getting high on my own supply - 5. "u"
episode 5: "u" v1 (spring 2007) v2 (spring 2009)
deborah's hairdresser pitched the show from to her and i was skeptical despite wanting a new drama to watch but then received a second confirmation this weekend when e's boyfriend described it as "lost but in a small town" which like sold and nothing is perfect in this world including this show but we've been watching several episodes of it a night and the needle drop over the end of the [lost-ian weirdness intensifies] season finale we just watched was "everybody knows this is nowhere" by neil young, my favorite of his songs.
in honor of lost, today's episode features a flash forward. the first version of this song would have been recorded during the same spring break as "WMD LUV" and the second is from two years later, when i was living with my parents after moving back from korea and making music in a closet while slowly going crazy (or maybe i have always been slowly going crazy and that was actually a brief time of doing so more quickly).
that can stay in the future for now, though. the inspiration for "u"* was george perec's a void, a 300 page novel which famously did not contain the letter 'e'. i did not actually truly formally commit to this formal constraint in writing the lyrics, probably after meeting the slightest difficulty (not that this saved me from awkward constructions like "my eyes did tear"), but instead used it as wrapping paper for everyday dumb love.
they're very different versions (one is indie folk pop, the other is southern rock) recorded years apart but do share a weird (but unfortunately not rare) commonality, which is that the singing annoys me. it's not that it's bad per se but one of the things that's a struggle listening to these recordings is the belief that most of them would be so much better if everything else was exactly the same except i had just done like 15-25% less vocal affectation, like just singing clearer and straighter and with less inflection and melisma and strain and bleat and [jazz hands]. i have the neutral accent of a millenial raised on cable television and i don't know why when singing i so often stretch so far to the point of sounding like a cartoon character, but i guess if i want to think about it with gratitude, maybe it speaks to a kind of brief freedom from self-consciousness, the trance of being alone with yourself in headphones.
despite the singing, i do like the end of the second version — those splashy cymbals floating inbig reverb, the space jam vocal and piano bridge at the end (pitchy harmonies, but harmonies nonetheless) leading into a "everybody knows this is nowhere" indebted freakout solo that kind of somehow feels like it's in slow motion even though i don't think the tempo has changed.
[screenshots from "a rupture in time" by sarah aziza]