Song by Song: Underneath it all

The lyric of “Underneath it all” off my recent release Exist Everywhere first presented itself as a poem about the experience of an outsider observing the inside with both envy and distaste. The inside featured a cult-like hero who delivered compelling speech and all the comfort afforded to us by the promise of certainty. But something was amiss in the emotional undertones of his delivery. As the song progresses, the lyric becomes a sort of record of the process of fully detaching from trying to make it to the inside, letting go of an underlying belief system that suggests it’s the place to be.

Most of the lyrics on this album lean more abstract than narrative. In all of the songs with vocals, I was exploring the function of my voice as texture with the words delivering meaning not through storytelling but through glimpses and fragments, sometimes threading a stream of perception rather than rising action, climax, falling action. The lyric in “Underneath it all” is one of the more straightforward narratives on the album. It goes like this…

You lost your ambition
as you climbed the final stair.
The experts held an exhibition,
a crowd had gathered there.
A man stood before them,
holding his hand up high.
The sun shone upon him,
he held promise in his eye.
When the man began to speak,
you lost the reason you came here.
You felt the warmth of faith.
Your heart softened, you forgot your fear.
Master, master, affirm our Truth,
a man at a microphone.
Master, master, tell us what to do,
we can’t make it on our own.
Just then his spell broke
as you ran backstage.
His words rattled as you awoke
to the sound of his rage.
Underneath it all again
trying to find a way…
Now below it all
with shadows across the floor,
smoke and heat rise above,
you feel relief to your core.
Feet thunder from on high,
fury falls with the wind.
You huddle by the earth,
count your breath, one to ten.
You don’t hang on a word
when you’re down low.
Let the winners stake their claim,
then find another way to go.
Underneath it all again
trying to find a way…
You’re below it all
where you are happy to be,
for the racket of the winners
hardly sounds free.

On the musical side I wanted there to be a relentless quality to the rhythm. And as the world of the lyric felt concrete, cold, and mechanistic, I turned to a drum machine as my anchor. The core beat present through most of the song is provided by that drum machine. It is intentionally static. There are other drum sounds that come and go, acoustic drums skittering and dashing around the unwavering machine. The mood of the lyric was my guide to this relationship among the various drum parts.

My love of drum machines in my own recorded music first came not out of sound but out of function. That contrast of anchor/static core to skitter/dash just mentioned offers a lot of potential for creating a groove that both holds it down and lets the rhythm breathe. And sonically drum machines can sound huge which might then allow acoustic drums to sound more natural. I often think about music this way, developing a piece or song or sound palette through contrast. My thought process follows from listening and consciously identifying a focal point of one part and then imagining if that focal point were paired with some other contrasting element. Maybe they are in conversation and I don’t want to hear them simply agreeing about everything.

I’ve previously written about how I create limitations for myself in the studio as a means of landing on the approach and sound of a given song or album. On Exist Everywhere I set out to limit myself to use only vocals, keyboards, drums and drum machines, and whatever processing and sound design I wanted to do with any of these sounds. A guitarist friend asked if I was playing guitar in this track. I viewed this as a success as there were several occasions on this record where I wanted to make a keyboard or a voice take on electric guitar qualities. You can hear that in this song but in all cases there is no guitar. And bass is played by a synth.

Lauren Goans of Lowland Hum sang the background vocals on the chorus (she also sang on several other songs on Exist Everywhere) and the distorted lead that you hear from 3:28 - 3:58 was a vocal that she sang that I then processed in various ways, most obviously with distortion. I loved the harmony parts that she and her husband and musical partner Daniel created for this song but when I first heard the lead vocal line I could not make sense of how it fit into the world of “Underneath it all.” Once I transformed its sound and determined how it would enter and exit, I did not want to hear the song without that part.

Sometimes songs need to move a lot and other times less. When I made this one I worried that it neither moved nor stayed static enough. But as I kept coming back to the lyric, it helped to make sense of the production direction. It’s a relief to have somewhere to turn. And sometimes it’s a relief to walk away.

My debut full-length solo album Exist Everywhere is available exclusively on Bandcamp, for free or pay-what-you-wish digital downloads or to purchase as a limited edition vinyl record.

Listen to Exist Everywhere