I had this instrumental for five years and never knew where to go with it. It’s a bunch of layered vinyl samples; a backward saxophone solo, some notes pulled from a guitar tuning lesson, orchestral chords, and some drum fills from one of my dad’s records. The structure came pretty naturally at the time but I didn’t have any specific concept of where the verses should be.

This year I made a point of going back and playing acoustic guitar over some of my old instrumentals, hoping to jolt my brain into conceiving of these ideas as breathing songs again. A lot of times it makes an idea sound contorted and worse, but every now and then a good rhythm guitar part seems like all I’ve been missing for years.

The main reason I’m trying a written blog for an aural subject is to pin down the trajectory intuition follows from the moment an idea takes root to the payoff two days or half a decade later when you’re staring at a full page of lyrics you never imagined you could cough up. I have no conception of the quality of these ideas but I can attest that the process itself is so revelatory every time that it’s just unthinkable until it happens.

So let’s hope these lyrics aren’t shit. I started with the line “every time I try to talk to you my mouth moves faster than the air can leave my lungs,” and the general notion of “bad faith” floating around in my head. For the longest time that was it; I had to dig back to a melody from three years ago to get the verse phrasing in the right place. The final verse and chorus melody were both pulled from a voice memo I made the day I realized I needed to stop being in marching bands. The lyrics I mumbled were “just tell me what you’re thinking.” I guess I was getting sick of standing silently on dots.

I tried to clash these little pieces of lyrics together over walks through a mac-mansiony Ann Arbor neighborhood across the street from my apartment complex. I was spending my quarantine days listening to Chomsky and Zizek and I was riding high on eat the rich fever. Still am. I think the first half of the song picked up on the diversion tactics I notice people using to avoid confronting ugly contemporary truths. With enough money it seems anyone can build a utopia of nostalgia, fortifying themselves behind walls thick enough to contain a delusion. The effect of wealth is the opposite of community. Every neighboring house has its own basketball hoop, hedges demarcating identical spans of grass, closed doors and shuttered windows. Every family has its own self-aggrandizing value system and a custom-tailored stream of incoming information. As though we never filled in all those Cold War bomb shelters, we just brought them upstairs.

Anyway. The second half of the song is more concerned with dismantling fear as a way of moving beyond ideological self-isolation. For many people, fear is a stem that extends all the way up into the afterlife, and I have to wonder how one avoids letting something with that kind of sway become their rudder. My alternative is to ground myself in the moment–letting my dreams, intentions and desires influence the world I want to create going forward. As opposed to letting my reactions shape the world I long to escape to. I guess the thesis is that we really need to step outside and make a concerted effort to connect over our unfiltered needs and visions in order to construct a world that serves us as more than a place holder. Here’s the words.

i’m not into easy answers

truth is inevitable

i won’t stiff arm my existence

for the comfort of the cold

so tell me what you’re thinking

what resonated first

don’t let this pass you over

premonition in reverse

i’m sick of saying peace be with you

running this place to the ground

quaintness is a small affordance

for the last to come around

so tell me what you’re thinking

what resonated first

don’t let this pass you over

premonition in reverse

every time i try to talk to you

my mouth moves

faster than the air can leave my lungs

i’m relying on a midnight hour flight

out of here to infinity acres

where more is said than done

i’ve come to think of it as bad faith

that keeps my mind preoccupied

with death until the day i die

i shouldn’t have to fear the light

keep my head down to be seen

fetishize the ends

as though they’ll justify the means

fuck that i want to stay here

live long enough to burn

at the end of the expansion

premonition in reverse