16th
FAQ for "T-Shirts For Tourists"
Why does it sound all distorted and sh!t?
This is the number one question that has come up with the release of this album. Actually it usually doesn’t so much come up as a question as it does a comment, or an awkward silence (during which the person is wondering, “why does it sound like that?”). The short answer is: I did it on purpose. It was interesting and exciting to me. And it fit in with the theme of the record. So I spent almost half a year constructing arrangements with all these overdrive effects and squashed frequencies. A song that probably took a couple hours to write went through months of post-production to get this lo-fi electronic sound. There’s a brief step-by-step explanation with pictures here. If you check out the cover art and photos I put together, you’ll see I basically tried to achieve the same thing there. Ever worn ripped jeans on purpose? OK, then don’t gimme grief about my lo-fi record. j/k
Why is the album marked “EXPLICIT” on iTunes?
The last song on the album (“Fallin’ From The Sun”) is actually a demo recording I made literally an hour or two after I wrote the song. I never intended it to be anything more than a sketch, but when I went back and listened to it months later, I realized that as imperfect as the playing and singing are, it was the most precise carbon copy of how I was feeling at the time. It’s a recording of a single, uninterrupted take… just me playing on my digital piano and singing in my room, with a slightly nasally, mumbling tone, and my voice sounds totally exhausted and drained… but I think I had actually expressed myself as well as I could. So I didn’t do much more to it than add some reverb to the piano, cut the frequencies on my voice to make it sound like it was coming out of a cell phone or something, and got rid of some of the room hiss.
However, while I was singing the song, I dropped an F bomb in the middle of it. And the rules with iTunes are, if you have explicit language in one of the songs, boom, the whole thing is marked “explicit.”
Why did it take so damn long?
The album took so long because I was trying to get the lo-fi sound I wanted just right. I know a lot of people think there’s something wrong with the recordings, but oh well… that’s the way I meant it to sound. And that’s what was turning me on artistically at the time, so I had to follow that.
Why is it called “T-Shirts For Tourists”?
The theme of the album is the idea that lovers are like travellers… and they don’t know when they find someone else if they’re going to stay with them and make them their home or whether they’re going to eventually leave and just end up being tourists, in a sense. So there’s a lot of imagery in the songs about travelling and stuff like that.
What are you going to do next?
Probably something completely different. I don’t know if I want to do pop music anymore. I think I may finally try to return to doing instrumental music for a while and see if I can come up with something that’s interesting for me there.
