OURS IS A BLANK MAP
released AUGUST 30, 2025
ALBUM 55, RELEASE 153
The plan was to spend a day in a recording studio and record a few songs that would be on an otherwise home-recorded album. Somehow I ended up booking a second day and committed to recording all of it in 2 days. I'd spent much of July writing stuff but not finishing a lot of things, because I thought this album would take longer to make. Instead, I picked what I felt were the most complete ideas and finished those...then recorded them again to make sure they were playable, THEN went to the studio to do it all a third time. This is the third time. Thanks to Ben Schurr for engineering and co-producing this album, and to Hellbender Vinyl for being the place we recorded this.
"Cut In My Hand" rips. I'm sure it could have felt even bigger, but I'm happy with it in this state. "Preseason Football" is, musically, the oldest HW song. The chords and vocal melody date back to summer 2012, before I'd ever put any music online. The lyrics were mostly brand new, trying to imagine what point there is to watching the NFL preseason. My main bummer with this song is that the Omnichord didn't let you just press a chord button. You had to strum it, and while I think it works well enough, it wasn't what I heard in my mind. There are a few songs on here that I think would have benefitted from a 3rd studio day, but overall I do think this album was a success. For instance, "Kings Distraction" came out pretty well. I filmed myself making this album, but the camera audio was super blown out and I didn't think I looked good in it. It hasn't come up in any of the songs so far, but I was writing this album when my egg cracked and I realized I was trans. My hair was pretty short at the time, so I decided to wait the rest of the year to take my transition seriously. I don't know if that was the right choice but I'm happier with that part of myself now and that's better. I may have played a harmonium on "Kings". I know it's that or a pump organ...actually it might have been the pump organ. There's a lot of keyboards on this album because Ben has so many. "Steady Employment" went through some big changes during its development. It started as a much slower song called "Only 1 Original Thought" but I thought it was too mean-spirited so I increased the tempo and wrote new lyrics about working full-time in an office (where I am right now, in fact). One guitar is tuned a half-step down, the other is in standard. "We Back Inaction" is my biggest regret of the album. I had this idea kicking around for quite a while (the bass part pops up on Distance Fighter) and I had a vision for it, but I think the vision got jumbled in translation from my house to the record plant. I should have used more aggressive synths because the chorus wasn't supposed to feel this light. I can't remember what synth I actually used here...I keep second-guessing myself on whether or not it's a DX7. I think it was. The percussion was from me walking around the live room with a basket full of tambourines and shakers and shit, shaking the basket and dropping it and whatever. I thought it would sound better. Mainly I think this song fails to live up to my expectations for it, and it's a really long song to have in the middle of the album. It screws up the flow a little. The long instrumental section at the end is kinda cool actually. I don't think this is a bad song, just a letdown. "If You Can Drive, You're A Cop" is much better. It's kind of tongue-in-cheek, but I do actually hate cars and I can't drive for shit. The entire second half was originally much shorter, but I kept extending it with each demo as it dawned on me that it might be fun to just make a lot of noise in the studio. I think it maybe could have used one more instrument on here, but it's still fun. "Ours Is A Blank Map" is the hit to end all hits. It is explicitly about my egg cracking and thinking about how I wanted to transition, and the realization that my future suddenly looked quite a bit different than it had before. "2 Obvious Things" is the one song I wish I'd done a second vocal take for. I wish I'd done more with it in general. When the song speeds up it should feel much bigger, and it just doesn't. For the most part I think it's a great song. The chorus was taken from two different a capella voice memos I had sitting around. The lyric "lost at the wrong side of 0 and 12" is a nod to December 2024, when I was struggling with THC-P withdrawal (I still have a weed problem but that stuff is EVIL) and was either getting 0 or 12 hours of sleep every night. "Whisper Text to Speech" was originally a mess of time signatures overlapping and intersecting and fighting with each other. I had to reconfigure it to be a waltz because otherwise it was unplayable. When I write about this album's two sets of demos (probably soon) you'll find that this change is the most drastic change between Demo 1 and Demo 2 of any given song. "He Who Loses, Wins" is so much fun. A lot of the lyrics are obscured in metaphor and wordplay so I couldn't tell you what every line is about, but the song started with the bass riff and the phrase "hahahaha Hitler won World War 3". It sounded very XTC to me, so that's the direction I took the rest of the song...at least that's what I thought. Ben Schurr thought it sounded more like Fugazi, another band I love. I can see it. My twin (hi Dan) thought I was trying to rap. Rap is cool. I have no interest in trying to make rap. I'm the wrong person for the job. No one wants to hear me rap. This song comes in and out of the live set whenever I think there might be room for it. "Long Lost Sister", on the other hand, is much harder to play live, because the bass part was written on a Bass VI, and I sold mine recently. This, like "Blank Map", is explicitly about being trans. The entire middle section didn't exist in the first demo. I thought the song was a bit light, and needed something else to happen, so that emerged. This is also the only HW song with mallet percussion, with some lovely vibraphone (or marimba? I forget) at the very end. I'd sure like to record in a studio again, but I don't know what approach I would take. For this and 50 Songs, I was super rehearsed so I knew exactly what I wanted to do in order to get the most out of my limited studio time. Next time I want to be less prepared.