Liner Notes
Broken Spear - Mistique
Domestic Tourist
DT is a natural opener, and in some ways a natural transition from the Pantomime EP (I didn't finish DT in time to include it there, but it would have fit right in). This tune started in Charleston during lockdown, from an acoustic guitar riff that sounded a lot like Ágætis byrjun by Sigur Ros -- a blend between warm analog shoegaze and colder digital elements -- the original demo was called Vanilla Sky eccojam because I had just rewatched Vanilla Sky at the time (fun fact: Penelope Cruz saying "abre los ojos" was one of the first samples I ever used in my teenage Uda Ox project, loaded up onto a Boss Dr. Sample.) The glitchy bass synth (which recalls Oneohtrix Point Never's Garden of Delete) and Dune2 piano chords really took it to the next emotional level. Adding the breaks and the aggro-whirlwind of shoegaze guitar was a very obvious signature way to end it. I used DT as the opening track for my live set in 2023 at Public Records for the Noumenal Loom label showcase, which I used as an occasion to add some vocal samples to tie together some of the tracks (which I had also done in Holly Waxwing's takeover of Internet Public Radio in the leadup to his release of The New Pastoral on PC Music). I instinctually began looking for samples from Dawson's Creek, as I've sampled One Tree Hill at the beginning of the Broken Spear project, and the two shows are spiritual siblings. I'm pretty fucked up in general by Jack and Jen's dynamic throughout the show, and his line "I'm scared that I'll never find someone that I love as much as I love you", followed by Jen's sympathetic whimper - just felt so right to kick off the album, which I've realized has a conceptual through-thread about relationship anarchy, romantic friendships, unrequited yearning. The title, Domestic Tourist came from an idea I had been toying with for some time - the Sagittarian instinct to feel more at home on the road, living out of a car or a suitcase, feeling like yourself in a random town you've never been in before. And the tongue-in-cheek nod to gun violence -- which also feels quintessentially American.
Yours Forever
YF started when I was living for a few months in my teenage bedroom near the Sammamish River, in a suburb outside of Seattle. It was gray, and I had just gotten the Postcard Piano VST as a Christmas gift from my parents. The big bass synth blasts came first, shortly followed by the warbled, broken-sounding piano chords. From there I started to stack vocal ideas, which came together pretty quickly. I was quite inspired by a melody from HYD's song Chlorophyll at the time, which felt very Broken Spear-like in the way it was channeling grunge through a PC Music lens. I isolated and analyzed the vocal melody, and kind of reverse-engineered it into having a place in a greater melodic structure for my instrumental. I'm interested in the idea of plagiarizing myself via others -- did HYD have that idea first? No it was me, but it was a younger version of me that had been influenced by HYD's previous project, QT. If you trace it all back, you arrive at Avril Lavigne -- so I titled the demo Avril Ascent. It sat in the demo chamber for a while, until I pitched it to my best friend Sam who had agreed to do the vocals for I Really Care. She was really into it, and we worked on building out the demo, writing lyrics, ad-libs, harmonies. She pointed out that what I had as a chorus sounded more like a bridge ("tell me to be quiet I'll whisper"..) -- this happens a lot. So I quickly came up with the chorus melody idea which felt a bit more explosive and triumphant - very Losing Grip by Avril. For a while we were entertaining a switchup for the "Part 2", trying to do a key change like Backstreet Boys' I Want it That Way. It didn't really work so we ditched that idea, but took a clubby departure from the more conventional first part, stacking vocal ideas. A big breakthrough was adding the strings, an ocassional snare to accenctuate the claps, and the fast vocal chops of Sam's earlier melodies -- pushing through my learned resistance to layering and reverb, because for a long time I considered those techniques to mask weak songwriting - but they really worked here to make the double-time Part 2 feel big. My favorite part of the arrangement/production are the quick double tom hits that come in on Verse 2 -- keeping the energy building subtly. I also like the noise hits during the chorus, which got de-accentuated in the mixing process, but finding ways for percussion to stand out in a slower arrangement (80bpm), via noise is something I've been working on. Fun fact: we got to perform the song together at the 2023 Public Records show I mentioned in the liner note for DF, which must have been Sam's first time performing original music (or maybe singing live on stage ever?)
Still Right Here
I have my "accountibilibuddy" twin flame Jessa to thank for this, as during a sneak peek album listening party for my 30th birthday, she suggested that I switch up the track order. Previously I Really Care was in this track slot, but it made perfect sense to replace it with SRH, which is a mutant alternative version, or VIP edit of that song. SRH was born when I Really Care still had Bulk Bin's vocals on it, and I think I was getting stuck on the arrangement, and I came up with the stuttery supersaw part you can hear at the end, and sped the whole thing up -- and basically started remixing it before it was even done. This also kind of worked because Bulk Bin didn't feel like her vocals belonged on the original song, but was more comfortable with it being defamiliarized in this version, which was sped / pitched up. I was living with my friend Maurice (who makes music as Country Girl) in Brooklyn at the time -- my room was pretty small, but had a tiny broken mirrored table that I put my Argon8 on top of - I sat on the floor and started recording a lot of chords and riffs on there (fun fact: I later gave this mirrored table to Bulk Bin). Country Girl, upon hearing an early demo, remarked that the glidey smooth synth solo sounded very 90s R&B, which always stuck with me. I especially like that mid-way through, it stops being a traditional remix, and starts chopping and looping the vocals "but I'm still right here, but I'm still right here, but I'm still right here, yeah yeah I really care" -- which made me feel a lot, hearing something kind of torn apart to its emotional core. "everyday, be here if you need me, everyday be here if you need me" -- the ending has some melodyned vocal parts that transform a loop into an alternate melody.
Judging U
JU always made sense paired with SRH - they're very much in the same sound world of icy digital crying-in-the-club music. I made the core of this on a weekend afternoon when I was feeling sad and lonely, and made a quick video edit with the demo, and shared to Instagram. I would often play JU and SRH back-to-back during my DJ sets, as a way to see if they were "functional" in a club setting. I had been wanting to use the lines "judging you for something that I'm guilty of" and "when is the last time you were here?" for a while, and glad that they found a home here. There's a faster way to say the former lyric ("hypocrisy") - but for some reason it just feels more profound spelled out like that. I think I was trying to do something like Doss or Danny L Harle, a contemporary version of an EDM-elemental vocal line getting looped over an evolving club instrumental. The latter lyric was originally part of a much slower ML Buch-inspired ballad, but worked better here -- and cool to make the lines duel eachother during the ending.
Kaoss Grand
KG started in Los Angeles, when my parents were living there for a few years: they had brought my mom's grand piano from Washington. That piano has been a fixture my entire life, and I used to never touch it because I was intimidated as a guitarist, but in my adult life I really relish every chance I get to play it - it sounds amazing, and she keeps it in tune to play pieces by Rachmaninoff, Chopin, etc. I'll usually start by playing something pleasantly melancholic in C Major or F# Major, that sounds like a very stripped-down version of Ryuichi Sakamoto, Joe Hisaishi or Erik Satie -- like the anime scores for Makoto Shinkai films that have heavily influenced me. I will then hit my skill limit, and start to attempt to use pivot chords to modulate between scales (with varied success), and then fall into some atonal / chromatic, Schoenberg-esque twelve-tone, rhythm-oriented chaos (usually to my family's dismay). One time, I was just slamming 1/16 notes on one key in the lower register, trying to tune my ear to the precise volume envelope and resonance of the piano body - thinking of it as a midi instrument - the attack, decay, sustain, release, and reverb of the room. I was pretty into the idea of doing this "off the (beat) grid", and recorded it on my phone. I then tried to reproduce the idea in Ableton using a basic midi piano, and stacking layers, amused by it sounding impressively aggressive at some moments, then out of phase and amateur-like in others. I was probably influenced by A.G Cook's song "Note Velocity", and driven by the same instincts that then led to his song "Out of Time", though that came out much later. Anyways, Kaoss Grand was left in the beat vault for quite some time, as I had added some strange stuttery key change and footwork pattern that didn't seem to be going anywhere. After a few years, I returned to it, convinced that it was still a good idea, chopped off all the extraneous parts, and tried to tune back into the original spirit of the song. I added a lot of piercing supersaw arpeggios, automating the "rate" of notes. It was getting a lot closer, but I wasn't sure if it was a Broken Spear song, or for a different project. The last elements to be added were the vocal chops, which kind of did it for me -- loading up the acapella from an unreleased acoustic folk demo with my friend Lila and pitching it up, added a lot of overwhelming emotion and still makes me tear up when I hear it. Topped it off with some Dark0-esque (aka Square Enix / Final Fantasy) trance-like piano flourishes at the beginning. If "Domestic Tourist" is the album's Boomer, "Kaoss Grand" is its Gen Alpha -- a proof-of-concept of a 170bpm club genre that maintains its rhythmic ferocity through the harmonic and rhythmic complexity of pianos and vocal chops, rather than a boring 4-on-the-floor kick drum. Closing the first half of the record. "Kaoss" nods to "Kaoss Edge", the fictional nu-metal band of Oneohtrix Point Never's Garden of Delete (and the Korg Kaossilator) and the kind of unhinged/extreme mutant nature of this tune.
I Really Care
Flip the record to the more songwriter-y, acoustic guitar-driven B side.. IRC began on a bike ride in Brooklyn in late 2021 - I was feeling quite moved by A.G Cook's Soulbreaker, which he had included in his Dream Logic Mix (2021), and would later be released on Britpop (2024). The chorus melody "cause yeah I know when I look in my heart, you're a soulbreaker" felt so familiar, evoking one of my favorite lyrics from Naomi Punk's "The Feeling" (2010) -- "cause when you live in the heart, you have to feel your way". So I had my earbuds in, and started recording a voicenote while biking, improvising a nearly fully-formed vocal melody (lyrics and all) that would become the first verse -- "with an angel eye, and a long ear, you know I'm right here". I really wanted this to be a lyric-driven song (rare for me), so fleshed out the rest of the words -- and it turned out to be a song about being a resentful shoulder to cry on. I'm really interested in songs that say one thing, but mean another thing - like Cool by Gwen Stefani, where she claims to be cool with her ex-boyfriend dating someone new. but listening to the chords and the tone of her voice, it's clearly not. So for IRC, I liked the idea of a "good friend" being comically (pathetically?) martyr-like in their compassion and empathy for someone who talks their ear off with their problems. I started building the instrumental, using some jazzmaster whammy chords -- and it was clearly destined to be a ballad. I was very inspired by HYD's No Shadow at the time which was similarly slow. I had asked my new friend Boothe (who makes music as Bulk Bin) if she wanted to work on it with me, and we had a few writing + recording sessions - basically finishing the whole song. Using some millennial digital synths in Country Girl's studio, recording some acoustic guitar parts, electric bass, the heavy shoegaze ending. However, it became clear that the song wasn't meant for her, so I sent it to my best friend Sam, who loved it. It so happened she was coming to New York, and came over to our apartment (our first IRL meeting in 3.5 years due to the pandemic) and tracked the vocals. She later got her own recording setup in Hong Kong so we could continue remotely. Fun fact: her sister printed the demo on CD as part of a birthday gift later that year. Sam calls the acoustic guitar break the "Chris Brown" section (another R&B moment?). With IRC, I wanted to challenge myself to make an entire song from 1 chord progression, and just march out a series of vocal ideas one after another. the ending vocal melody, which was improvised by Sam at the end of a take (that I slightly edited to fit the bill) was the perfect way to end it.
Worth a Billion
WAB started in my living room in Hawai'i, in the same cloud forest flat that I recorded a lot of Truth Pieces (2019) in. Our roommate had moved out recently, leaving behind a cheap acoustic guitar that I would improvise on. I was finger picking a pretty fast riff, and felt inspired. I went into my bedroom, and recorded it straight into my Macbook microphone: it sounded surprisingly good. I layered an arpeggiated sampler of my single "Ambient at Heart" over it, put some breaks on it, improvised vocals through my earpods' built-in microphone, and made a quick video edit (basically a sped-up and glowy version of my favorite scenes from "The Island" (2005) - which I randomly had saved on my computer) - and posted it on my Instagram story. A very similar process to "Judging U" -- I think capturing the lightning in a bottle and sharing it online gives the demo some more weight in my mind as a reminder to return to it ("you already teased it so you might as well finish it"). I showed it to Country Girl the next time I was in New York (in the same apartment where I wrote a lot of the above tracks!) - and he suggested removing the breaks and simplifying the drum part -- smart. Later on, I created a LYRIC VAULT, basically mining all my old iPhone notes, tweets, and other documents where I kept lyrical ideas, and was scrolling through there looking for inspiration for a new song. This ended up being how I wrote the lyrics for Star Friend. When looking at demos to sing the new lyrics over, I pulled up WAB, and came up with the melody for "you're on stage, 6 feet away".. which worked. I loaded all the vocals into elf.tech (Grimes' AI vocal generator) - and you can still hear a bit of it as a vocoder and ad-libs ("uh huh yeah"). I felt like my vocals weren't really getting the job done, so asked my bestie/roommate Lila to hop on vocals (while we had a houseguest over who sat and watched) -- which she nailed pretty quickly. I left my vocals for the "B Part". Fun fact: Lila and I performed this on acoustic guitar in our living room for some friends visiting from overseas, and one of them cried! Specifically to the lyric "don't tell me who I get to love".
Star Friend
As previously mentioned, Star Friend was born out of the LYRIC VAULT exercise, and was based off of several iPhone notes of dreams that I've been having over the past few years about someone I consider a star. The lyrics borrow from these dreams, and the general emotional mood of wanting to be closer to someone despite knowing their responsibilities to their fans, team, etc (the duty of fame). It felt important for me to sing this one myself, and I tried a new vocal style, inspired by TXT's Ghosting -- no pitch or formant shifting, singing at the top of my range -- with some falsetto ad-libs and harmonies here and there. Feels like a sequel to "Ambient at Heart" in some ways, having a lot to say with not enough time. Sam described the vocals as "breathless". The bridge gets into a different dream I had about SOPHIE, where her spectre was temporarily revived for a private domestic grieving ritual with her lover that then became a performance with a crowd. A similar energy to the earlier dreams, where intimacy is interrupted by a ravenous audience (they don't love you like I love you).
The instrumental began as a K-Pop cover at Mad's apartment in Brooklyn. We recorded her vocals, and then I began replacing the instrumental with new chords using her baby Martin acoustic guitar. We both liked how it was sounding, despite it being her first time recording vocals in this way. I built a "Part 2" that was more sparkly, clean, and electronic. We let the demo sit for a while, and later agreed to shelve it.
So I was left with an instrumental ghost of a cover, and tried singing the "Star Friend" lyrics over it, which pretty quickly turned into a functional demo. The rest of the arrangement fell into place pretty inevitably, and I even got to pull some of Mad's vocals back in for embellishment (some mmms and oohs). The last addition was a synth pad on Verse 2, which surprisingly helped a lot (I typically avoid pads because they eat up too much of the frequency range without adding a melodic or rhythmic ideas) - giving it a ghostly effect with the pianos, that really blossomed with Nick Bolton's mastering job.
Nonbelievers
I have a vault of Broken Spear demos - guitar riffs, keyboard loops, and other samples and ephemera that I sometimes use when starting a song and looking for ideas. One acoustic guitar riff really recalled Adam's Song by Blink 182, and I was amused when a few months later, DIIV released their album Frog in Boiling Water which also featured a very Adam's Song-esque riff. The demo had an A and B part, and I came up with vocals pretty quickly for both. I invited Lila to try some ideas on it, and she came up with another A and B part that were pretty stellar. I decided to structure the song as an A-B-A-B chord progression, but different vocal ideas for each part: me for the first half, Lila for the second half. No repeating melodies. I then wrote lyrics for all the parts thinking about rain, addiction, and "The Crow" (1994), and resurrected a guitar demo inspired by Kiss Facility for the second half - which had a very similar tempo, energy, and chord progression as the original demo. I then wrote lyrics and brought Lila back in to record her parts, and wrapped it all up with a reverse synth solo which really added to the trip-hoppy nature of the whole thing. Coqui frogs in the background of the guitar recording..
Drift Away
This is one of the oldest songs on the album, which began at my flat in Upstate NY in a town called Little Falls. It was pretty spacious and cheap, and I had all my recording equipment there - pretty idyllic place to make music, with a view of the mountains and cold fresh air -- it's where "Ambient at Heart" was born. I was inspired by ML Buch's High speed calm air tonight (2022), which had dropped as a single, and actually her album Skinned (2020) was a big influence for I Really Care which was written around that time. Anyhow, "High speed", in the same way that HYD was recalling my early Avril influence, was recalling my middle and high school music, which was two-layers removed from Nirvana. A lot of my guitar playing at the time as a teenager sounded like "High speed", listening to local bands who were a generation or two after grunge, filtering this influence through shoegaze, dream pop, emo revival, post-punk, etc. When I first heard the ML Buch song, I sent it to my friend Tim (who makes music as Nuns Honey) and called it "Everlong 2", to his amusement. Fun fact: I've played the riff for my song Birthmark in different living rooms over the years, and people have compared to Everlong.
Anyhow, I was laying down this fuzzy guitar riff with very ringy note accents, that felt Buchian. I came up with the haiku-like lyrics, "I'm back but I'm out of phase, I never felt this feeling slip away. Your card on the windowsill, I'm feeling my attention drift away" -- which captured my feelings at the time being up there in the cold, a bit lonely and outside of time and society. I was interested in these cycling lyrics changing in meaning and emotion over time, much like in "Judging U". So I had an "A" chord progression, but then went to a "B" chord progression, while maintaining the same vocal melody -- a reharmonization, a remix inside a song. I had my partner Sasha record the vocals in my aforementioned teenage bedroom that holiday season, and then layered these with my own vocals that were manipulated and pitched, to make the second section kind of feel like it was melting and coming apart at the seams, much like the hazy attention-drifting of being sleepy in the mid-afternoon, looking through the window in melancholy. The ending section kind of adopted an A.G Cook-ian "anything can happen" mentality (which I also deployed in my cover of the emo-revival song "Comfort" on my last release) -- kind of devolving into digital chaos with big impacts, vocal chops, harmonies.. I was pretty happy with the overall arrangement, but I just couldn't get the main guitar part to sound "alien" enough, in the way that ML Buch or Mk.gee are so talented at doing. The stems had come from an old computer, already processsed through a pretty convoluted chain of virtual amps and effects - so I stripped it back down to the original DI guitar signal, and tried manipulating that to little success. I decided to just start fresh and record new guitar parts with more movement and less fuzzy chug, that feel glidey in a post-rock way, similar to my guitar work in past songs like "Emo Cruise". The finished product is a bit of a hybrid between the two, weaving in and out with filters and dueling eachother for frequency space.
The ending also felt a bit bare, and by then I knew that DA would be the album closer, so I decided to wrap it in a poetic bow by using another sample of Jen and Jack from Dawson's Hill. This one (*spoilers*) is around the time of the show's finale, where Jack admits "you belong.. you belong to me. don't you get it? you're my soulmate" -- which feels like a mix between a happy and tragic ending as far as relationship anarchy goes. Jack never found his ideal (male) lover, but realizes that his (queer)platonic best friend was his most important relationship all along. A sense of loss and regret over "what could have been", with the sobering appreciation of the love that we already have right in front of us.