HISTORY WORTH REPEATING
released JULY 30, 2021
ALBUM 37, RELEASE 102
If I had to make a list of "top 5 favorite HW albums" this would be on it. I started writing this the day after I presented my senior thesis (known to you as No Victories) with the intent of making an album where every song had a 1-word title and was under 2 minutes long. I recorded loads of demos, and all but 4 of the songs here have roots in those demos.
One of them, "Witness", opens the album with what could charitably be described as a "song". I think it's hilarious. Earlier posts on this website detail this song's evolution from "joke song opening an album" to "monster of noise closing sets with seven minutes of pure agony". "Process" is a song about songwriting. I tried to get the Questions lineup to learn this but one of them said it was a flurry of chords and they couldn't keep track of it. Fair. It is. I like writing songs with lots of chords. The actual ideology of "Process" is somewhat muddied. I remember having lots of bitter thoughts about the music industry and local scenes and whatnot at the time, and while some of them were dead-on, others were just bitter and jealous. I feel a lot better about my place in music these days. "Diptych" actually might have been a lyrics-first song. The idea was for each section to end with whatever word, and then the next section would start with that word. "Shaking" has its origins in a song from before Hello Whirled. When I was working on this album, I heard "Egregore" as the hit. I made "Idioglossia" the single, but I felt "Egregore" was just as good. I don't super feel that way anymore, but I do still like it. I'd just heard Yes Boss by Kleenex Girl Wonder and it blew my mind. A lot of songs on here sound like that album. Obviously most music is influenced by other music but this is a bit close. "Datura" was originally a more normal speed, but I thought it would be funnier to play it almost like a mall punk song. I hate that kind of music but this song seemed to lend itself well to it. "Rubber" and "Wrench" were 2 of the 4 songs I didn't demo. "Rubber" started with the phone noise against the bass pickup. I built the guitars and vocals around it, which is why they fully cut off when the voice memo starts playing. A lot of making music is just amusing yourself, and that dead cut in this song is the funniest thing I've ever done in a song. "Wrench" is a secret hit. I truly do not remember how I made the intro. A true mystery. There's a lot of mystery noises here. It could be my favorite song on the album. I wrote the words to "Quaintrelle" with a dictionary open. That's an easy way to write really pretentious lyrics. I don't remember what inspired me to make "Buzzcut" fully electronic, but I think it's really good as a result. I wish I made more music that sounded like this. "Normality" was a No Victories outtake that I re-recorded for this. It was originally called "Normal Escape" but I changed it to fit the 1-word theme. "Idioglossia" was a fun song to play live for a while there. After a while I thought it sounded too pop punk so I cut it. Still a good song. "Aegis" uses a lot of what I felt were common words I'd seen in JRPGs. At 18 songs in 29 minutes, I think a lot of musicians would say that's an album. I don't agree. For Hello Whirled, an album has to be 30 minutes. That's just how I roll. The last song, "Thousand", actually did have a demo, but nothing as formal as the ones that I mentioned earlier. I thought it would be funny to take this really fast-paced album with lots of short, fast songs and crush the momentum with an anvil. It's the 1000th Hello Whirled song and it seemed important to make it really count. I haven't hit 2000 yet but I'm close. I threw "Her Flaming Absence" into the end of the song because I had basically played the chords of the song anyway, and I thought it would be a nice nod to myself. Ego stroking unlimited ultimate.