I have been nominated for a total of 9 awards by the Indie Music Channel, the premiere source for indie/alternative music in North America, and I'm going to talk about the songs that have been nominated. This is Woke AF (the clean version, that we call "Woke AF minus F"). This song got us nominated for Best Alternative Band.
Earlier this year I was invited to join a group of artists who were to undertake the challenge of writing and recording an entire album or EP during the month of May 2023. Seemed like a fun idea, and I came up with the concept of a protest EP about the horrific events and decisions that the political right has foisted upon the rest of us here in the US. I would call it "Hatey". It would include a remake of Nick Lowe's "I Love the Sound of Broken Glass", transposed into the relative minor and produced like a Pink Floyd song, a reworking of Elusive Green to make the environmental message more obvious, and a couple more including this track (II'll get to the other one on the next post).
This sone started out as a dare, when I once said to a newscast "I should write a song and call it 'Woke As Fuck'. Stick it to the people ruining Florida." As often happens, my wife said, "Then do it!" It took about 15 minutes to write and arrange, and I knew I could put it together pretty quickly. In fact, it was the first song finished in the project.
I had made substantial progress on the whole project when on May 22nd disaster struck. My main studio computer went all Klingon on me and decided it was a good day to die. A complete crash - hard drive destroyed. Now I had a lot of everything backed up but without that hard drive I wouldn't make the deadline for the album project I had been invited to. So I had to bow out and I bought a new computer.
I sent the hard drive to a specialty facility and they were able to recover about 60% of my data, and fortunately for me all of the data I didn't have backed up. I got everything back and up and running the second week in June and decided to unleash the song on the world on July 1st. I had the simple video above commissioned and unleashed it on the world.
Within a week it had been streamed over 10,000 times. The video got over 3,600 views and a few truly bizarre comments - the kind of thing you'd find on a family slideshow of the reunion.
In either case, the whole "In your face" approach to the madness going on right now in Florida struck a chord. This was originally going to be just a bass, drums and guitar song but the moment I had the guitar tracks down I realized that it needed organ and clavinet. The keyboard solo was an accident - I was noodling around between takes and came up with the recurring sound you hear there. As for the guitar solo: it's probably the wierdest one I've ever done.
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