xfcliffords-blog

[sy3g]

new teto cover?? with an mmd render ? it's more likely than you think! defoko doesn't sing in it though she's just moral and brass support

credits are in the description of the video

[thepolyorchids]

A bit about each song on The Polyorchids LP

Track 1 of 10: The Lark

This was the first Polyorchids song that didn’t exist prior to the band’s formation. It was sort of an experiment in a different writing style. The first Courtney Barnett album had just come out and I loved the way she wrote these songs made up of super specific and sometimes mundane lyrics that, when added up, made you feel something. Tony’s naturally great at getting specific like that, but I tend to retreat into my own mind and write from that space. I used a simple a two-chord progression I’d been sitting on for years and wrote a blow-by-blow telling of a drive out to a gig Travis, Tony and I played in Willits a few weeks prior. The hills of Lake County had just been burned by a huge fire. On the trip, we met a bunch of nice seasonal weed-trimming folk (plenty of them white dudes w/ dreads, hence the chorus, which was originally just a placeholder but ultimately stuck) and we crashed at a shitbox motel called The Lark. I liked a Joyce Manor song called “Midnight Service at the Mutter Museum” which had a quiet-verse/loud-chorus structure to it. I brought it to the band with that in mind, but couldn’t get Travis to soften the his floor tom hits, only to find that the thumping beat actually made for a better song. From there it found its groove. — Justin

Track 2 of 10: Predisposed

Most of the lyrics and melodies for “Predisposed” were written in 2011. I think for most songwriters it’s easier to say something in a song than it is to say it in real life. This song was written directly to my friend (and sister from another mister) Nicole Putnam. She was and has always been someone that had my back no matter what, no questions asked. This song turned out to be a (WELL-deserved) explanation/Thank You (even though she never asked for either) for all the times in that year she was there for me when I felt like I had no one. It started as an acoustic song (like most Polyorchids songs), I absolutely forgot I EVEN WROTE IT! For me writing becomes sometimes like therapy, so once I finish... I feel better and feel like I can move on a bit. I found and old iPhone in October of 2017. When I checked out the voice memos, this bad boy was on it. It wasn’t totally complete but Justy, Trav and I worked it to be a full band song and it made it to our album. This is also the first time in The Polyorchids history that I sing my own song on the record. — Tony

Track 3 of 10: Dumpster Heap

I wrote the melody for this a few years ago on a miniature kids’ guitar I was fooling around with, but I spent more than a year just humming gibberish to it. Tony and I have had tons of conversations about our feelings about talking politics on social media. On one hand, it’s a cesspool of garbage that brings out the worst in people and diving into it accomplishes essentially nothing, but on the other hand, it’s where we do 90% of our communicating at this point. If we don’t talk about this stuff online, we’re sort of making the decision to not talk about it at all, which isn’t good either. I’ve typed out full responses to Facebook comments only to delete them before posting so as to avoid surrendering my day to a shit show of notifications. This song is about that internal conversation. I wrote a second verse for this after the “grab her by the…” tape came out, but decided it made an evergreen idea too specific. A few months later I started writing ’45’ and realized this 30-second song could exist with just one verse that feeds right into that one. — Justin

Track 4 of 10: 45

The sort of bizarre post-election vibe had given way to the inauguration and now this guy was slapping his Sharpie signature on like five executive orders per day and arguing about crowd sizes. A parade of idiots were marching through Charlottesville with tiki-torches the day I started writing it. I can’t really pull off overtly political lyrics because they feel corny to me about one hour after I write them, but it seemed like a joke that this dude was running things and I felt like trying capture that in some way, because it was inescapable. Jeff Rosenstock’s WORRY had come out a few months earlier and knocked me out. A fast/crazy deep-cut called "Bang on the Door” was my favorite track and I pretty much wanted to jack it and make it my own. The chords and melody for 45 are totally different from that song, but you can tell they’re sort of distant cousins. I only had one verse written, but I showed it to Trav and Tony at the very end of a practice and the “Side! Eyed! Glances!…” intro was so glorious and punchy with the full band. Some songs take work to find their groove. This one was a natural fit right off the bat and we got excited about it. I wrote a second verse and we started playing it at shows. I finished the third verse the night before recording with Pat and our friends Mike and Jake came in to sing gang vocals on the outro. — Justin

Track 5 of 10: Skeletons

Tony wrote this one a few years ago and lost the demo on an old phone (that’s his move) until just a few months before we recorded the album. I’d never heard it prior to that, but I instantly became obsessed with it, even more so than Tony I think. I told him as much, and I even played it a few times at open mics by myself. The song is really just one verse and one chorus… or a looping chorus with one bridge — however you want to put it. I added the guitar riff, which mirrors the melody but gives it something new, and pitched the idea of having Tony and I alternate singing with a louder, shared verse at the end. This is the only time we’ve ever structured a song that way. We recorded this two days before I moved out of California and we had absolutely no time to practice it with Travis. We tracked our instruments to a click track (unlike most Polyorchids songs, which we record live as a full band) and let Pat at Earth Tone play the percussion after the fact — also something we’d never done before. — Justin

Track 6 of 10: Down in the Desert

This song was written after a trip to Arizona for my uncle Jeff’s funeral. My brother and I grew up with our uncle around a ton, bringing us those little popper/snappers and just generally being the best. As we grew older, we came to realize how truly bizarre and fucking hilarious this person was. Eccentric and witty to his absolute core. He joined the Army out of high school and was stationed in Germany, which I think clouds this song in a bit of confusion because “shipped out to Germany…” really sounds like WWII, but it was actually decades later during a peace-time in Germany. My uncle enjoyed room-temperature tall cans of beer — a taste he said he developed during those years in Germany. After the Army, he got into theater and ultimately became a union-carded makeup artist in Hollywood, working on stuff like the sitcom Major Dad and a TV adaptation of the movie Weird Science among many other projects. Before the funeral, my dad received a letter from one of Jeff’s old makeup artist friends/colleagues. He read that full letter at the funeral and it was just about the most real and beautiful thing I’ve heard in my whole life... Just a human being remembering another human being through the specific memories they shared — the kinds of specifics that send you inward to think about your own memories. I cried hard and felt extremely happy at the same time.

The whole extended family stayed at a desert motel that night and passed a couple of tall cans around in a circle and took turns sharing stories. I liked the idea of letting that evening with family be the chorus and Jeff’s life be the verses, so that’s the basic structure of the song. I started the first couple of lines during that road trip to the desert, but the rest came one line at a time over like a half a year. I never hit a wall, but I never hit a groove either. It was a challenge to write, and yet I felt strongly about seeing it through. It wasn’t until I played an almost-finished version for Tony that it became a potential Polyorchids song at his insistence. I played it once at an open mic but the first time we played it live as a band was at Danny Secretion’s Fuck Cancer benefit almost exactly a year later. — Justin

Track 7 of 10: Back off, Warchild

I started this as a sparse and mellow folk song on acoustic guitar, but abandoned it after about a month of frustration over the lyrics. It started as a sort of abstract story about conflict and tension, but I had a hard time keeping it moving. I liked the first verse on its own but didn’t see a path forward. But then we tried it as a band right after the Popgun EP was done while floating some new song ideas. This came right after we’d found some momentum with The Lark, and I got excited about the dynamics of the full band banging it out. It added something new and took some pressure off the lyrics, which I still feel a bit lukewarm about to be totally honest. The binding theme of the song is frustration and tension and negativity. Verse one is childhood, verse two is early adulthood, and verse three is the old age and death. The chorus is sort of an anthemic reveling in that pessimism, which is no way to live but real nonetheless. The one lyric I really love is the chorus line: “...Not our tax brackets not the weather / could pull the graphite out of the letters...” The song title comes from a line in Point Break when Keanu is about to get in a fight at the beach. We spent our teens and 20s camping and boogie boarding at that beach (Leo Carrillo) and rinsing off in those same outdoor showers. — Justin

Track 8 of 10: Low Class Love Song

Low Class Love Song was started in October of 2017. It started out as a baseline I couldn't get outa my head (I'm not 100% sure but I feel like I might have stolen the chords from "runaround sue"). It ended up being a song about the feeling of dating above your class and knowing it's not gonna end well but pursuing it anyway because the pain of a broken heart is worth the experience of sharing some time with that person. Music really is cheaper than a therapist. — Tony

Track 9 of 10: Preachers in Private Jets

This song started as a jam session groove at a practice. Our old band wrote some songs that way, but The Polyorchids never really have. We loved playing it but didn’t know how to treat it because there was no chord progression, just this looping riff. Eventually we added a palm-muted version of the riff and I started yelling nonsense over that part sort of in the style of Fugazi’s Waiting Room. Around that time I saw a video of two televangelist preachers shooting this shit about why God is very pumped about them being super rich. More than half of the lines in this song are lifted almost directly from that YouTube clip. A week before recording, Hurricane Harvey hit Houston and Joel Osteen locked up his megachurch doors, keeping out the affected. That last verse was finished right before recording. The chorus chords were written separately by Tony for a different song, but we were elated to find that they fit right into this one and added a nice melodic part that contrasted the verses and the riff. We took a long time to start playing it live, but Jake from Pisscat nudged us to play it every night of a tour we did together around Lake Tahoe. Pisscat pal Becky wrote it on a set list as Pee Pee Jay one time and I regret not calling it that. From there it felt complete. — Justin

Track 10 of 10: Readiness for Radio

After a life spent not caring either way about Bruce Springsteen, I found my way to his Nebraska album and loved it like many before me. I did the obligatory deep-dive into its origin story: DIY four-track demos that he’d recorded in his basement with plans of doing a proper full-band studio album, only to release the raw demos instead because they served the songs better. I liked the idea of writing something that referenced the themes of the album and its story without ever doing so explicitly. The result, I think, is one of those songs that lets the listener find their own meaning. It’s not an autobiographical song for me, and yet I identify with plenty of it personally. The main chords were adapted out of an old mewithoutyou song. I thought I’d spun them off to be totally unrecognizable, but my brother’s wife Veronica spotted it like four years after I wrote it! If you listen to that band, let me know if you can spot it. I recorded it live in the big drum room at Earth Tone, soaking it in open space and reverb. Pat left the loooong ringing sound of the final chord and then abruptly ended it when I slap the strings shut. I love those final seconds. — Justin