37 - Better Man (A Thematic Cover)

2023 saw 20 episodes (really 20 new songs) on Scratch. In this episode I'm joined by my primary collaborator on Scratch - Mike Tierney. And while these Year-In-Reviews always feels one-part reflection and one-part report card, this episode is mostly just a good conversation with someone who I really value. Enjoy, and see you in late March!

"Honor thy mistake as a hidden intention" and more nuggets of wisdom as we explore punk

It's possible heroic efforts will be made and some piece of the statue could be preserved for another few millennia.  But eventually, whether its in a museum or out in the elements, atom by atom, it will fade.  In a way, its already suffered one kind of death.  At its creation, it was a statue of a ruler its people viewed as a God.  It had a talismanic power.  Now it's only relevant because it's an example of ancient sculpture.  Hordes of tourists walk by every day, taking a quick glance at a ruler that few remember, slowly falling apart in a dusty old museum. This song is based on the poem Ozymandias, by Percy Bysse Shelley: I met a traveller from an antique land,Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stoneStand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,Tell that its sculptor well those passions readWhich yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;And on the pedestal, these words appear:My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!Nothing beside remains. Round the decayOf that colossal Wreck, boundless and bareThe lone and level sands stretch far away.

I'm more excited about this song than maybe anything else I've done in Season 2. Starting with a sample from a Hewlett Packard Word Generator, "To Hope" blends the poetry of 17th century Mexico with a meditation on the foolishness of hope - the singular importance of today.

How infatuation relates to Sharpie pens, gasoline, and aerosols - the kind of things that give you a momentary high (and an awful comedown). Also in this episode -the "subconscious assembly" technique is a new songwriting technique I'm test driving on this song.

Characters are like buckets of water, dropped from above and left to settle in the natural valleys created by the topography of the setting. Discussing Barbara Kingsolver, Bruce Springsteen, and analog delay <3

There are a lot of safe spaces for me in music - form, instrumentation, and many others. They're useful, but pushing out of those spaces is where the *really* interesting stuff happens. In this episode I cover the creation of the song Demain - one of my most electronic songs to date.

Very excited to introduce my new single, launching today on all platforms - Nothing In The World Can Stop Us Now. This episode is a rebroadcast from the original airing several months ago - I hope you enjoy.

Nummo are the ancestral spirits of the Dogon people of Western Africa. Hermaphroditic, fish-like creatures that were human from the waist up, fish from the waist down and inhabited a world circling the star Sirius. While I couldn't make the music of the song half as interesting as the lyrical content, I attempted to mash up the Malian desert blues inspired by a chance encounter with Vieux Farka Toure with western-style string arrangements.

There are lots of ways to do a cover. This song takes a character from the Zombies song "Care of Cell 44" and imagines he writes a different type of letter.