which is unfathomable. look at that greasy fuck on the album cover. they are severely chronically & acutely going through it.

it’s very funny to look at its description on bandcamp (“some recordings i did in 2012 thrown together in a it’s-nearly-new-year’s-eve-and-oh-my-god-i-have-nothing-to-show-for-this-year-creatively panic”) & think about how i had… truly no idea what it was like to actually Not Create. me-in-december-2012 had written a bunch of songs, recorded some of them, & probably did a bunch of other art, while working a full time job or two most of the time, & also drinking to the point of blackout five to seven days a week, & still ended the year violently dissatisfied with their output. i’ve done almost nothing, very genuinely, this year, or the past couple of years, & i’ve come to a point of acceptance with it because sometimes acceptance becomes the only option. these have been difficult years. i’m not trying to disparage myself, i’m just marvelling at what a frenetic ball of completely unresolved trauma i was & how much more i used to project into everything i ever did or didn’t do. how completely unable i was to accept that maybe i was good enough. wouldn’t it be nice to travel back in time & hold your younger self & convince them that they’re already good enough? obviously i wouldnt have believed me, but its comforting to imagine. & at least ive learned to do it for that version of myself who still exists in me all the time.

im taking the opportunity of the big anniversary to be self-indulgent & talk abt the songs in a way i havent before.

07.11.12

i’m not sure i’ve explicitly explained anywhere that for a little while i had a project (which lived exclusively on tumblr, obviously, at the time, with occasional highlights still ported over to deviantart) where i just tried to write exactly a hundred words every day– literally the only requirement was that it was exactly one hundred words– & that’s where the little spoken word stuff sprinkled in between the songs comes from.

taphonomy

i laughed out loud in surprise when i looked at the page for taphonomy & saw that i’d written it in 2011. it seems like such a simple & naked plea for people to stop dying that i’ve been operating under the false assumption that i wrote it in 2012 proper, the year where People Just Kept Dying. now that i’m thinking about it, i’m recalling for the first time in a long time that it was written in response just generally to the feeling of being in communities of people who are somehow overwhelmingly suicidal, as often happens when you are, you know, a poet, or queer, or whatever. i don’t think i want to make any more new human friends. it hurts, i know, but you’ll learn you gotta.

actually one second i gotta look up what taphonomy means. “the branch of paleontology that deals with the processes of fossilization.” HUH alright sure yeah, tbqh i am not really sure why i chose that title specifically but i definitely still had the lingering deviantart habit of ~exclusively using evocative one word titles that aren’t directly taken from the piece itself~

there’s a video of me performing it live my sister recorded in 2018, i think the first time she ever saw me play

02.11.12

shadflies & beer

 shadflies & beer is a snapshot of an intense & carefree sort of friendship that seems very far away from me now. like a coming of age movie type friendship i’m not totally sure how to touch in my thirties, or maybe just in the coincidental isolation that has defined my thirties so far. i also think it’s still one of my most beautiful songs, lyrically, & probably the one that makes it most obvious to me that i was listening to a lot of the weakerthans

the sun will reach down to work tension out of my bare shoulders
painting them like it paints clouds with sailors’ warnings
and it will dry up and flake off; art always fades off of my body
nobody can mark me, not even the maker of mornings
not even the bringer of daylight can brand me permanently

that’s pretty. what an evocative way to write about a sunburn. good job, kiddo.

this one actually got a music video of sorts a couple years later. in 2011/2012 i was doing a project where i filmed basically my whole life & uploaded weekly artsy vlog type videos, & i used footage from the days that very directly inspired this song (kingston brew pub patio night / wolfe island picnic day) in the projection video. look at me sitting on the floor in my little peter pan collar lace dress from ardene lmfao

i hope the world ends

now in light juxtaposition to taphonomy, this is a very distinct People Just Keep Dying This Year song. i may not be quite as unhinged as the 21 year old version of me who was teetering on sort of a supervillain dark empath “I FEEL THE WHOLE WORLD’S PAIN & THE ONLY WAY TO FIX IT IS TO STOP ALL SAID PAIN BY DESTROYING SAID WORLD AUUUGH” arc, but like, i still get it lol. also certainly one of the best examples of why i consistently get this meme sent to me

since the pandemic began, it’s fluctuated much more regularly into feeling like it’s just a bit too on the nose to play (apocalypse media generally felt a bit ehh for a while ykwim..?), but i probably won’t ever stop bc it might be my top favourite song to do live. dragging a laugh out of an audience by throwing my head back & screaming a sarcastic poppy “SHA-NA-NA-NA” after openly yearning for violence for a couple minutes is stupid satisfying. i also really love occasionally transitioning the ending into the chorus of r.e.m.’s its the end of the world as we know it & ending on an absolutely dead-eyed “i feel fine.”, as you can sort of experience in this video of me singing it while covered in sharpie for whatever reason from the drunken night before

i choreographed a silly dance to this song at one point because i always really wanted to make a music video for it. i’ve never shared it before but here’s a video of me in 2016 doing what i remembered of it. one day, if i ever record a version of this song that i love, i will teach it to 100 people & we will flash mob it.

invincible

 invincible is just another song about how it’s magical to be young & in love with your friends & stay out all night.

old bones

old bones is a song i sometimes jokingly introduce as being one of my many songs about ghosts. it’s a sort of fictionalised idealised version of a best case scenario when you realise that all you have in common with someone you’ve known for a long time is the memories you share. i think this is something that carried a lot more pain for me then, because the concept of growing apart or growing separately from someone until you’re just too different to be bosom buds or whatever anymore is often still relatively new when you’re that age.

it’s funny stepping back & looking at these lyrics & realising how little of that is literally conveyed. i think of my writing as pymoob as not being particularly abstract & i wonder when i got that impression, bc that doesn’t seem to be the case here. isnt it funny that you can just be wrong about…. like………….. yourself & the things you make, something you should theoretically be the expert on

there’s a stripped-down live-to-tape version on youtube as well, which also surprised me bc i actually forgot that this song was written on the guitar bc i’ve only played it on piano in the past few years

05.11.12

hey, that’s the name of the album!

pronoun trilogy / ampersand

when i posted the first version of ampersand on youtube, it got a comment saying “i like it but the intro is too long”, to which i was like “noted!” & immediately tripled the length of the intro. spiteful baby behaviours. but also i was right.

as someone who considered themself primarily a poet, it was exciting for me to experiment with instrumental storytelling– a song that feels like me, a song that feels like you, a song that feels like us. in my early & mid teens i was generally really intrigued by the concept of pronouns in poetry. it feels very funny in retrospect that my work in the years leading up to me realising Im Genders (which was like ~2009??) i rotated so obsessively around pronouns as a part of language, but i think it’s at least largely a coincidence & mostly it was just something that stuck in my craw about the idea that a person could be boiled down to a representative thing or concept or word.

ampersand itself is one of many songs that boil down to “i’m so in love with you & one day i will figure out exactly what to do to make you want to be with me & even see me in the day time sometimes” like literally the next song on the album mentions that exact same thing.

give me back my senses

this is still one of my favourite songs i’ve written. i like how visceral it is & i like how gross & meaty the sexuality is & i like the sad sad sad defiance in “i want love / yeah, i said it” as if that is an inherently embarrassing or aggressive thing to want oh my goddddd teenage satah who wrote this (in february 2011 i was 19!!). & also the night i released the album i heard my dad listening to it & thought i might actually die when i realised he was listening to a song that’s VERY much about being sad while having a threesome. WHOOPS!!!

i’m thinking you don’t even realize / there are only two swatches of fabric between our thighs… the idea of being down so bad that you become hyperfocused on the fact that if your legs are touching, it’s only a couple millimeters of denim preventing your skin from touching……… yeah man

03.11.12

bonus track

a song called list #4 is also on this album if you buy it. it’s called the “autumn storm remix” because it’s a demo i recorded while it was raining. that song also has a version on youtube from a few years later. it’s about being boiling hot in the graveyard at my best friend’s funeral. 2012 was bad

thanks for reading???? if you did???????? some of these songs are still really dear to me. which is wild. ten years is so many years. i might do a little streaming show in the new year where i play them all or something, to celebrate, but for now im just gonna be like Wow a full decade omgggg wow. that’s all.