THIS PLACE IS A MESSAGE
the album is here. 10k aura points.
Oh hello there. THIS PLACE IS A MESSAGE is officially out and available on all the streaming services. I meant to write on Friday but I couldn’t figure out exactly what I wanted to say.
If I am being honest: I still have no idea.
Promoting things is extremely unpleasant. Making things? Divine. Sign me up! Promoting things? So undesirable it often stops people from creating them in the first place. I am willing to bet every single person reading this knows what I am talking about. Making the thing is generative. Promoting the thing is extractive. So few have figured out how (and have the resources to) do it in a way that doesn’t feel that way.
But here we are and here I am doing the thing. I appreciate every single one of you who takes the time to listen to these songs and spends time with them.
Here are some things I can tell you about the album:
The album title comes from a government paper in the 1980s that attempts to address the question of what we should do to warn future generations about nuclear waste sites. This was apparently a whole field of study but I haven’t been able to find as much as I would like online about it. The ideas folks came up with were wild. Atomic priesthood! Ray-cats! If you like finding poetry in government reports, this rabbit hole is for you.
The first round of tracking was done at 1357 up in Greenfield and I had to pull myself off the bathroom floor (yay puking!) to make it to the session as I had entered what turned into a record setting THREE DAY panic attack that morning. The frustrating thing about panic attacks is that they might seem like they’d be triggered by the thing immediately in front of you but they’re not. I was not panicked about recording. My body was revolting for other reasons. I am happy to report that SSRIs can be a wonderful thing in the right circumstances.
The last of the recording were the vocals for “Rate of Decay.” Some people have said they liked those vocals the best. It’s probably because I need a minimum of 8 hours warming up before I hit peak vocal performance.
The album art comes from a collage that I made with my daughter at MFA in Boston and therefore I love it.
The oldest song on the album is “Absent.” The newest song is “Take.”
“Keanu” was initially called “Break Point” because I needed to give the demo file a name and as I was about to do it I received a message that someone I knew was at their “breaking point” so I reversed the words and then could only think of the 1991 action film starting Keanu Reeves. In hindsight, I wish I had changed the title but when it sticks, it sticks.
With extremely few exceptions, everyone wrote their own parts on this record which is why the songs are way better than they were when they started.
There is an easter egg in the liner note that goes back to item #1 on this list and anyone who gets the reference will receive 10,000 aura points.
No one asked for this but,
I did it anyway.
PS: If you’re in the Boston area, we are playing with Dead Gowns (solo) and Tiffy on Tuesday, October 15th at Deep Cuts. Come through!
xoxo.
candace / all feels