts with an E.

sprinting the rusted stairs

Definitely was listening to a lot of To Pimp A Butterfly and untitled unmastered. writing that bass line. I’m a sucker for fast bass and ride cymbal/rimshot drums.

Sometimes the title of the song and the back of your building make for a good video pairing. I wrote this song before I lived in this building, though. Did the other building have rusted stairs? Well.

unseasonably warm

Really not trying to start each of these with “here’s a better song I tried to rip off” but I really was trying to write my own version of Donnie Trumpet’s “Something Came To Me.” That song is such an incredible bit of just playing, in every sense of the word playing, with your instrument. I wanted to do that here, and I do think the end result is fun and playful.

This was filmed in like February or March, after a huge snow melt. Too early for a snow melt. Luckily for us, cryptocurrency PACs are outspending the Koch Brothers in elections and AI is being forced upon us by extremely stupid and greedy people and we’re about to elect Donald Trump a second time, so we’ll have lots more unseasonably warm days to film music videos.

march with the fed-up crowd

This title is from when I was going downtown for a bunch of post-Trump-election protests. Let’s not elect Donald Trump again! Dipped back into that modal jazz chord progression we talked about last week, and I was clearly enamored with my beginner-level tapping abilities. I like this song, though. It could be re-recorded, but I like it.

The Stones River. Goddamn do I love the Stones River. This is where I grew up. I’ve been moved away from Murfreesboro for 18 years and that river is still flowing, you know that? Amazing.

lay in the crook of yr elbow

The outro riff had been written since maybe sophomore year of college, burning a hole in my riff-wallet, and I had to get it somewhere. Sometimes you write a riff—it doesn’t even have to be all that great—and you just have to have other people hear it. That drum beat is trying to rip off Run The Jewels’ “2100” isn’t it? You can’t hide from me, Past Me.

Again, since I don’t have gills, I have to film aquariums.

the ocean fights harder

Another title that represents my feelings about the US’s agonizing drip into fascism. The right wing fights harder, they’re better-funded, they’re louder and wronger. Speaking of loud, I enjoyed playing that whole tone scale over the loud chords. Song could stand to be re-recorded. Country could stand to have the right wing disappear.

If you don’t want to make a trip to Baltimore and go to the National Aquarium, idk what to tell you.

look at the mountains in Utah and never say die

For a while, this was the “gee willikers I shoulda been writin this way all along” song for this record (you’ll remember “fox chasing” being that on i dreamed a knife like a song you can’t whistle). And I’m proud of that outro. Smags heard this drum beat at a Solipse practice one time and wanted to do a live version of this song. But this song I think is the last writing of my Explosions In The Sky phase—I rely on tremolo picking and delay-pedal-accentuated tapping a lot less now. Still, I like this song. Rarely do I feel like I fully captured how I was feeling in a particular moment—which is kind of my goal with every album/book/anything I put out—and I feel like this album, with this song as its climax, fully captures where I was at from like 2011-2017.

Literally filmed in Utah and Idaho. Actually I think I filmed this music video before I even wrote the damn song. It was Tommy Beanbags and me, cruising through what should still be Shoshone and Bannock territory, going to witness the San Juans getting married. Goddamn I love that big sky.

into the uncertainty

Sometimes you just wanna make a cool little groove to walk around at night to, you know? Elephant Gym writes these kinds of grooves. This was a super cut-and-paste from other ideas (some leftover stuff from making podcast music for Small Beans and Gamefully Unemployed), every instrument kinda play whatever, throw shit at the wall song. Every time I listen, I’m happy with how it turned out.

Another fun day with the kid in this video! This is at The Color Factory in the basement of the Sears Tower. Well worth a visit.

once again, would be cool to put a back cover here, but (credit: Chris Corlew)

Every time I listen, I’m happy with how it turned out. This album was written under the influence of a lot of whiskey and self-doubt—it’s shocking it exists. A major motivating factor was “well you’re not just gonna write one album, right?” Here’s to pushing yourself as an artist, because you have no other choice.

Sorry you got an email,

Chris