After letting Quartered release without using it at all, I set out to make an EP that only used a Casio VL-1. “A Season To Believe In” isn’t offensively bad but it’s just missing something. “Seconds Last” is the only real hit here. That one actually feels like a song. The other two songs just aren’t good.
The first solo Hello Whirled show in over a year and a half. I’m 100% certain this show marked the beginning of “Hit Me With Your Car” being my biggest hit. There’s nothing really spectacular here but it sounds like a good show to me.
The first two songs were outtakes from New Blood In The Sister City. I don’t really like either of them, although there’s promise in “This Must Be Home”. The other two songs are covers that I love much more, especially “Praise”.
The story behind this album is more interesting than the album itself. I wanted to make an album out of randomly-generated chord progressions (the process of which I will not detail here). I generated 50 progressions and demoed each of them. Only 15 were even vaguely usable, and one of them just sounded like Andy Shauf’s “Early To The Party”, so I took the remaining 14 songs and made proper songs out of them. Two of them didn’t make the cut, so here stand the 12 best songs out of 50…I guess. After that weird intro I made, I think the album really picks up for a while. “Old White Lie” and “International Cross” are my favorites of the first half, but I know someone who’s adamant that, even 2 years later, “Loving Pocket” is my best song. “Draw A Straighter Line” is, in some sense, probably the “loudest” Hello Whirled song. The guitars are so overpowering that the drums are almost completely buried. Only the cymbals cut through. Amazingly, I wasn’t a huge Microphones fan around this time (I liked The Glow Pt 2 but hadn’t explored further), because this sounds a lot like The Microphones to me, at least sonically. “They Call For You” uses the same chord shapes for the verse and chorus, but for the chorus there’s a capo on the 2nd fret whereas the verse keeps it open. The magic of multi-tracking. “May Queen” is beautiful. I really like it. Nothing insightful except that the lyrics were heavily inspired by the movie Midsommar.
Inexplicably, the post-script has a post-script. I think I made this as a means of making pre-2019 songs…2019 songs. I had the idea of de-canonizing everything I made before 2019, at least in a live performance context. Clearly this backfired. Nonetheless, I’m really proud of this thing, whatever it is. I’m not really going to go into detail about this one, other than to say that you should really listen to it. You could argue the most it adds to these songs is live drums, which a few of them had originally anyway, but hey it was winter break and I wasn’t sure what Hello Whirled’s next step was so I did this.
You could probably call this the beginning of Atlantic Witchcraft. I was still using my Tascam DP008ex, but not for much longer. “Christ’s Second Child (Demo)” was intended to be re-recorded, but instead the verses were reworked into “In His Shadow” and the chorus became “There She Goes” much later. “Same Space, Different Plane” was an outtake from Memory Lane Bombing. I’m done with 2019. 2020 marked the most significant shift in how I made music for Hello Whirled, so much so that I’d be willing to call it a more outright Era 2 if I was more pretentious.
Hello Whirled 