The Sea

In all of these conversations, I noticed some patters in the way the listeners spoke about my music. Something significant Gabriell talked about was the arctic image he associated to my music: 

“This thing of solitude, of a traveler, a traveler searching through noire experiences of breath and thoughts and eyes and flesh and night and stars and dreams. I had an image [...] it really was a little overbearing listening to some of the songs, was this image of a glacier, this colossal white ice-y mound of density that is travelling in its solitude, in its complete solitude, through the vast empty oceans overarched by the cosmos and the stars and infinite beauty and floating through infinite desolateness and darkness and distance, and its like a slumbering glacier that is disembowelling and unwombing all this dark matter that has been gestating within its bowels for forty thousand years and is finally under the cosmos and upon this vast dark desolation, being given to the air after its been in the earth and in water for centuries and centuries and centuries… […] This thing of transformation, of the wild wilderness, dream-like […] lost, searching through harmony, time,” (Gabriell, 3:28).

This quote really made me think about how my music does in fact feel fairly isolated and lonely, and hearing that he pictured a traveler and a glacier's journey highlighted that even more.  Something distinct about this too that I noticed was how connected to the sea the imagery was, and this allusion to the sea was something I noticed throughout all of these conversations. Both Isaiah and Nat also alluded to the tides in our conversations:

“It felt with always like the notion of like pulling something or pushing something away, um or reaching for something that I think maybe you know the natural instinct, or at least mine would be like, you know, to literally pull something to where you feel it deep in your gut,” (Nat, 16:55).

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“There’s like a push and a pull with it, where I feel like compelled to like nod along and you know like tap my feet and stuff, but then just like certain choices that you make kind of like pull you away from that, and it’s almost like a battle kind of. […] You’re grooving to it but then it kind of like— you’re like ‘oh!’ […] It makes you think,” (Isaiah, 8:13).

Both of them, after I asked where they felt the music in their bodies, used the phrase "push and pull" to describe the music. Nat's explanation of this push and pull involved a natural instinct as well, which brought up the idea of a baby's first instincts, which are to reach and grab. It's an instinctual thing, very animalistic and wild, which is also touched upon in Isaiah's discussion of this push and pull in relation to the urge to move to music. Dance and moving to sound is another very animalistic urge, and it's interesting that my music brought up those primal instincts. Gabriell also elaborated on this connection of my music to the tides in the following quote:

“Some of the language was just like so visceral and body felt, like ‘nausea bones, I just want to be human man, with you,’ and then it changes at the end ‘with you.’ You see all of it has this lovely journey. Like the tides, it goes onward and its trying to reach somewhere but then it recedes, and then it goes a little further but then it recedes, and its like this infinite journey, this Sisyphus-like journey, of like trying to reach something but ever failing but ever go forward anyways in spite of it but never ceasing to receded but also never ceasing to return, and that kind of feeling. And then for a moment you reach a place where you can say ‘with you,’ but then inevitably it will recede anyways,”  (Gabriell, 18:56).

Here, Gabe continues referencing the ebbing and flowing feelings that were evoked by my music, supporting the imagery of the sea that continues throughout my discography.  With his observation, I was brought back to how these tidal feeling might continue to reflect the loneliness in my music that he commented before.  Gabe directly talks about how the tidal nature of my songs, always moving forward only to recede again, aligned with my songs, such as in Human where I spend the song slowly but surely opening up more and more until I can get to the point where I can say "with you" at the end, but then return back to the loneliness of my journey with my next songs. I think this tidal nature definitely reflects on my perspective of life as a series of ups and downs, constantly moving forward and yet intimately connected to the past, always changing and yet the same. 

Vagueness and Mystery

We also discussed how mysterious and vague my lyrics often are, which I think is something that can further act to isolate me as the songwriter, even creating distance between me and the listener. Here were some quotes from the guests highlighting this:

“[Another lyric is] ‘it falls apart every time’ […] in some songs it’s like very- it seems like very metaphor heavy and it’s very abstract, and like visual, and feels like you talk about heat a lot and feeling it in your body, very earthly things, and then in some other songs […] more specific and detailed situations,” (Natalie, 3:40).

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“This thing of— often I didn’t fully understand on a— I understood it on a visceral level [but not on a] knowledge [level]— sometimes it was kind of abstract in its— it’s sound, it’s music in the air, there’s nothing more abstract than music, but yet it felt so embodied and physical and it was just a balance, it was a beautiful kind of strange-familiar, ‘cause you could relate to the physical things about it, and I mean just like ‘I cough small words’ such a physical, visceral phrase, […] and yet the sounds […] it was dream-like,” (Gabriell, 24:13).

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“The lyrics kind of struck me, again, in like the Tom Waits-y like kind of, more painting a picture as opposed to telling a story most of the time. […] It was pretty ambiguous most of the time, where, you know, you really had to sit and think about it,” (Isaiah, 11:03).

With Natalie, I talked to her about how I've noticed that writing more specific lyrics rather than the vague ones I used to write is a more recent thing. That might align with my growing ability to be vulnerable in my personal life, and feeling more comfortable with getting specific about the things I talk about in my songs.

My conversation with Gabriell however made me realise that while I talk about more specific things, the specificity is still used in a way so as to keep the listener in a mystery as to the real subject of the song. He pointed out the specific phrases I used such as "cough small words" that paints a very specific picture but doesn't actually tell the reader about anything concrete about my life, just imbues them with imagery and an associated feeling. At another point, around 26 minutes in, he also talked about the line “the blood where the stitches meet" from I Want To Eat as being another very specific detail that does nothing to actually tell a specific story— it only aids in creating the mood and highlighting the odd visuals that strike me as the songwriter important and relevant enough to include in the song. 

With Isaiah, the ambiguous lyrics were something that further invested him into my music as it created an alluring mystery that he wanted to unravel and understand. This provides another element to the vagueness, in which instead of alienating the listener and further isolating me, the songwriter, it forces the listener to engage actively in the music and thus brings me more community. Gabriell expands on this allure of the mystery in the following quote:

“This box of music, of sound, of airy like composed sounds and words and flesh and disease and also healing. And I thought, you know, you don’t always have to understand it, you can allow it to haunt you. Sometimes the most vital way to understand something, truly, is to just allow it to haunt you in its mystery, and let it haunt you, ‘cause there’s nothing more intimate and into our thoughts than mystery, nothing. […] There’s a special kind of intimacy that is only found in not knowing what it is and yet feeling that you know, ‘cause then the knowledge belongs entirely to the physical, it hasn’t been intellectualised or remodelled to fit a kind of intellect/mind/memory. It lives in the body. It digests physically.” (Gabriell, 27:18).

Gabe makes a good point about how my music having an air of mystery can allow for the listener to have a more intimate and emotional relationship to the music, in which they can feel that they know very well what I'm talking about just because of the metaphors I use and what images that conjures up in their own minds without having to know every personal detail. This reminded me of one of Nat's comments on my song Fate N Fade Away in which she said the following:

“There was the metaphor of the butterfly, and it flying higher and then, I don’t know, it felt— even though it was a metaphor, like, you know, the others songs, that one felt more personal for some reason, and I feel like I could clearly see like the perspective on whether it meant like the butterfly, or like flying high, and then it was like 'I want to come down,' [...] that song itself felt like a journey of like wanting something and then at least like what I took from it was like you wanted something, you got it, and it’s not— it ends up not being what you wanted and then it was like wanting to escape. […] It felt very personal," (Natalie, 11:56).

Her comment was significant as Nat had just been telling me about a situation in her own life that reflected exactly the situation she's talking about here, and I found it interesting that she took this song to be very personal not necessarily because I was revealing anything about myself but perhaps because it stirred up very personal events in her own life that made her feel seen through the songwriting.

Like a Movie

Going back to Gabriell's previous quote about mystery, I found his use of the word haunting to be interesting as it reminded me of something Isaiah said about my music:

“It almost feels like they [Tom Waits, Bob Dylan, Rolling Stones, etc] create their own world that you’re like living within when you’re listening to their music you know […] it feels like it’s like separate from you know the world, its like watching a movie kind of, and your music is definitely like that, like I feel like I’m watching a movie when I’m listening to these songs, and the movie kind of scares me a little bit, but it’s like, you know, I’m still watching,” (Isaiah, 6:33).

Isaiah describes my music as being evocative of a movie that scares him but keeps him watching. Gabriell also talked about this immersive element of my music here:

“It really does bring you into another place and another time, that’s why that nostalgia —that’s the word, that’s my word for you— the longing for a distant place, also necessarily involves a separation in time. Time and place both being separated.” (Gabriell, 17:09) & "It felt like you were in the room with someone, you were in a room that you weren’t supposed to be in, you were hearing someone say things. […] You’re not supposed to experience this," (Gabriell, 21:52).

He describes the music as transporting him into a unique world, supporting Isaiah's comments on how the songs feel like movies in an of themselves, which is interesting considering my background in film— I mean, I'm a film production major here at USC. Also, in previous quotes, Gabe's descriptions of the music reminding him of a journey further this cinematic experience of my music. It's interesting too, that he describes the songs both as journeys across land and very intimate moments in small rooms. He says it can feel so intimate that the listener is not supposed to hear this, and yet the music creates a world for the listener to step in to; almost as though the music is simultaneously pushing the listener away while bringing them in.

Nostalgia

A notable word Gabe brought up was nostalgia. In the previous quote, he uses this idea of nostalgia, a longing for something that is separate from the present, to characterise how the place that my songs bring the listener to exist in a particular separation of time that can make those places feel distant at the same time as they draw the listener in.

Both Natalie and Gabriell talked about how the songs brought up a sense of nostalgia:

“So definitely it felt nostalgic in some ways of things I’ve experienced, which maybe it’s related to where I feel it in my body, it still felt very internal, and I don’t think it brought up, you know, something concrete, more of just, you know, feeling, but it was cool to experience it where I felt it but it wasn’t attached to something, it wasn’t attached to a person, a memory, it was just like I remember this feeling because it was something of mine,” (Natalie, 18:28).

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“Something that really came to mind, a word, was nostalgia. And the original meaning of nostalgia is […] a morbid longing to return to one’s home or native country; homesickness as a disease, […] and it comes from the German Heimweh which is home woe. And I just had that feeling of homesickness as a disease, as a physical malnutrition of the air and climate and feeling that like the physical feelings the physical nourishment you need by being in the place of your nativity. […] I was having so many poetic images, that thing of the glacier, that thing of being in this winter— you know at the end of Frankenstein when the creature is in that Arctic abyss, that Arctic desolation […] it’s this antarctic, lonesome place, and then of course the creature kind of has this vision of the woods and that little cottage with the people and the warmth and the fire and the comfort, and then now here he is in this vast solitude of death and ice. It was very elemental, it was very physical. […] [Nostalgia] necessarily involves a separation in time. And I felt that, I felt time. […] Like how nostalgia is a physical disease of a lack of home, so time is a physical sensation, experience of being away, separated from something,” (Gabriell, 8:30 - 10:52).

Natalie uses nostalgia to reflect on how the music was able to stir feelings within her that existed not in the concrete visual/physical world, but solely within her as something that she could resonate with without necessarily pinpointing why. Gabriell's explanation  of nostalgia might help unpack that better as he explores how the concept is based on a physical homesickness, a longing for a place of comfort, and how that longed for place is necessarily separate from the present. This separation from the object of longing and one's present reality might explain how my music stirred relatable, experiential feelings in Nat without necessarily stirring specific events in her life as reference. The nostalgia found in the songs is a physical sensation in the body rather than a concrete, intellectual understanding of some occurrence.

The fact that nostalgia includes a separation from home by time also highlights the isolation that seems to be an undercurrent of all my songs. The physical separations in space and time only further the idea that I am alone and that these songs tell the journey of a lonely traveller.

The Animal and The Wild

Continuing with the content of my songs, everyone commented on how the themes in my songs were fairly consistent, alluding to earthiness and humanness:

“I noticed like a motif of heat, or you know just feeling that in your body,” (Natalie, 15:18).

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“Lots of food and like hungry metaphors,” (Isaiah, 9:42).

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"I wrote here, such a beautiful delicate balance between the animalistic, visceral, instinctive, and the royal harmonic, grounded human, heart-centred, feeling […] I think there was an undercurrent of the animalistic and the instinctive in all of them," (Gabriell, 20:08).

Nat saw the repetition of the idea of heat and the inner body, and Isaiah saw the repetition of the concept of hunger, which is something that lives inside the body too. Gabriell also alluded to the visceral, animalistic nature of the music, with the viscera also very deep inside the body and the animal representing who we are as humans: flesh and meat. This idea of flesh and meat seems to run through many of my songs, and I believe this reflects a deeper connection to my own humanity and the natural world around me.

Gabriell also said, “you have a gift of expressing poetic, airy concepts in such a grounded, physical experience. […] I wrote here the word transformation. […]  Transformation is a physical word, butterfly, the metamorphosis of the butterfly, it’s just very, it’s very physical change, begetting like very poetic usually abstract ideas and making them into embodied sensations,” (Gabriell, 14:26). The supports the idea that I and my songs are connected to the physical world of animal-humanity and nature. My ideas are expressed in primal ways, which might add to the more physical, emotional experience of the music, rather than an intellectual, easily understandable one.

Where in the Body?

When I asked where the music was felt in the body, Isaiah told me he felt it in the chest and maybe even the neck. Similarly, Nat said somewhere in the upper body, sometimes the mind, but never below the belt. I agreed, feeling that the music was very guttural and visceral, but also with some moments of headiness and overthinking-like feelings.

Gabriell's response, however, surprised me:

“[It was] the breath that I felt most. With each new song, […] I did feel, as the songs changed, and as the journey changed, or moved forward, or in stillness or whatever, that my breath also evolved with it. And I think music can do that to you.  […] The way we hear a word said or the way we listen to two sounds coming together and being engulfed, engulfed like the tsunami, by a water, a kind of shrouding, ghostly atmosphere that goes above it and then there’s the main chorus of sounds meeting sounds— this has the power to change the way we breathe and the way we inhabit our body. We breathe differently depending on what we’re feeling and nothing, nothing, nothing connects us to our emotions so well and eloquently as sound and music,” (Gabriell, 37:48).

It makes sense to describe the music as connecting to the breath, especially considering what Gabe said here about music being able to change our emotional state and thus change our breathing. I believe this could tie into the feeling of the tides that is conveyed in the music as well, since this in and out of the breath, as well as it's ability to grow softer or more intense, mirrors that ebb and flow of the tides. The breath connects us to the very earthly, elemental ebb and flow of life, flow of water.

My Growing Voice and Musical Choices

Another thing we discussed was how my music evolved from the first few songs I wrote to those I most recently wrote. Gabriell talked about this here:

“It’s funny that you say Brain Damage, Fire Starter, Open Mouth, those were the early ones ‘cause, I’ll be brutally honest, those are the ones I think I don’t remember as well, but I remember some of these later songs very well,” (Gabriell, 46:13).

My earlier work was still me searching for my voice, searching for ways to convey my ideas in striking ways, and the fact that Gabriell describes the later ones as being the more memorable ones shows how I've managed to grow to have that more striking songwriting.

Isaiah also talked about how he noticed that I was better at finding my voice the further I went along in my writing, but he also talked about how he felt my voice throughout, even in the earlier songs. When talking about all the songs, old and new, he felt that my voice was very clear and intentional. He says here:

“I felt like all of your songs were really intentional, like I felt like the instrumentals really coincided with the lyrics of each song, which again that could just be confirmation bias, but I thought they all fit really well,” (Isaiah, 2:23).

This idea of my writing being intentional, with musical and lyrical elements alike being well thought out, might be an underlying element to what exactly my voice is: it is something that is carefully crafted, something that might allude back to that image of isolation in which I, as the songwriter, am too selective about what I show my audience for that separation between us to fully be closed. It's meticulous, even when I don't recognise what I'm doing. For example, both Nat and Isaiah brought up elements that I hadn't thought too hard about but that struck them as being carefully crafted in a way that made them feel strongly about the music they were listening to:

“I think Fate N Fade Away was my favourite one, because I think the chord progression at the start, it’s like, you know, it’s a like very popular progression, and I’ve like used that before, and it kinda caught me off guard because all your other songs are very like, you know don’t know what chord’s coming next, but that one— but then you twisted it though, you made it unique. I wrote down that it emphasised the imagery, which is conflicting,” (Isaiah, 0:59).

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“On the lyric [in Boil Over] you say ‘its nice to have a friend’ and that’s the only line thats like really low in the music and the rest of it is like pretty loud and that’s the only lyric that’s like— it’s really low […]  [you had] just like that one lyric kind of singular and do you think it like, I don’t know, emphasised that lyric more or do you think you intentionally wanted it to kind of like fall under…?” (Natalie, 1:46).

Isaiah noticed how the conflicting imagery in Fate N Fade Away of the normally happy, beautiful butterflies, and the descriptions of burning and decaying matched the subversion of a commonly used chord progression as the song went along. That choice to take something common and change it in a way to make it darker was also noticed by Nat, as that lyric of 'it's nice to have a friend' in Boil Over subverted the way that lyrics are meant to be audible, and instead, in being almost too low to hear, called her attention to it more and made it heavier. 

Spades

The one question that I received from everyone was what spades meant to me. Considering that I have a song named spades, the cover art for my single has an ace of spades on it, and I have a spade tattoo, it makes sense that my listeners would want to know its significance to me. 

The whole purpose of me writing the song Spades was so that I'd be able to explain the concept further so that my listeners would understand the idea behind the prominent symbol in my work, and the fact that it was still unclear after listening to that song was interesting to me. The whole concept around the spade is that a spade is the end of a shovel and my music is meant to be me "digging up" my personal emotions and such and expressing them through song.

I guess the phrase "spades digging up spades" rings more true than I thought, as I never noticed until now just how distant my personal life is from the content in my songs. I might know exactly what I'm referring to in the lyrics, but I never make it easy for the audience. Rather, I keep the truth concealed, even in songwriting which is meant to be a way of expressing the feelings that I wouldn't willingly express otherwise. I might be digging for content to explore in my music, but what I'm finding is more spades, more evidence of the fact that I haven't reached the bottom. My songs are often not actual depictions of events or situations that hurt me, but commentary on how it's so difficult for me to dig in the first place and be willing to put real vulnerable things on display in my writing.

Dialogue

Another quote that particularly stuck out to me was Natalie's description of how she sees my creative process:

“I like, you know, how you say that it’s like you get, not necessarily the idea from something else, but you get the imagery from something else and you can build off of that and then you can let that become your own and then, I don’t know, I just like that spiral um and that build. […] I think that’s a cool concept to just— your music and your art is created off of these things and your experiences of other people’s experiences,” (Natalie, 28:10).

I'm a firm believer in stealing. Stealing is very different from plagiarising however, and I think the way Nat describes it is exactly what I believe has allowed me to find success in my songwriting; I take concepts from others that stir up something impactful for myself and I use those images or metaphors to create something that is my own and tied to my own experiences. My art is a dialogue with everything that's come before it and everything that has impacted me.

Gabriell expands on this dialogical quality of my songs in the following quote:

"It felt very— this is what is being felt in the moment and this is my expression, and I’m sharing that expression with you, and I did, it was a shared experience,” (Gabriell, 22:30).

Especially after having recently read Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed for WRIT150, hearing how my music allows me to have a dialogue not only with my influences but my audience is something that stuck out to me and I hope to never lose that in my work.

Wrapping it Up

Going back to the sensations brought up in my music, I also wanted to highlight another description Gabriell gave me:

“All the images that I had listening were very stop motion animation, kind of child-like, grisley, but yet oddly beautiful. […] Fantastic Planet.” (Gabriell, 7:43)

I've always loved "weird" storytelling, and this description reminded me of some of my favorite animations, like Jack Stauber's animations and the animations of Marc ames Roels and Emma De Swaef, all work that uses unconventional stop motion techniques, so it's nice to hear this comparison.

Anyway, it's been a pleasure sharing my music with these three guests and hearing what they felt about the songs' "personal, intimate, strange thoughts,” (Gabriell, 0:20). I'd like to end this with another quote from Gabriell that stuck out to me; he talks about returning home: 

“And we’re led to our homes once again, somehow, somewhere, even if it’s— even if the home is now in desolation, but we return eventually.” (Gabriell, 34:42)

My music is described as a journey, a tidal push and pull that takes you to another place and time and yet cannot help but bring you back. The careful dialogue of the music, the mystery and the animal and the wild, this is what makes my music mine, and I'm glad to share it.