Why Do You Make Bad Music?

You're an intelligent person

With a nice record collection

Yet when you make music

Something happens

It's not a question 

Of talent-

Something meaner and stupider 

Comes out of you

I don't care if you're successful 

So was hitler.

When you put out a dumb vibration

Life catches up to you

You do a bad thing

Like a corporation eating the planet

And it becomes your thing 

Against the world, beyond ridiculous

Because your music

Doesn't make something interesting

It doesn't make 

something curious 

It confirms the worst in everything

And it's very successful 

You don't need the money

You don't need success 

You need to be able

To live with yourself 

because I can't ...

Traffic Islands

Amongst poorly 

designed things

We construct 

relationships

the world does 

its thing

we go about 

our business

all I ever need

is you to be here

nothing else matters

take my passwords

climates change

rains cleanse

left to your own devices

and dreaming

nights slow dancing 

on broken glass 

on the surface of a planet 

entirely made of gas

Taste Matters

I've played with a number of musicians in bands and as a solo performer. I know very little theory so I often rely on a more learned musician to be my musical director and inform me when changing a note or two in a chord would make more sense for an arrangement. I should be the worst musician in any ensemble I play with because I'm a songwriter, fuckface, not a musician.

I had a recent experience where I started to recycle some old rhythm tracks àla Lee Scratch Perry, (never released band recordings of aborted songs), working with Marcos Cunha. Marcos is a damn fine multi-instrumentalists who's played with many A-list Brazilian talents. I've had the honor of having him on bass ukelele in my group, but here he was jamming on an assortment of synthesizers and it was nothing short of magical. We have very similar tastes in music and honestly, it's been a while since of played with someone of his caliber with his TASTES. Tastes matter. The lines he created were alive, dirty sounding things that just took my compositions to a whole new level. Playing with technically gifted people ain't enough. Particularly if they have shitty record collections. This was better than sex.

Shot Order

close up of a mouth eating breakfast

long shot of cars stuck in traffic

cut to a man on a train

scratching the scab on his face

zoom in on you in the mirror

putting on your makeup it’s serious

pan to your ancestors tilling the soil 

forward a millennia they’re sold as toys

follow a conversation

of a middle aged couple

struggling with a handle 

on a world they can’t control

trying to feel romantic

without a sense of desperation

surrounded by advertisements

for electric cars

wide shot of a crowd leaving the subway 

armies of phones glowing like insects

we track a girl of nineteen

texting her parents for money

at this point in the action I do my walk on 

evoking kitsch Russian ads for tampons

I smile then I look in your face

you scream and run away

( I give chase on my Segway )

zoom out as this song

plays in the background

life looks beautiful

the world is cruel

all captured in 

a spinning solar system

framed by 

an indifferent universe