getting high on my own supply - 3. songs about food (and sex) pt. 2
episode 3: "candy, darling", "i wanna frost your cheerio", "pie" (spring 2007)
i was still a virgin when i recorded these songs. i kept doing food songs but i started to want to push past the limited emotional range (while also not like getting serious and putting my actual feelings at risk). i had the idea to start singing about food but as a kind of double entendre that then like gets taken to a ridiculous degree to the point where it doesn't really make sense and is maybe funny. i guess it was a way to try to bridge from just literal statements about food to something more emotional or expressive.
"candy, darling" is based around the idea that i am asking a woman for her candy, like literally actual sugar candy she owns and possesses, but then it's also like candy is sex. it's silly and also kind of gross. the guitars are my already usual flavor of strokes and i think the mono synth that it's anchored around was kind of inspired by one of the songs on summerteeth but it's kind of a weird one. often in the songs there will be production or performance choices i regret and one big one is the amount of master reverb there is on this track (since i like the guitar parts and the drums but they all sound too tinny) and the bellowy low vocals which like if you continue listening to these you are going to hear me doing some pretty weird shit with my voice but the amount of strain and inflection i put on here is something (like i projected out of my shyness but then blew right past taste).
i really love breakfast cereal and in an ideal world i would eat it every morning for my entire life and the phrase "i wanna frost your cheerio" just got stuck in my head one day and i loved how visual and lewd the metaphor was (and yet also innocent? like it is obviously a virgin singing this and at this time in my life anyone who is going to listen to this song is my friend and already knows i haven't actually had sex with anyone). i wanted the production to be a kind of spector solo lennon chamber thing but also with a little bounce to it (the skittery guitar dancing over the drum fill between the chorus and the verse)—unlike the previous one, i think this song benefits from the reverb. i definitely got drunk in order to record the vocals (though also i am playing up the drunkenness i am not mark e. smith) and the multi-tracking of a chorus of drunk me's makes it feel even more unhinged. my dad put sugar on sweetened cereal when i was a kid and i blame him for my prediabetes. i would call this PBR&B but high life was the beer i got drunk on to sing this song.
i think after the end of senior year but before i moved out of the house i had a crush on this really beautiful girl whose last name was pai and who once whispered in my ear, after professing an interest in me in front of other people at the end of a party we had seen each other at, "i want to make you dinner" which was the hottest thing any girl had ever said to me in my life but the problem was we were only really tertiary friends and so i didn't see her a lot and my out-of-control unmedicated anxiety (except with enough alcohol and weed to go out, but even then i never really thought i became a different person when i got drunk (which i kind of wanted sometimes, to actually lose my inhibitions), just a dumber happier (eventually sicker) one) meant that actually independently acting on this and trying to go out on a date with with her was simply impossible so instead story of my life i recorded this blues rock song called "pie" and posted it on my facebook wall, which was where i had shared some of the previous songs and where i thought she might hear it and wonder if it was about her since we were (digitally) friends and that afternoon after it had been up for a few hours i got a call from a number with an area code of her home town, a fairly specific place that i had never gotten a call from before, and it was like the moment where the thing you're fantasizing will happen but sure is never going to actually happen is like actually happening except once again at this time i had no courage or game or anything and just let the call hang and didn't pick up sorry for the buzzkill not gonna james frey this who knows it might have just been a telemarketer! but even though that was a total loss and though the lyrics are dumb, i do still kind of like this song—there's something organic about the interplay between the piano and the acoustic guitar and the drums, the wordless vocal coda. at 21 i was such a romantic and so ready to love and be in love (and also have sex) but also incapable of making it happen, not a whole person, a scared kind of shell. i sometimes think about what it would be like to be that age now and have all of these ways all the time to broadcast my inner self out into the world and find connection through mediation that weren't there then: the grass is always greener tho, this be the verse. it's nice to listen to this recording and know that with time i'd have the thing i dreamed of (true love).