The World Outside

Here's a song from a while back, from the album "Atomic Weasel Ball"...that's STILL unreleased!! I really was gonna put it out, but so much was happening in my life at the time I was finishing it that I put it aside and let it sit. That said, I still think it's got some pretty cool stuff on it and I promise to get that going very soon. Your waiting will be rewarded...by more waiting, as Dave Brockie from GWAR used to say. Anyhow, I'm fond of this tune, and I like the way the video turned out too. I originally wrote this with my wife Cynthia's mother in mind, as she was going through some very difficult times with dementia...she asked me once at breakfast if I was the one who had come to pour milk in her eyes. I assured her I had no intention of doing that, but the phrase stuck with me. So partial writing credit to Ellen.

The album "Atomic Weasel Ball" was started shortly after "Arphus", and was kind of a reaction to it, I think. I'd been working on playing almost all of the tracks myself for so long, and I was pretty sick of hearing myself and my own licks. This was when I started doing songs that were all, or nearly all, created from loops, mostly just for fun at first and without the intention of making finished songs. I had really resisted the idea of this early on, because A. I hadn't actually played those bits and B. I didn't want to be "Led by the nose" with the pre-recorded material. But as time went by my perspective changed. True, the easiest thing to make with loops was bad-sounding Hip Hop, but with some time and work I found that I could create tracks that sounded very musical. And I'd certainly used other musicians before for tracks! These guys were just not in the room at the time. I'd had to edit studio musicians tracks, too. The other part, the being led...well, I'd been led by my own licks and limitations, and using some other people's  was helping me generate new ideas, ones that neither I or the artists who made the loops had had before. It was all in the juxtaposition of different small bits, and the manipulation of them...some are cut in even smaller pieces and shuffled, some are modulated to different keys, some are reversed, and many are all three...and there are a lot of other manipulations. It's really a bit like collage, in a way, except in an audio format. So for good or ill, I started getting kind of loopy. This song is all loops...I'm not actually playing any other instruments than the Acid Pro 6 and the Cubase 5. Oh, and singing.

 The lyric content on this song is, as I've said, about aging, and about memory loss and confusion, and about my hopes and ideas of reality and afterlives. It looks from the video as though I believe that after we die, we apparently turn into birds, butterflies and sunlight. And who knows, perhaps we do. I still like the quote concerning reality from Robert Anton Wilson..."I don't believe in anything, but I have my suspicions". I certainly have strong suspicions!! I have plenty of anecdotal evidence from my own experiences, but proof...well, all I can say is that we'll all find out someday. As I said in the song, I really don't think there's anything to be afraid of. I don't think the Universe hates us. In fact, it may be quite the opposite! All the best to you out there.