The days I don’t want to kill myself
are extraordinary. Deep bass. All the people
in the streets waiting for their high fives
and leaping, I mean leaping,
when they see me. I am the sun-filled
god of love. Or at least an optimistic
under-secretary. There should be a word for it.
The days you wake up and do not want
to slit your throat. Money in the bank.
Enough for an iced green tea every weekday
and Saturday and Sunday! It’s like being
in the armpit of a Hammond B3 organ.
Just reeks of gratitude and funk.
The funk of ages. I am not going to ruin
my love’s life today. It’s like the time I said yes
to gray sneakers but then the salesman said
Wait. And there, out of the back room,
like the bakery’s first biscuits: bright-blue kicks.
Iridescent. Like a scarab! Oh, who am I kidding,
it was nothing like a scarab! It was like
bright. blue. fucking. sneakers! I did not
want to die that day. Oh, my God.
Why don’t we talk about it? How good it feels.
And if you don’t know then you’re lucky
but also you poor thing. Bring the band out on the stoop.
Let the whole neighborhood hear. Come on, Everybody.
Say it with me nice and slow
no pills no cliff no brains on the floor
Bring the bass back. no rope no hose not today,
Satan.
Every day I wake up with my good fortune
and news of my demise. Don’t keep it from me.
Why don’t we have a name for it?
Bring the bass back. Bring the band out on the stoop.
Hallelujah!
Jul 4, 2024
Related Recs
“I haven't found any music in a while.”
This is something people say to me fairly often. Friends, family, even other musicians. Curious, this line of thinking, in an era of total comprehensive availability. Every song written since the dawn of creation, just a quick search away - the cannon at your fingertips and yet...
Maybe it’s a conundrum of choice. Maybe you’re like me, standing in the shampoo aisle at CVS, thinking to yourself, “Okay, I understand intellectually that I’m looking at colorful plastic tubes of post-capitalist chemical gloop, all of which serve a nearly identical purpose. I understand intellectually that the architecture of this moment is deliberate, that the sheer volume of product is meant to make me feel as though this decision matters greatly. I understand intellectually that in fact, this decision doesn’t matter in the slightest, and yet, here I stand, staring, “shopping.”
Author’s Note: Please allow me to check my privilege here. I am lucky to possess what I have been told is “easy hair.” I wash it maybe once a week, and I am plagued by zero scalp-centric struggles. I do not wish to offend any readers by calling their post-capitalist gloops post-capitalist gloops. If you need a specific gloop to keep your noggin tip-top, I levy neither judgment nor verdict. I may be more empathetic to your plight than you imagine- I am exceedingly particular about deodorant. Rite Guard makes a very good gloop.
And so, I step warily forward toward total personhood by way of scalpal salvation, and I pause. “This time you’ve gone too far,” rasps over the pharmacy speakers, a warm, familiar gravel to the sung phrase.
No matter- important choices are to be made. Labels must be read and considered- words like jojoba and keratin could be the keys to finding meaning in this life, so we must think carefully!
And then, another pause. “Wow, that guitar tone is gorgeous, even in this CVS. Maybe a strat through a JC-120, hell yeah.”
And just like that, I am awake again. A sheriff of songs in the days of dueling, I am quickest to the hip and smoothest with the draw. My revolver is my iPhone, and it’s loaded with the most underrated ammunition that many of us forget we have in our arsenal.
I aim, cock the hammer, pull the trigger, and blast a cold chunk of leaden Shazam into the heart of the buzzing speaker. I rarely miss my shot, and the payment of bounty pings my account instantaneously. “Of course!” I cry out in rapturous ecstasy, “Peter fucking Gabriel!” I add it to my latest heard in the wild playlist, I grab whatever shampoo is on sale, and I clear just a little bit of the post-capitalist gloop out of my brain.
I am of the opinion that music is meant to be heard in the wild. When I’m looking forward to listening to something, I’m thinking mainly about the context I will attempt to create around my listening. Where can I walk around where these songs make sense? When it works, it works, but it’s nearly impossible to engineer. As a person of Scottish descent with no real cultural ties whatsoever, I can’t even begin to describe what it was like, discovering Frightened Rabbit while playing a festival with them in Leeds, and then accidentally ending tour with a week off in Edinburgh, spent oscillating between hammered and hungover wandering the endlessly weaving city with “The Midnight Organ Fight” blaring in my headphones.
Author’s Note: I didn’t mean it when I wrote “I can’t even begin to describe what it was like…”. What I actually meant was “I’m not going to describe what it was like in this essay. I’m going to write an entire essay on this, which you will be able to read soon. Look at me, I am doing internet things.
So, here we stand, in the most infinite aisle of the most infinite pharmacy, trying to find something new to listen to. We have the world at our fingertips, but the world is too noisy, so we put on the noise we’re most comfortable with and we “go on about our business.”
Thankfully, my shampoo analogy is about to fall apart, here’s why:
The songs aren’t the gloop, your algorithm is. It is a useful and elegant marvel of technology, to be sure, but its methodology is no longer a thing of great mystery, and its goals are clearly defined. Streaming algorithms have been optimized to deliver you more of what they know you like, with the express intent of keeping you on their platform for as long as possible.
Here, we arrive at the dingey bottom shelf of the most infinite pharmacy aisle. Here lies the downside of having every song ever released wading patiently just upstream of your algorithm. You know that album you love, the one you had on loop back in the day? There are hundreds of thousands of songs that sound a lot like it. A reeking landfill of .mp3s that you will probably like, that will also, crucially, not pull at your attention or challenge you in the slightest.
After years of streaming, we’ve effectively self-reported what we think we prefer, what we know we have always liked, what we probably want a lot more of. And yet,
“I haven’t found any music in a while.”
And so, I propose a new approach, one I have found helps me to transcend this dynamic- pay attention to the music you notice in the wild. Not the music you hear in the wild, as there are shards of song flung at us from all directions, all the time. I’m not talking about the cliche smooth jazz punishing you from the elevator speaker, I’m talking about the 1992 Peter Gabriel masterpiece “Digging In The Dirt” that reaches out from the heavens to give you a gentle, loving tap on the shoulder to remind you that you are alive. I’m talking about the not-so-rare piece of music that can remind you that life is short and capable of intense beauty and that you might not want to waste too much time on gloop in CVS.
Make sure you don’t stop at the Shazam- add that song to your heard in the wild playlist.
Maybe, like me, you can’t help but notice music erupting from car stereos at near-impossible volume 20 times a day. Usually, it’s background noise, but occasionally you’re dodging wild chickens while prowling the streets of Ybor City at 2:30 am on the fourth Friday of a five-week tour, the clouds part, and the god of bangers reaches downward with a shimmering Sistine finger outstretched. In a world of trunk-rattling 808s, one melody cuts through, for whatever reason, and thanks to your deftness at coming up off the hip before the red light can turn green, you’ve captured something real from your moment. A piece of art now belongs to you just as much as it belongs to anyone else.
If you’re anything like me, you will probably enjoy revisiting this song for years to come, not because you love the genre or tend to listen to similar artists, but because this song, at least to you, is powerful enough to steal your attention away from all the other stimuli without even trying. You’ve already unwittingly pressure-tested the song’s ability to whip you into presence, now get to know it a little better and see where it takes you.
These songs may also gain geographic significance as you continue to develop the habit. Anytime I listen to “Love & War” by Lil Poppa, I’m back in Ybor City, and I’m enveloped in this memory thanks to an artist from Jacksonville with 386k monthly listeners that the algorithm wouldn’t have served me in a million years.
The geography doesn’t even need to be interesting to stick, and although I can mentally retrace countless adventures through my playlists, if I’m honest, a lot of the songs take me back to CVS or somewhere like it.
That is also okay with me, because at least it means I walked away with a bit more than the post-capitalist gloop I came for.
(this is a pi only preview of a newsletter i'm launching this month. the newsletter is part of a larger project that includes original music (bangers) and youtube docs (about making / playing / loving bangers all around the world. if you've got any notes, i'd love to hear em, and if you like what you've just read, we should be friends. if you made it this far, i appreciate you genuinely and deeply. the world is crazy, but i've been working hard, and i'm excited to share everything. the newsletter site isn't live yet and none of the copy is final, but if you feel compelled, hit the link and signup pre-launch. <3. ok sick cya l8r.)
photo by ashley gellman.
Apr 8, 2025
I wanna publish 'zines
And rage against machines
I wanna pierce my tongue
It doesn't hurt, it feels fine
The trivial sublime
I'd like to turn off time
And kill my mind
You kill my mind, mind
Paranoia, paranoia
Everybody's coming to get me
Just say you never met me
I'm running underground with the moles, digging holes
Hear the voices in my head
I swear to God it sounds like they're snoring
But if you're bored, then you're boring
The agony and the irony, they're killing me (whoa)
May 26, 2024
⭐
The first single from Winter Boyfriend from the upcoming album set a, frankly, very different note. 'anx/bodies' is an outlier for us, musically and lyrically, but when putting the final touches to the album it was one of the songs that people seemed instinctively to engage with if they weren't broadly invested in our main thing, essentially indie/indie-punk made by a would-be emo band. At the very least it provoked a reaction.
It's a song inspired by a very specific series of events but is not specifically autobiographical. Outside of the world of this song i am much less forward about sex. I enjoy being 'too much' with friends but i really don't want it going anywhere my family might hear it. Repression is fun! I often wonder if that's similar to what actors feel when doing nudity or whatever. It's a case of, "I don't want to know you've seen me experience that?" Anyway, honesty can help in art, but also maybe so too does a little internal repression.
It was written about a memory of going to a university disco, arriving at the club where everyone was looking hot and cool, and i suddenly becoming very aware of my inability to be calm. It is essentially about over-stimulation and amorousness and the confusion of that smashing like a wrecking ball through any semblance of chill i might have had.
The verse bass riff is really old, easily over 10 years old. I wrote it for a different project, a Death From Above 1979 rip-off thing, and my pal Martin played bass, while i sang and drummed. The song was unremarkable but the riff was cool. There was no way i wasn't keeping it. Also, it explains why it's the only song that uses a fuzz bass tone. Yet.
I have no idea when i came up with the guitar riff but it's one of my favourite parts i've written. It's rythmic and a little bit dissonant, but i think the G# implies an E Major chord, making it A minor natural (sorry music theory experts, probably butchering this).
I was also unsure if i could allow myself to write the chorus which used power chords. It always feels too basic. But it worked in the context of the song. I finished it years ago aside from a few lyrical tweaks and the introduction sound (chord played, tremolo arm depressed as it fades out, recorded and reversed). Also when mixing the song my references were very different and included a lot of 00s and 10s music, including bands that have been grandfathered into the whole 'indie-sleaze' thing, and it made me realise the second verse needed, nay demanded!, a cowbell and some percussion (the other percussion is drumming on glass bottles fyi).
I feel like 'anx/bodies', and the song that follows it, 'on our way home', are two sides of the same coin. One uptight, repressed yet explosive, and the other unrelenting, desperate and flailing. You could almost imagine the latter being later in the same night, getting existential when worse-for-wear. More on that one later.
Jun 19, 2024
Top Recs from @caskeyc
🗓
1. Don't set an alarm and wake up naturally. Snooze for however long you want to, it's okay
2. Have breakfast. For me it's toast. Have it with butter/jam/honey and a lot of water and coffee and juice.
3. Listen to an album in full and do some puzzles until it ends. I like to stick a record on and do the nyt games (connections, then wordle, then the mini, then I'm ready for a crossword)
4. Shower and use all your best stuff. Smell great. Make your hair feel soft.
5. Wear an outfit you don't get to wear that often. I tend to wear the same thing over and over at work so I wear something a bit more fun and less practical.
6. Go outside. I live near a road with secondhand shops that are great browsing but quite tempting on a budget. To beat the temptation just look in the windows and then walk round the streets or to a green space if it's a nice day. Walk as fast or as slow as you like. Try and spot cats that might let you stroke them. See how each place you go smells different. Walk down streets that you've not been down before just because.
7. Come home and decide how much energy you have. If you have energy do an activity (I would write, play an instrument, do some art, read, play a game) if you don't then watch something from your watchlist. Saturdays feel like a good day to watch something new.
8. Cook yourself a meal. Start before you're hungry and spend ages on it. Use every pot. Listen to music. Sing whilst you wash the dishes.
9. Play! Video games, board games, internet games, card games, phone games, rearrange your plushies, embrace your inner child. Play with ideas, experiment with felt tip pens, write a limerick. Get silly with it.
10. Talk to your friends. Invite them over, call somebody up, text that person back you didn't have time to. I like to spend a good day off by myself then have a great time talking to people after I've recharged.
11. Have so much fun getting to do whatever you want you fall asleep at whatever time. Monday - Friday is about appeasing your body clock, Saturdays are for filthy pleasures like falling asleep at 3am because you were too busy flirting or reading or watching videos.
Apr 16, 2024
Re: my last rec I'm kinda realizing reading this might have changed my life actually
Apr 16, 2024