Part of This

ALRIGHT WIRELIGHT-HEADS (is that catchy? I might need to workshop it a bit. Wirelighters?): after a few months of chucking new music at you and talking it about extensively online, we’re finally coming up on the end of this promotional cycle. Megaturquoise comes out next week, which is crazy and more than a little frightening to think about, and I just dropped Single #3, “Part of This”, last Thursday. If you’ve been within earshot of my ongoing Social Media Yelling, you’ve probably already heard me talk about Part of This a good bit, but in order to keep things consistent, I might as well do a deep(er) dive here on the website.

For reference, here’s the song (click that pic):

I wrote Part of This sometime in the 2018 to 2019 era - I guess we can call that the “Pre-Covid” era or “P.C.”, so ~2019 P.C. - and the path from conception to finished recording actually went quickly by my typically glacial standards. It helps that the song is relatively simple and unadorned compared to some others on the album; Everything’s Cool, for instance, has somewhere north of 40 different tracks, and Part of This is closer to 10 or 15. For this one, I was shooting for a fairly specific mood/vibe, and I think that the spare instrumentation goes a long way in helping establish that. The song is anchored by a pair of very bright, prominent acoustic guitars, and everything added on top of those guitars tends to play a more textural/supporting role than a leading one (the ethereal, heavily delayed electric part in the intro is a good example); excepting, of course, the trumpet tracks contributed by Emmanuel Echem.

And speaking of the trumpets: goddamn, I love ‘em. You’ve already heard me say it, but I’m gonna keep saying it. In the early stages of arranging and recording Part of This, I was playing around with ideas to drive the song forward when the drums kick in on the second verse, and for whatever reason I ended up experimenting with some horn samples in my sound bank. I certainly have no opposition to using software (read: fake) instruments in my songs, but for such an attention-grabbing part, I felt like it might be worth bringing in the professionals, and I’m so glad I did. I sent Emmanuel a rough version of the song with my software trumpet tracks included, and he sent me back a series of tracks that included his renditions of the parts that I wrote as well as a few Emmanuel-penned, improv-y ideas. I ended up using pretty much everything he sent, and you can hear those jazzier parts tucked away in the back of the last chorus.

Moral of the story: trumpets are sick; use them in your music.

So here we are, just over one week out from the full album release. This media blitz has been a very new, unfamiliar, and often frightening process for me (Relentless Instagram Poster is not my natural state, believe it or not), but it definitely feels a hell of a lot better than my old strategy of “release album under cover of night and hope no one notices”. Having been able to devote so much time to each of these three singles over the past few months, it’s a bit of a bummer that I’m about to drop five additional songs all at once on the full album that won’t enjoy that kind of lavish attention, but I guess at some point you have to trust that your audience a) exists, and b) will listen to the whole album. You can lead an audience to water, but you…well, you can’t make them drink…your music. That one might also need additional workshopping.

Overall, though, I’m excited to put this whole thing out, because I want you to hear it. Now that we’re in 2021 A.C. (“After-Covid”), I’m also working on pulling some shows together, so maybe one day you can even SEE ME PLAY SOME OF THESE SONGS LIVE. Wouldn’t that be something?

For now, here’s the album art:

See you next time.