STEREO BUTTERFLY
released SEPTEMBER 26, 2017
ALBUM 9, RELEASE 23
My first album from college! I recorded this in a few places: my dorm room (most of it), the TCNJ recording studio (the 3 live drum tracks, with an engineer named Christopher Hingston Tenev), and a random classroom in that same building (the Logic drums). I didn't have a bass on campus for my first month or so, so while there might be some actual bass on some of these songs, there's a good chance what you think is a bass is actually a pitch-shifted guitar. This is the only time I ever did this with any regularity.
"Under the Flickering Light" is why I don't like putting my favorite songs at track 1 (although I do this anyway, but not by default). I told someone on my dorm floor that I had a new album, since he had advertised his Bandcamp on his door whiteboard. He told me a few days later that he liked it, but he loooooved the first song. That always hits me funny. "Suddenly They Like Me" was about grappling with being in a new social setting and figuring out how to talk almost exclusively to people who I hadn't spent the last however many years around (one person I knew in high school did live on my floor, and although we were never close we had many mutual friends in both high school and college). The song isn't great but the "pray for us" hook floors me. "Stereo Butterfly" is another song about a girl I had a crush on. I wrote a lot of songs about her. This song foreshadows what eventually did happen: I realized I was happier with her as a good friend, and later realized I felt that way with pretty much everyone. I'd rather have a friend than a romantic partner. The noise at the end is taken from the Conet Project, as are many of the samples on this album. I'm only noticing now that the audio is kinda phase-fucked, and if you played the song in mono you might just hear silence at the end. It also seems relevant to say that this album's cover and title were different before this song. It was a photograph of a bathtub in the men's bathroom of my floor. We were advised to never use it. I changed it to a picture my friend took of me, because I felt it reflected that I'd had a shockingly easy time finding new friends at college. The bass part on "Shortest Wave" was a melody from another Conet recording. While it's true that "Flickering Light" is the hit, my favorite song on here has always been "Positively James McNew". It's another crush song, but it stands nearly alone in the HW canon as being a bona fide love song without any catches. The words are simple. The music is simple. The melodies are catchy. "Strings Pulling Wings" and "Curtain Call" emerged on the same night (also an early version of "Flickering Light"). I went to a concert on campus (not saying the bands, but I do remember who they were) and I didn't like the first set at all. I stayed for two songs of the second set when I concluded that, actually, I could write better songs than these bands, so I went back to my room and started recording. This drives an embarrassing amount of my songwriting. "Golden Lovely" predates HW. I re-recorded it here but I forget if there was a real reason why. It got another version on Gives Up And Plays The Hits and it's much better there. The best part of this version is that extended Conet sample at the end. "My Ears Hurt" was originally written for a side project that never happened called SKi TRiP '69. It's a hit chorus without a hit song around it. Maybe one day, if I feel like remaking my old songs again (with more willingness to rearrange songs entirely), I'll revisit this one. Maybe.