Stupid Stutter
Lyrics
i do this thing
i post these stories
of how much that i love my life
it's all a lie
i'm constantly miserable
often i wish i would die
but with all that i say
you think it all goes my way
i think i'm going insane
a little stu-stu-stu-stu stupid stutter
i can't be right, can't be wrong
i bit my tongue clear off
but god said i look just like god
despite what you might have thought
i think i really suck
so
i thirst for engagement
engagement will mean that i'm loved
i'm a slut
for the metrics and numbers
that tell me how i'm being judged
despite what they say
the feelings all go away
i think i'm going insane
a little stu-stu-stu-stu stupid stutter
i can't be right, can't be wrong
i bit my tongue clear off
but god said i look just like god
despite what you might have thought
i think i really suck
i can't be right, can't be wrong
i bit my tongue clear off
but god said i look just like god
despite what you might have thought
i think i really suck
Song Notes
i know this sounds crazy but i first wrote this song ten years ago. i've been sitting on a lot of these songs for a long time... thus Eighteen was accidentally a double album. the song is about social media, which just gets worse and worse. i remember getting to my breaking point with Facebook, where i was quantifying my self-worth with how many "likes" my posts & pictures recieved compared to others. it was making me so unhappy that i ended up unfollowing every person i knew and leaving every active group i was in to just get myself to stop using the platform. did i miss out? yes! i missed out on lots of things because people only communicated them on facebook. that's how the platform could keep rotting away; forcing people like me to try to use it. it was awkward missing parties and learning about major life events second-hand but it was worth it to save my sanity. now, facebook is a dead platform among my friends but we've just traded it in for instagram, another terrible app i hate using but i am somehow stuck with. (try having a band in philly without having an instagram account. hA!) it is sad to me, what the internet has been turned into, who it has been made to serve, but i will save those thoughts for another day...
Recording Notes
by the time i was done with Eighteen pt.1 this song was like 80% there and i wasn't sure how to get it right! i ended up re-doing the guitars in the intro and outro to be more aggressive... that helped a bunch. then, i added an acoustic guitar to the bridge and that helped a lot. the outro for this song, how the drum parts change, is very hard to communicate... "first you play this" (beatbox) "then it goes like this" (pantomime guitar part) "then it goes...uhhh...." trying to get josh on the same page as me was tricky. we got there, eventually, but at one point he was lost and said "i'm not feeling it" while we were recording a take and we included that line in the background during the guitar solo. fun easter egg 4 u! two fun auditory things happen at the very end of the song: the drums are wayy compressed, to the point that they have a "pumping" sound that is totally unnatural. often compression is used carefully and not in an obvious way, since over-doing it is almost always a bad thing and amateurish, but in this case we're using compression as a deliberate effect! second: to get that final "lift" at the end we added a cool fuzz effect on the bass. the guitars don't get heavier, but the bass does. ahh cool!
Next: Daniel