NO USE CRYING OVER SPILLED BLOOD
released SEPTEMBER 8, 2023
ALBUM 46, RELEASE 131
This album has so many demos and outtakes attached to it that you'll never hear. Heck, I haven't heard most of that stuff in years, but I do know that a lot of these songs came from those demos. The plan was to make a 2-hour-long album after Questions For Concerned Citizens, to assert that HW was still a solo project as well as a band. As you can see, this album is much shorter than 2 hours, and that's because the band fell apart and I wanted a new album ready to go for our last show together. I had even more demos and unfinished songs, but those ended up on the next album.
Overall, this is one of my favorite HW albums. I just listened to a bunch of pre-2020 HW albums, so my ears perceive "Fate Fades In And Out" as the best version of what my old, DAWless albums were trying to do. "Your Island" has always been one of my favorites on here, but (like a good chunk of the album) it's in open D, and I don't like spending lots of time tuning during shows, so I think I only played it live once or twice. It's about Rick Froberg, the singer from Hot Snakes and Drive Like Jehu who died while I was making this album. "Can You Feel The Ocean On Your Eyes?" was actually a demo for Questions For Concerned Citizens. The rest of the band heard it and liked it. I pulled it from that album because it ran so counter to the approach of all the other songs (playable live with 2 guitars, bass, drums) and I couldn't figure out what everyone in the band was going to play on it. The synth on much of the song is the Sonicware Liven 8bit Warps, a synth I actually really liked but ultimately stopped playing after a while. I think I sold it in 2024. It's a good synth, but the Roland S-1 was ultimately more what I'd spent many years and dollars looking for. For whatever reason, I think of "Open Window In A Field" and "Grown Upside Down" as siblings. No idea why. Maybe it's just the similar riff-based approach, and both riffs being really good. "A True Arc" came from me trying to make one of those "Lars Ulrich is bad at drums" beats work in a song. I just remembered that most if not all of these song titles came from a giant list of titles I'd written around this time. The majority of the titles on this, There Is Another Sun, and The Ocean On Fire came from that list. "Inside Out Airplane First Flight" sure was one of those, and I know for a fact that it's someone's favorite HW song. The lyrics are actually about the title, sang from the perspective of a Musk-esque figure. I guess I started this song on bass, because I know the lack of guitar in the bridge was because I couldn't remember what I'd played on bass and didn't feel like figuring it out. The bridge going into the last chorus should be a much better transition, but I didn't go a good job mixing that part, or anything ever really. "The Sound of No Hands Clapping" was the hit at the time. It's mocking people who wear their military clothing out in public. I just hate it. Go away. The song was originally much slower, but I couldn't figure out what to do with it so I sped it up 1.5x with Reaper's varispeed and suddenly a big hit emerged. This happens a lot. Many aspects of "Depression Artifacts" date back to a song I wrote in 2014. In a way, the album takes a turn around here. Four of the last five songs are mellower, sparser, or gloomier than the first 9 songs. "Late Night Wawa Run" was the result of a song challenge, but the only rules I remember are that I had to use a ring modulator (which I did) and I had to use the word "hoagie" in the lyrics (which I did). I think the song is about my uncle dying, somehow. Looking back, what really sticks out is this 3-song run of "Depression", "Wawa", and "Truce" that all sound quite a bit like Helvetia, a band I was REALLY into in 2023. Still am, actually. Actually, now that I'm listening to "You Hold Your Ax Like A Bronze Medal", it's actually a 4-song run. I wanted this song to be less structured and more free-spirited. There were so many markers in this Reaper project. The 3-part Beatles harmony before the tempo/time/etc shift (not much of a shift really) blows me away every time. I couldn't believe I made this song. I thought this was my best song until I'd performed it live twice, at which point it fell to earth and merely became a song I was really proud of. I'll never not be proud of this song. This would be a killer way to end the album, but "Please Stop Asking" had to go somewhere, and I liked it at the end. One guitar, one vocal. I actually tried to record the whole thing live in one take, but I struggled with the intricacies of the guitar part while singing. I think both parts (the guitar and the vocal) were recorded with 2 condenser mics. At one point, I think I wanted the song to cut off in the middle of me singing the last part, but thankfully I didn't do that.