THE OTHER NEED
released JANUARY 1, 2026
ALBUM 57, RELEASE 157
Howdy, it’s Fern. This year marks Ten Years of Hello Whirled. To celebrate, I’m doing a series of posts where I talk about every single thing I’ve released. I was inspired by @gbvreleases on Instagram to do this, except I’m the person who made all this music. Ego stroking at its finest! Anyway, here’s some stuff about the new album.
I didn’t intend to have a new album ready for New Year’s Day. What happened was this: I brought a little notebook to work one day in late November, and spent a few days writing little pieces, some of which could charitably be called poetry. There was no serious intent with any of the pieces, but I knew at some point they were going to be songs. Later that week, I sat down with an acoustic guitar, a Casio keyboard, and a tape recorder, and improvised songs based around the little pieces I’d written. The demos were good enough that I felt inspired to write 1 or 2 more things to make the whole thing presentable as an album. The demos remain unreleased. It is because of how I did the demos that I decided to use an acoustic guitar, tuned a half-step down, to record the entire album. There’s other guitars and bass and drums too, but every song has an acoustic guitar on it (even if it’s run through an amp). I also decided to record the whole thing inside just 1 Reaper project, so if you’re wondering why the album isn’t very sonically varied, that’s why. Wow, that was really boring! You know what’s less boring?
I can’t claim to love all of these songs, but the best ones are really strong. “Competitions” was written as a mesostic (like an acrostic but the key word is in the middle) about my mixed relationships with local music scenes, and the extent to which my issues with them are a “me” problem. “After 2” was the second song in the notebook, and the first song recorded for the album. I wanted it at track 1 for a while, but something about it being first in the recording order AND the album didn’t sit right. “Bubble Up” was such an obvious hit when I demoed it that I threw it into the setlist for the tour I was about to embark on with Te Vista. It’s maybe the first Hello Whirled song to be performed live without a proper finished recording of it in any form. “Blood on the Page” was born from a mystery cut on my finger that bled enough for a bit of it to fall onto the page. Most of the lyrics were written after the original demo process. Originally it was just “I don’t know how or when or where or why I cut my finger and I could really use a bandage for it.” I don’t have anything meaningful to say about “Inward”, but it’s got a fun chorus and that’s good enough to end an album with.