Publication Date: March 17, 2024
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Folksonomy—What You Doing to Me?
This is a vanity project. As I age I anticipate that I may not remember anything about my life other than getting old. I plan on doing more music, but if I don’t, here’s four projects that I find worth remembering.
It’s weird to lump Fill Spectre in with three other works that mostly focus on war, politics, religion, Katrina, justice and other outrages. The idea of “The Flying Fan Modules” was to record music of a whimsical nature, touching “lightly” on social themes, while invoking my muses—mostly composers of surf pop, British pop, folk, synth pop, and other forms of the dizzying variety of music I loved. I relied on durable themes of hope, doubt, and wonder, with an eye towards a poetic reconciliation with the nature of things that uplift me, haunt me, or pry open the door of parody for my lyrical dithering.
There are a few tunes that lean into protest: “The Tide Recedes” borrows heavily from The Terminator, revealing that I was reluctant to take things too seriously; and “Technology”—a denunciation of technology—addressed my Luddite suspicions. After all, I was a school teacher and was luckily employed by a school system where academic freedom let me reign over how to teach literature and get kids to write. This drew much creativity from me (the only thing that matters), and gave me little time to complain. Lucky me.
Trepanning, Before the Second Rooster, and Jacquerie were attempts at purging the seething anger that emerged after 9/11, feelings I was trying to codify into songs. Most people liked the melodies and performances, but grappled with what poetry was going on in my head. Grappling is good; grappling is life.