WRITER'S BLOCK 5
released AUGUST 30, 2019
RELEASE 72
Start of my junior year of college. That was a weird time, as documented on Quartered. I wanted to figure out how I was going to record music this time around, so I made this as a test. "Heavy Like The World" had been released by this time, but Sweating the Plague (the GBV album it was on) had not. I think I did the same thing with "The Rally Boys" earlier in the year. I'm certain I got some of the words wrong, and if I'd taken even a little bit more time with it, I could have gotten more of the solo down. "Gulf War Song" was, and is, one of my favorite Cleaners From Venus songs, and I wanted to try and figure out some of its weird chords. It's a bunch of diminished chords! It might be one of the saddest songs Martin Newell ever wrote. I just listened to his newest (Beryl & Ruff Go Shopping) and it was quite good but there was nothing like this on it. That's fine. If I'm still making music when I'm 73 I'm sure it won't sound like the stuff I'm making now. The Field Mice were super influential on the really early HW stuff. 3 years later, I got back into them and decided to tackle their first song. The cover art for the EP is an homage to their Autumn Store EPs. It's also on this recording that you can hear how messed up my voice was around this time. I was battling a tough sinus infection and recording through it anyway. There's some squealing feedback on this that's really funny to me. I think there's more feedback on this cover than in the entire Field Mice discography. Something that bugs me about my "Fluorescenes" cover is that, near the end of the song, there are 2 electric guitars in the center of the stereo field. I hate that shit. There might be another song on here that does that. I know there's a song on "Quartered" that does. "The Frontier Index" was a Silver Jews song I hadn't heard until David died. It quickly became my favorite, so of course I had to learn how to play it. I think it came out the best of any of these. It kind of sounds like the original sometimes. That ain't bad. I knocked out "Violet Execution" back in Mount Laurel before moving back on campus. I recorded "Power Bird" at a time when I'd given Ponyoak by Kleenex Girl Wonder a shot and the only 2 songs that stuck were this and "Tendency Right Foot Forward". The 20 people who have heard anything Graham made after that album (especially Yes Boss) will know the influence his music had on HW for a while. I even played a show with him once (which I need to write up on pretty soon).