d204 is a project where i take a list of eighty songs that i wrote & record whichever one comes up when i roll a d20 & a d4

the song

i don’t know what to feel or do
when i see these yellowed photos of you
i don’t know how to reconcile our shared nose
our shared smile

the vlog

further thoughts

september first, 2016: we finish packing up our apartment some time after midnight & immediately drive the truck to another city. i take this picture at 4am in the new apartment. all of my bedding is too deep in the truck to retrieve in the middle of the night, so i sleep on a uhaul furniture moving blanket.

we wake up. we unpack the truck. the new neighbour gives us coffee. we drive the truck back to the first city. we drive a car back again to the new city. i’ll only spend about three out of the next six months there, bc my estranged mother died without a will, & a series of factors means the estate fell to me, so i’ll spend about half my time in my hometown, dealing with bureaucracy & logistics. i am always seventeen years old & crazy when i’m in my hometown. i’ll become the most chaotic mix of functioning (paperwork) & non-functioning (everything else). i’ll get over my generational anxiety abt phone calls through brute force immersion therapy. i’ll sneak empty booze bottles out to the recycling after the friends who are letting me half-live with them go to sleep.

but that’s in the future. it’s september first, & some time within the past forty-eight hours or so, my estranged mother’s body was found. i’m still trying to understand what i’m supposed to feel about this. it’s been a couple of years since i experimented with reconnecting with her & pulled back because she was still displaying some worrying behaviour. i’ve been trying to decide whether i’ll ever try again. sometimes decisions are made for you. i’m not sure what i gave up the right to feel by not talking to her anymore.

now that i’m older, & i’m looking at pictures of her when she was younger, we look even more alike. i’ve never liked my smile because it makes me look like her, but i’m seeing it in the rest of the face now, too. i’m not sure what her family (my family?) thinks of me. i’m not sure if i’m supposed to feel regret– if it would somehow be less monstrous to feel regret. there is a terrified 12 year old still living inside of me trying to justify the things they did to make themself feel safe & i want to tell them they don’t have to. it’ll take a while, though.

i often remember the dates here wrong. this is a funny possible side effect of mythologising your own life through the dramatic arts. i remember finding out that she died on august 31st, the day i named another song on this album after, but it had to be august 30th, because one of my reactions to the news was this mountain goats joke (? i did really do it, but i did think it was a bit funny)

the original version of this song is very, very simple:

 it sounds like a lot of my demos. when i’m working on a song i’ll often record a version with this sort of very easy one-handed piano accompaniment just to have something underneath the melody & lyrics as i’m playing with them. my memory of this song is that i did that & then went… oh. huh. that’s the song, actually. this one doesn’t get more. this one should just be this empty & raw.

culpable is, obviously, about complex grief, & written in the thick of it. a lot of the choices i made in its production are particularly emotionally driven (even in the context of, arguably, MOST of my production decisions being emotionally driven). i recorded the vocals in one go, sitting on the bathroom floor in my childhood home, bc i was there visiting my father & realised it wouldn’t feel right to do it anywhere else.

but now… i dunno. it’s been more than six years since i released this album. i’m in another apartment, in another city. i feel a lot less beholden to abrasive authenticity than i used to be. i feel less pressure to use real blood in my work where paint will do. i think that used to feel like a lie to me, & now it just feels like… making something. just like a word is not the concept it describes, art about a feeling can’t be that feeling. so why limit it?

a song is just a song. a song isn’t the thing the song is about. it doesn’t have to be raw & empty as some sort of sacred thing. i can improvise some slightly more fiddly piano & add some harmonies. it was fun to do, honestly, & it feels shocking to allow myself to have fun with anything from this album. but it’s allowed. i’m glad that the album exists in its original form & that i made the choices i did then, & i’m trying to shift into the perspective of collaborating with my old self, rather than… bowing to them. or erasing them.

culpable is on bandcamp & all the streaming sites & stuff & it’s the only time so far i’ve ever written an album on purpose as one cohesive piece & even if i want to be less precious about it, i do think it’s most impressive in its entirety. like a chapter in a book can be good, but the author can still want you to read the book. super light-hearted start to this dice-based project, i know