‘We Are Not Where You Are’ 2.6.2023

I’m releasing a new album, as you may have got wind of from some of the preview clips I shared recently. Continuing the theme of trying to explain myself that I began in sharing track descriptions along with those clips, here’s an attempt at describing ‘We Are Not Where You Are’ as a whole. Once upon a time, these would’ve been called ‘liner notes’ and printed on the sleeve of the record. It’ll be available on Friday 2nd June and you can hear for yourself whether this explanation illuminates or informs what you’re listening to or doesn’t match up at all with your experience of it. What I’m definitely not trying to do is to tell you how to listen to it or what you should be getting from it. I’m also not really explaining why I did it and to what end. Probably because I don’t think I know the definitive answer to that myself and I don’t think I’m required to justify creating something for the sake of it. I’m not even trying to sell it to you, it’ll be free to stream and if you like, you can completely ignore it but if you’re interested enough to give it a digital spin you might get a bit of insight into how it was put together. If you weren’t interested enough to give it airtime then just maybe a few words about what I was up to might make you wonder what it would sound like and encourage you to play it:

Possibly more than anything else I’ve recorded, ‘We Are Not Where You Are’ is an effort towards capturing some essence of spontaneous creativity.  Slightly paradoxically, I was using drum machines and / or loops as a backbone or starting point a lot of the time and I think I probably tried to keep the feel of everything else, especially actual instruments, as loose and human as possible around the robot beats and repetition of loops to minimise any rigidity or monotony.  

I also didn’t start with a fully written ‘song’ in most cases or any preconceived notions of what a track was going to be, so the recording process was more jam-like in nature until something emerged or suggested itself.  That’s a departure from the way I’ve generally worked in the past.  I didn't have time to practice parts before recording them since I was mainly operating in a way where one thing suggested another and I just recorded ideas as I was trying them.  This kept things fresh but perhaps also on a knife edge and has resulted in a raw and unpolished sound in places, but also some sense of immediacy and humanity or even – that wildly slippery term in rock and pop music - authenticity.  I left room for improvisation and experimentation to try and further reinforce the balance between the potentially unnatural or inelastic electronic, synthesized elements against not entirely predictable organic, human elements. 

This approach did mean it took me some time to carve out what I felt were meaningful arrangements rather than just interesting but crowded jams.  The balance of contrasting sounds also challenged my technical skills and I had to learn some production and mixing techniques to try and make some sense out of materials that were / are a something of a raw and unfiltered expression of creativity attempting to fuse different genres and textures into one cohesive whole.

In terms of what I’ve ended up singing about, I’ve realised that there aren’t any straight up, exclusively love or relationship based songs on there. Maybe that’s a feature of my age and stage, maybe we’ve got enough of those, maybe everything I’ve started writing on those themes sounded too trite, hackneyed or not interesting or original enough. Or maybe that’s just not where my focus has been over the last while. I could ask myself why it should even occur to me to mention that at all and if it’s even an interesting or unusual characteristic. You’d probably expect love songs on a pop album and versions of love songs in some other genres but it can’t be unheard of to have music that doesn’t necessarily include that particular subject. At one point I was wondering what I could write lyrics or songs about in an age where billions of words are being generated by people online every hour of every day. What combinations of words might I select that would have any more particular significance than those continually streaming from our devices? And in that context why would they be any more worthy of attention than anything else? I didn’t get around to writing the song about how I can / why I would write a song at this point yet or find a way to express how a song might keep itself afloat and unburied in the avalanche of alphabet, the tsunami of text deluging our eyeballs but I did seem to continue collecting words and phrases and ideas and I’ve ended up with things that certainly look and sound a bit like songs after all.

The twist for me is that I wrote far fewer actual words than in a lot of my previous attempts at songs, perhaps because of these issues of what to write - or not write? - in a time of information / textual overload but maybe also as a not wholly conscious attempt to do more with less and explore linguistic economy as a virtue. Of course, I might be blowing that out of the water as I write these hundreds of words explaining how few words I’ve used in the songs on my album but there it is, you might listen to the music / lyrics without ever feeling the need to read any of this stuff I’ve written about it.

I’ve gestured vaguely at what was in my mind when I wrote what I’ve written in my descriptions of the individual tracks (which you’ll find on the release on Bandcamp or in other posts about the preview clips on this site) but, believe it or not, I avoided going into too much detail because I don’t want to tell anyone what to think or take from a song or ruin it by defining expectations or being prescriptive in any way. I very much believe there is no one interpretation even for me and lyrics aren’t in the business of presenting a clear, logical or even rational argument so there’s little point in my trying to define precisely what each lyric ‘means.’ I did try making a list of ‘themes’ that the album deals with and this is what came out:

Zen
Consciousness
Creative genesis
Process
The personal and political
Fragility of human plans
Ideology
Perspective
Empathy
Argument
Skepticism / Cynicism / Maintaining an open mind
The economy of outrage
Sophistry
Disorientation
Paradigm blindness
Environment
Species extinction
Complacency
Existential ennui
Keeping the dream alive
Self knowledge
Resolution
Staying receptive
Misanthropy
Mistakes
Progress not perfection
Genetics
Evolution
Technology
Experimentation

So now, I have undoubtedly written many more words about this album than I ever did in actually making it.