WRITER'S BLOCK 2
released AUGUST 16, 2017
RELEASE 21
I'm sitting on a Greyhound bus headed for Dayton, Ohio. It's almost 4 in the morning. Cool. I recorded "Balancing Act" a day after hearing it for the first time. It's still one of my favorite Volcano Suns songs. I had a big ol' keyboard with all those general MIDI sounds that I definitely thought I was bringing with me to college. I ended up not doing that for some reason. Maybe my parents thought it was too big to fit in the car. All I know is that I gave the keyboard to someone in 2023. I liked it but I just didn't use it a whole lot by that time. "Double Dare" is one of my favorite Yo La Tengo songs but this didn't quite catch why. Not noisy enough. The drums completely lose the beat at one point and while I'm no stranger to sloppy drumming, it really hits wrong here. The vocals also fall too far back in the mix. Part of why I compress my vocals so much these days is so that never happens...although it still does from time to time. "Terms of Psychic Warfare" was going to be the name of the first HW album until I decided to not steal the title of a great song for it. In a twist of bitter irony, this was the second time in 2017 that I covered a song written by someone who was alive at the time, but passed away by the end of the year. First it was Tommy Keene, and now it was Grant Hart.