1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DdI-ZoM0M8
even my earliest material was short on traditional songs, so this really stands out in my discography as a lo-fi psychedelic pop tune. i've connected the track to two guitar-driven psychedelic instrumental sections that i'm also rather fond of and that are leaning towards the composer that i became as i grew older.
something else i like to say about this song is that i give my age away clearly. it's a silly song about imaginary villains. not much depth to it. it's one of the few places where it's obvious that my voice hasn't changed yet. beyond that, this simply couldn't have been written by an adult. it's just too cute.
the instrumental sections at the beginning and end of this are older than 1996, and were both things that i would often play in my room for hours by myself to sort of chill myself out if i was going through some childhood drama. i dressed them both up here, but at their core they're both very sombre folk tunes. while i don't have clear memories of many of the thoughts i had when i was between ten and fifteen years old, i can state with certainty that i developed a lot of the core concepts that define who i am while meditating on these chord patterns.
2) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lt7AWQ7QiOE
this is the second recording of the track (you can get to the first by clicking through the link). the initial 1997 recording is the first song-oriented keyboard-driven track in my discography. it's not the last one, but these tracks are relatively rare, coming from me. production wise, both versions of the track were huge steps forwards relative to when they were created. this version is defined uniquely by the sequencing. while i'd actually hesitate to order the two versions (the original is maybe a bit more raw, while the rerecording is more elaborate), i only want one version on youtube......
so, yeah: this is a song about a pre-treatment transgendered teenager fantasizing about genital mutilation. yeah, well, *life* is heavy. deal with it....
3) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBPyVJCuydc
this was initially an anti-smoking song, and you want to interpret that as a kind of anti-corporate punk rock thing rather than an anti-libertarian thing. public health has a slightly different dimension to it in countries where health care is publicly operated. canada's health care system (or collection of systems) is not technically socialist, but the public funding model still brings ideas of public ownership (or at least public investment) into the equation. the question of finding ways to reduce large costs on smoking related illnesses is consequently a valid policy discussion, as it opens funds and resources to spend on other health concerns.
the initial demo version of this was recorded when i was 16; this version was recorded a little more than a year later. over that period, i smoked a few things, and i liked some of them. my anti-tobacco perspective did not weaken until my early 20s, and i actually even started smoking around the age of 20 as a stimulant (it works well with coffee), although all the versions of the track were done by this point. a lot of my argument against smoking was that it was just a pointless destruction of yourself. what i learned was that it has useful properties in increasing alertness. i suppose it's up to the end user to weigh the costs.
but, by the time i had this version done, i had made a clear decision to not be anti-pot. at the time, i would have been anti-alcohol, anti-tobacco and pro-pot. it's what the evidence i had seen suggested to me: alcohol and nicotine were very dangerous, while marijuana was not. so, i converted this song out of an anti-tobacco rant and into a pro-marijuana sample collage. that collage was somewhat juvenile, and has been removed from the track. however, it's accessible from bandcamp if you stumble through a maze of links to it.
musically, this is very post-punk and is coming out of the large amounts of early 80s music that i was listening to at the time.
4 ) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1rF9wM1p0M
this is the final section of the last proper inri demo, which was written as somewhat of a suite, but only in a fleeting moment, and then forgotten. it's a sort of sardonic take on the jesus story, in that it follows a persecuted person through a suicide and a resurrection, with tongue in cheek commentary.
initially, it was a song suite about being young and not listened to, culminating in a rather dramatic overreaction - that i ridiculed as counter-productive, partly by reference to kurt cobain, whose suicide is an event that hangs over the childhood of my generation. people that were adults at the time might want to think of it in the same way that they interpreted watching kennedy get his brains blown out on live tv. as i grew up (stated loosely - i was still 17/18, here), i realized this is a general condition of society that is not limited to young people. so, i generalized it to reflect the illusion of what we call "democracy", and gave it an exaggerated persecution complex. the cynicism was targeted at the clinton administration, but in a broader sense i'm sort of ridiculing the rather cartoonish perception of generation x as this kind of raelian mass of fatalist children....
the vocals seem dead, and may confuse people looking at this as 90s punk (which is retroactively defined by it's screamy vocals). at the time, i considered screaming to be sort of contrived and passe. the recitation is a very considered reaction to something i interpreted as largely cartoonish. i mean, i was still influenced by the screamy stuff i grew up with, but it wasn't a characteristic of much of anything i was attracted to after about '97 or so.
the initial, somewhat abridged version was initially the end of my first inri cassette demo, which you can get to by clicking through the links.
i've pulled back from insisting on recited vocals in order to minimize that contrivedness, but the truth is that the vast majority of music released after about '97 that has screamed vocals very much *is* contrived. time has only cemented my rejection of falsely emotionalized vocals in punk-derived genres.
