Song #13: IGOTITTOO
In which I decide to have fun.
Liner Notes
13 songs into the year I'm feeling like a machine slowly becoming sentient, yet still unable to escape its programming.
With each song I watch myself work, struggle, succeed, fail; I listen as I repeatedly question my motives for making art; I feel the pull towards spending all of my time on my design and website work, projects with clear tasks, purpose, and value; I watch myself try to put these observations into words. It happens every week, so many of the same feelings, not just ups and downs but a whole chaotic ballet of doubt and circumstance that ultimately lead me here, presenting some form of a song to you.
The past week the ballet has been especially avant-garde with the social + political upheaval around abortion rights. Amy's work running Plan C has been busier than ever, and I have spent long fitful days working on the website and succumbing to the emotional and mental entanglement of trying to figure out how to "win." (Man shrugging emoji).
In step, my creative process has felt extreme and chaotic, flowing in fits and starts, promising vistas that funnel to scenic dead-ends. One of my new tactics when feeling stuck in a song is to switch to a different song and work there until I get stuck again, then switch back, or switch to a third song even and continue going until my stomach says stop.
During the past couple weeks I've been riding 6 or 7 different horses and praying one of them will lead me to water. I had a long romance with a song called "Something New," which was ignited by a kind of divine inspiration that I haven't felt since writing "Desdemona." But after many days of trying to capture it I got very lost and have been glumly watching the magic deteriorate ever since.
I also spent several days on "Does Anybody Know?", "I Like it Like it Is," "Moths," "Silence," "Evolution," and an untitled piece that goes by "Lazy Cello Chorus," among others. Each of these felt exciting until they didn't, easy until they got hard. I shifted my focus to a song that felt easy and simple, that came out of nowhere, that I had been ignoring because it felt too simple and, dare I say, fun.
"IGOTITTOO" came to me in the early morning on May 30th, a day before moving into a beautiful treehouse mansion in Crestline, the kind of house we'd love to own but can't afford. This temporary lifestyle shift is exciting but invites comparison. When Amy and I fall into comparing ourselves to our friends, families, or Airbnb hosts, we can feel like we're doing something wrong, like we should be further along in our lives and careers, or as if most people our age (and younger) have something figured out that we don't.
The question is very present in our lives, and that Monday I woke up with an answer in my head, a comforting if lazy bit of Gemini wisdom that finds the truth by seeing everything as true. We're not doing it wrong, we're just doing it the way we're doing it. And we're doing it together.
I picked up my phone and tried to sing the idea as a song, here's what came out:
Voice Memo #1, May 30
I liked the shape of the lyric, wandering but logical. And it felt like me. I'm a man convinced things will get better but not always doing actions to make them better. (Sentient machine emoji) The next day we stuffed our car to the brim and headed up the mountain, grateful and gleeful to spend the next month in the relative peace and quiet of the mountains.
On Thursday (the day after the Sun Ra bongo jam that led me to "What Else Can I Do?") I revisited this voice memo and spent a half hour strumming around, trying to find chords that would map onto the melody, and exploring a potential verse. The voice memo I captured is longer than my usual bits (~6mins), but it's revealing of the sculptural process of finding a song. If you listen from start to finish you can hear me slowly chipping away, bouncing between verse and chorus, grinding or stuttering through the words until, 5 minutes in the shape starts to feel more natural and relaxed, closer to the finished elements.
Voice Memo #2, June 2
With the basics in place I put the song away and went on a walk to let my subconscious work on it for a while. During my walk I heard an instrumental tag rolling around in my head and returned home to find the fingerings for it. I had to be careful because depending on how I played it the part it either sounded like The Pretenders, Journey, or Hoobastank, listed here in order of desirability.
Voice Memo #3, June 2
At this point I had the essentials of the song ready to go, but it would still take me three weeks of chasing down "Something New" and the other horses before coming back around to sketch out the form of "IGOTITTOO" in Logic. I wonder, if I had been able to keep my focus, if "IGOTITTOO" would have come out as quickly as it did, or if it would have just folded it into my struggle with the 7 other songs. I wonder if struggle is specific to each piece of music, or is it just "Struggle," indifferent to the players involved. (Also does "Struggle" feel like a timely update to "The Game of Life"? Unlimited players, Ages 12+?)
In our final week of retreat, I returned to these voice memos and set the melody over a simple beat in Logic, trying to find the palette for the production. Here's an early demo.
Demo #1, June 25
I continued chipping away, finding a better drum sound, then playing through on acoustic guitar to establish the form. I was trying to keep the arc of the whole song in mind rather than getting sucked into the details, which with guitar parts can quickly turn into the endless jog of perfection. I ended up leaving in some mistakes and happy accidents, though I did permit myself the pleasure of Writing a Guitar Solo, which was played correctly after just 27 takes.
On our last full day in Crestline I stayed up til the middle of the night writing and recording the lead vocal, since I had put off lyric writing all week. When I finally beamed this to the internet on the 30th I told Amy "I could spend another month on this and REALLY make it great," which may more may not be true.
We then had an enlightening conversation about what my Values are with creating music and whether or not this project is aligned. In the grand scheme, my strongest value seems to be Greatness, in search of Consistency. But in this project it seems to be Consistency, in search of Greatness.
So I'm either chasing my tail or slowly eating my way to the center of the cookie. Time will tell.
Final Version, July 2022
IGOTITTOO
Harmony, you've been crying all night in your sleep
Now you're waking up here next to me
Harmony, oh harmony
In your head there's a life that looks a lot like our dreams
Where we fly around the world and sing
In harmony, harmony
Don't you think you're doing anything wrong
Life is long and hard or short and fun
Or short and hard, or long and fun
Or something in the middle now, is that the one?
The one you got? I got it too.
Darling, love, on the days that you don't feel like your enough,
and the words don't seem don't fit on your tongue,
I still believe there's harmony, harmony
Its in you, in the sound that brought us closer to truth
in the way our bodies feel when they move
In harmony, in harmony
Don't you think you're doing anything wrong
Life is long and hard or short and fun
Or short and hard, or long and fun
Or something in the middle now, is that the one?
The one you got? I got it too.
Is that the one, the one you got? I got it too.