Stick Around - my first single for 2022

 

Funny how things happen in the world sometimes. Not necessarily funny as in "ha ha" or even a "Nelson haa haa" but as in the weird sequence of events that can lead from one place to the next. My new single is like that - someone had to die for me to create it.

Don't get me wrong - I wish that person was still with us. I didn't know him although he was an acquaintance of a friend. I was shocked at the impact his death had on me. I'll get to all of that.

Those of you know know me quite well (i.e. no one who reads this blog full of curse words and rants) know that I've been struggling with a new album for several years now. I have shaped and re-shaped it a number of times. I have written and abandoned songs. The concept has shifted several times. I keep writing new songs that don't fit the concept.

A fucking pandemic happens.

I wrote a single for a charity album to raise funds for Nurses back in the early days of the pandemic and that led to a whole slew of releases over the past 20 months. I had a couple of surprise hits, from "He Takes a Knee" to "Kauro-chan" to even a Piano Sonata! I had videos produced, won some awards, and had a pretty solid year.

But that album is still percolating and I've actually finished a couple of tracks. Why not release one of the to whet the appetite?

But did it have to be this one?

Everything about this song is meant to disturb the listener in ways they won't even notice. I'll get to that.

I had written a song called "Stick Around" for the album. It was a break-up song, but with a horrid twist: it was from the point of view of the man who had been dumped, telling his now ex-girlfriend that it's okay to leave him. Mansplaining the breakup to the person who dumped him. In other words, she broke him and he's trying to rationalize it. I've written a few songs like that. One of my early singles from 2021, "That Man" is like that - a love song until you realize that the protagonist of the song is actually a stalker in the last verse.

I've back-burnered this song for a while, trying to come up with a suitably subtle and weirdly off-kilter arrangement. To let you know how long it's been germinating I had it mostly worked out when Chester Bennington committed suicide.

Now like I said, I didn't know him. I didn't much care for his music either although I have to admit it's growing on me these days. But a close friend of mine has children who attended school with his children and he was completely thrown by this. He talked about what a great guy Chester was - that he saw nothing that could signal that this was coming.

Unfortunately, this is a pretty common story when it comes to depression. I have learned the hard way that I myself can't recognize it. I've never experienced it myself and I don't know how to recognize it in other people. When people suffering from depression kill themselves its almost always a shock to at least someone close to them.

Not long after his death, Chester's widow posted a video of him playing with his children from the day before he died. He looked ordinary. He looked happy. She captioned it "this is what depression looks like."

Very powerful. It hit me like a ton of bricks. Depression is insidious in that it hides itself so that the closest people to those who suffer never even notice.

And that's when I got hit with a bolt of inspiration - By changing very few lyrics I could make my Mansplaining Song be about something else. To be about THIS.

So I re-wrote the song. Took out a verse. Lightened up the guitar sounds. Re-imagined the bass...

If you've watched the video above or just heard the song by now let me explain a few of the things I did and why it unsettles you, even beyond the gut-punch at the 4:35 mark.

First, there's the intro keyboards. It's on the V chord of the key of the song, using a sound that doesn't appear again. Your ears are expecting it and it never comes.

The drums are a drum loop. Drum loops aren't all that uncommon - Africa by Toto is a great example of a drum loop - the same pattern repeated throughout the song. Usually 4 or 8 bars. For this song the drum loop is 15 bars. This means that the pattern repeats, but it gets further and further out of sync with the rest of the song (with is in 8 bar patterns) as it goes.

Oh, and the time signature isn't what you think. It's in (drum roll please)...

8

4

The rhythm guitars are the most normal things about the song, each with their jangly open strings and passive voices. The top two strings of the guitar, the B and High E strings, are played open, without fingering, through the entire song.

The bass part originally matched the drums, but I came to realize that more of a U2 kind of performance would work better. Simple but holding the beat. But I'm not playing it on a bass (although I most often do play bass on my songs). This is a guitar that has been digitally tuned down an octave.

The strings on the choruses get an octave lower each time we play them.

I was 6 feet away from the microphone to record the harmony vocals.

The synthesizer solo is meant to be evocative of a trumpet, but I let the pitch wheel get wobblier and wobblier as I played, until that final sustained note feels artificial.

The lead vocals are actually multiple takes: One sung normally, one run through a filter that rappers use to thicken out their voices, and once whispering. The flubbed line in the last verse where I stammer out the line was an accident, but I liked it so I kept it.

And then there are the name drops. The first one was always going to be Chris Cornell, who I admired like crazy. the third one had to be Chester Bennington, to honor his inspiration of the song, but I wanted a person of color for the second name, to show that this is an issue that doesn't give a damn about skin color. I settled on Lee Thompson Young pretty quickly, because I was a fan of him as an adult actor (Rizzoli and Isles) and his death was so unexpected.

So I recorded the song and then put it on the shelf to work on the album and fit the song in. But that's taking longer than I wanted and I wanted to release a "best of 2021" album and it needed a new single. So I took a few songs and had videos commissioned.

The video for this one came back and when the name drops came it felt like a punch to the gut. It was perfect for the album. So I queued up the release of the single and the album as well.

The album comes out January 21st:

The single is out now. The video is up at the top of the post but it's also available at all of the usual places.

There is help available all over the world. Just ask. Some never did.

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPDxjE1ddlg

Spotify:  https://open.spotify.com/track/5VXKEPFLPbhfi6TFDvc0as?si=9f7dfbfd4856489e

Bandcamp: https://animeraider.bandcamp.com/track/stick-around

Soundcloud https://soundcloud.com/animeraider/stick-around