pickle darling album journal entry 2
I think the time between music releases always feels way shorter to listeners than it does to musicians. A couple years between albums is what I would consider pretty frequent, and when an artist announces a new record a couple years (or less) after the previous one, I’m like “woah but you just put one out!” And someone said that to me when I put out Cosmonaut in 2021, which was two years after Bigness (which was in 2019), for me it felt like ages, two years of nothing, but I guess from a listener’s perspective, we are never ‘waiting’ for anything because there is always so much music coming out every single day. But when you make something, you often finish it over 6 months before it comes out, and then when it comes out the roll-out lasts for like 3-4 months, so when the album campaign is fully complete, you’re already about 10 months into the next album. ANYWAY this is boring shit I obsess over and probably sounds like I’m about to announce a new album, but I’m not.
I was also thinking about discographies, because I like to nerd out over what an artist’s discography looks like, what each album means in the discography, if they are meant to be reactions against the previous album, or meant to stand alongside the other albums in a huge row where the order doesn’t really matter. It’s probably cringey to think like that when you are an artist that isn’t very big (ie: me) but I’m still like, excited for my fourth album to feel like a fourth album. Bigness was my first album and definitely feels like a first album, very naive and open hearted kind of embarrassing in the way a first album should feel. Cosmonaut feels like a second album, like a counter statement to the first one, with kind of the opposite colour palette, slightly darker and more spacious and exploratory. Laundromat is a third album for me in that it feels like the most compact, simple, accessible thing I’ve done, like a reaction against the second album, but also it felt like I had finally figured out what the Platonic ideal of a Pickle Darling song was. Short, no choruses, just catchy A section and catchy B section, no wasted notes in the melodies, etc.
My fourth album is kind of the opposite of that, the songs are longer, more chopped up, deconstructed. Not really any obvious singles or big swings. I was listening to that Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy podcast episode on Life Of The Record and he talked about the ‘value of limited reach.’ How the bigger the audience, the more diluted the impact of the art can be. Best (at least for me) to try and communicate to a small amount of people as viscerally as possible (either intimate, small shows, releasing music in a low-key way with lots of intentionally inconvenient barriers to entry). Not worry about his music being on streaming because having just a CD-buying audience is enough. Which seems kind of counterintuitive but…
Anyway, I know it’s so cliché to be like “wow the next album is my most vulnerable, personal record YET!” but I do feel like the next bunch of songs are ones I’m holding closest to my chest.
So with that, the new album is almost finished.
currently listening to:
Welsprynger - ‘For Granted - acoustic demo version’
Stephen Sondheim - A Sunday in the Park with George (Original Broadway Cast Recording)
Beth Orton - Comfort of Strangers
The Knife - Shaking The Habitual
Orbital - The Green Album
Squeeze - Singles: 45’s and Under
Rivers Cuomo - Alone: The Home Recordings of Rivers Cuomo
Cat Power - Moon Pix
Jason Lytle - Yours Truly, The Commuter
Jon Brion - Meaningless
Randy Newman - Live In London
LCD Soundsystem - 45:33
Mia June - Moth Penny Casino/The Way It Is
Stereolab - Switched On Vol. 4
Bladee - Cold Visions
Ween - The Mollusk
R.E.M. - Live At The Olympia
Cindy Lee - Diamond Jubilee
Holly Herndon - Platform
Hannah Everingham - Siempre Tiene Flores
Pearl Jam - Riot Act
Burial - Antidawn
Claire Rousay - Sentiment
S. Raekwon - Steven
The Streets - Original Pirate Material
U2 - Zooropa