QUESTIONS FOR CONCERNED CITIZENS
released JULY 7, 2023
ALBUM 45, RELEASE 130
This one stands on its own, not because it's my favorite HW album (it's not) but because it is the only one of its kind. It's not the first HW album to feature a full band on every song (more on that in December) but it is the first, and only, to be performed with that band in the room, and for the songs in question to have been written with that band in mind. It's also the only HW album that I didn't mix. This album features the only live lineup of HW to ever be designated as "official members": Danny on 2nd guitar, Evan on bass (and producer of this album), and Nick on drums. To help you understand why this exact arrangement will likely never happen again, I will merely state that, at various points after the album's release, my friendships with everyone in the band ended (although one was only temporary, and we are now friends again). It's an extremely bittersweet album for me, in that I really thought it would be the start of something big, only to instead be the end.
"Must We Take Advantage?" is one of my favorite album openers I've ever written. We would have played it live a lot more if I hadn't written it in open D (that's DADF#AD for you at home). The title is a remnant of my original vision for the album, where every song's title was a question. "Will I Find The Stars?" is the result of this as well, as well as the chorus of "Sure Self" (are you your surest self?) and a demo I finished but ultimately didn't record with the band ("Can You Feel The Ocean On Your Eyes?"). "Great Ideas" started as an outtake from the In The No trilogy with a great verse and an awful chorus. This song might be the one I regret the most; not because it's bad, but because we started playing this live after recording it, and it sounded better live. Now seems like a good time to say that we recorded this album at the recording studio on TCNJ's campus. Danny and I were alumni by the time we made this, but Evan was still a student there so he had studio privileges and we didn't have to pay for any of it. "Wood Anniversary" is the first of 4 cowrites on here. Nick had written a song called "Lumber Birthday" which was his parody of my general sound. I liked it, and asked if I could tweak it to do it for the album. He told me after this that the title was a play on my album Wood Anniversary, so I decided to just make that the title. I think it's funny that the album and song of the same title have nothing to do with each other. "An Old Darkness" was Evan's cowrite of the album. If I remember right, he had a riff he was working on, but couldn't figure out how to resolve it. I suggested a note to end on, and then asked if I could make that the chorus of a new song. This might have been our favorite song to play live. I certainly remember having a blast playing this one. "Lost Number" was one of my favorite demos, but the rest of the band really struggled with it because of the time change in the middle. I still think it's one of the strongest tracks on the album. "Recoveries" is credited to everyone because it started as a jam between me, Nick, and Danny, while Evan was setting mics up and whatnot. He hopped in at the end of the jam, and I told the others I would hold onto the riff and bring in lyrics for the next session. It's smack dab in the middle because where else could a song like this go? "Sure Self" was my stab at writing a Feeble Little Horse song. Girl With Fish hadn't come out yet. This was another one we all liked, so it was picked as the single. The lyrics themselves were kicking around for about a year before getting this. I forget if I had even demoed the song before scrapping it the first time around, but I'm pretty sure the G#maj9 riff wasn't new in early 2023. I could be totally wrong. Seb from FLH remixed this for the b-side. If having other people write the music for HW songs was weird, then "Too Hurried To Reach" is even weirder because Danny wrote the lyrics for it. Well, sort of. He sent me six poems, and I didn't think any of them worked as song lyrics on their own. I chucked all of them into a spreadsheet, alphabetized the list of lines, and picked my favorite individual lines for the song. We didn't play this live because no one else in the band could sing the overlapping lines. "Winner" was the first one we played live from this album because it's short and simple. I still like it a lot. "A New Light" wasn't written to be a sequel to "An Old Darkness" but I felt the riffs were really similar, and I wanted both on the album, so it seemed like the only way to justify it. The really crazy thing is, listening to this album for the first time in a few years, I didn't recognize the chorus at all. "Will I Find The Stars?" is my favorite song on the album. I still play it live every now and again. Since I was so convinced this album would make HW huge (or at least a known entity) I asked someone else to add something to the very end of the song. That someone turned out to be Todd Tobias, producer of many of my favorite Guided By Voices / Robert Pollard / Circus Devils albums. It's a fitting end to this album, I think.