I spent a good deal of the last year in pain, stuck in bed, unable to move. I eventually had to relearn to do things that I used to take for granted. In all this, it occurred to me that I tend to focus on and talk an awful lot about myself. Sometimes I even go into interview mode when merely having a conversation with someone. It’s not pretty. So in an attempt to let you in on my thought process surrounding the songs of AAOM without having to vomit in your ear all day, I’ve devised a handful of ways to let others speak for me;
1. While working on this EP, five films kept coming up for me. They all seemed to be pointing in the same direction, saying something about what these songs are about at their core. The complete list is buried somewhere on my website. Feel free to go there and hunt them down and watch them.
2. Inspiration comes from many sources. For me, it tends to start with other songs I dig. I cannot help but compare every song I write to other songs I think they sound like or remind me of. It’s a fucking curse. I’ve collected a handful of songs that contain within them the building blocks of what eventually became AAOM and put together a playlist (more on that in a bit). Could be anything from the sound of the guitars, to the words being said, the overall feeling of the music, or a cosmic connection I still can’t fully articulate. Sometimes it was obvious as I was writing, but more often than not it happened a year or so down the road.
3. Books. After several attempts at college, I still have never completed a degree. So most of my learning has come from the books I ingest. And everything from the subject matter to the sound of the title has found its way into my work over the years. I make no secret of the fact that I borrowed the title of AAOM from Oliver Sacks’ fantastic book. I read it somewhere in the ’00s and the chapter on Temple Grandin really connected with me. As pertains to this particular collection of songs, however, the entirety of the book (not just that chapter) best represents the feeling of what I was trying to articulate. I highly suggest you read it.
This brings me to 4. How do I combine all these things together in one place? Kind of impossible. I’ve already started to pepper little bits of this and that all over the internet, by way of various mediums, for you to stumble upon and either ingest or ignore. And I intend to ramp it up as the EP’s release date draws closer. But for now, I figure a good place to start is a playlist. And this particular playlist includes songs from the films I mentioned above, as well as songs that inspired me (either literally or figuratively). It was an intuitive playlist, so very little analysis went into it. And yet a lot of time was spent putting it together in that particular order. I find that music from a film can instantly bring me right back to the moment or moments of the film they are associated with. And likewise, to the feelings and experiences, I associate with having while having watched said film. So in a way we all become one, the creators and the audience, our experiences connected through time and space, and instantly accessible. I find that to be a thing of beauty. I’m hoping this playlist acts as another piece of the giant jigsaw puzzle of it all. Or at the very least gets you closer to my experience of what it feels like to be human on planet earth.