SEX WITH GOD
released APRIL 2, 2025
ALBUM 53, RELEASE 147
I had just moved back to NJ after 11 months in Philly. I was not doing great. What I was doing, however, was recording a lot. I already had the bones of Gives Up And Plays The Hits laid out, but I was also starting to assemble what would become Sex With God.
It opens with the first of two new versions of Momentum outtakes: a sorta beautiful take on "Nitrous Circus". Drums and percussion were outsourced a good bit on this album, for the sake of variety and why the heck not, and this song is the first of three to feature the talents of Mike Maietta, who makes music as Monda and Radar & Satellite. Putting something softer first seemed like a smart move, since I don't normally do that and this whole album was meant to be me trying some different stuff out. That idea became the theme of Hello Whirled as a whole for the next bunch of albums, leading up to the most recent one, To Breathe Your Air Is Violence. A running theme on those albums was having short blasts of energy that didn't come out right, such as "What Happens Here", which bounces off the walls in 17/8 time. There's a chord organ in there somewhere. "Water Your Eyes" was deemed the "obvious hit" on this one for a bit. Then "We Are Dead" happened and the distinction shifted. After a while, I concluded that my favorite song on the album was actually "The Arcane Art of Washing Your Hands". This is my favorite song to play live. The G-string is tuned to F# on the recording, but it's easy enough to play in standard that I do it that way on stage. It's kinda through-composed. Guided By Voices released their puzzling Universe Room while I was working on this album, and I sure listened to it a lot, so it probably influenced me to write songs like that too. I've also written like that before, but I never really try to. It just happens. "Learning The Cold" is another one of my all-timers, in my not-humble opinion. There's a ton of chords in it but it never feels clunky or forced. I call it my @ song sometimes because the acoustic guitar is tuned to C#. @ are a good band. Listen to them. Anyway, the tuning is also the albatross around its neck: I've only performed it live twice, and it was during the same show. "Trimming the Herbs", on the other hand, was written specifically to be played live. More specifically than that, it was written to be the partner song for "Good Things By Mistake". If I write a song in an alternate tuning and/or with a capo ("Good Things" has both) I like to have another song in that tuning, or with a capo, so it feels more justified. I don't really like changing my tuning between songs, so if I'm gonna do it, I wanna get some mileage out of it. Both songs detune the B and E strings to A and D, which is even more than I'm usually willing to do during a show. The combo got played 8 times in 2025, with "Herbs" always going into "Things". 7 of those times, the combo opened the show. "The Bubble" was written out of necessity. I had decided somewhere along the way that every song with a guest drummer would be on the album out of respect for my collaborators. However, I wasn't huge on "The Hall of Very Good" (not on this album), which I'd sent to my friend Freya from Angelhead to play drums on. I took her drum recording, sped it up, and wrote "The Bubble" on top of it. This is better. "Get A Library Card" was inspired by my frequent trips to the local library during my time back in NJ. I wrote a lot of these lyrics at that library, but this song wasn't one of them. The ones I can attribute to a single writing session (possibly January 9, 2025) are "Water Your Eyes", "Colors Change", "What Happens Here", "I Am A Mirror", "Why We Stopped Fighting" (outtake), "We Are Dead", and "Practice Squad". Like "Learning The Cold" before it, "Home 0" is a personal favorite that I've only played live once because of its tuning. It's BF#BC# on a baritone uke, and it being on a different instrument entirely means I can only play it at shows where I bring the uke. It's been a while since I've brought my uke to a show.
"Soma" features the talents of Noether aka Man With Dog fka The Quill Pen Gallery. It's not really a song so much as a few riffs stitched together with some incredible drumming behind them. "A Man For Every Mountain" was the last song written for the album. By that point, I had concluded that there weren't enough songs I wanted to cut (besides the 2 I already had, both mentioned earlier) to make the album shorter than 50 minutes, so I decided it would be an hour long. This song was needed to push it over the edge. It took 15 minutes. "You Can't Stop The Heed" is a tribute to a friend of mine who's battling cancer right now (and certainly was at the time). There's a clip of him talking during the bridge. My twin Dan, of Signal Valley fame, recorded the drums in 1 take. When I finished the album, my favorite song on it was "Time To Feed The Kids". It's still way up there for me. It just works. I don't know how to explain it. It had the working title of "Officially Licensed Neon Genesis Evangelion Hot Dog Buns". "Sex With God" is like "Soma" in that it's moreso a vehicle for the guitar and drums, but it still works because the drums are provided by Myles from mICROgOBLET, my favorite Philly band. The guitars were definitely written to sound like their songs. "We Are Dead" is one of those songs (seemingly one of many on this album) that just fell out of me and felt perfect immediately. It's boring when I keep saying "this is an all-timer" but the fact that this album has so many is wonderful. "Chemical Confidence" was another Momentum reject, but really it's just the chorus from the original being used as the second half of an otherwise new song. I wouldn't have wanted to end this monster any other way. It would not be a stretch to say this is my favorite Hello Whirled album.