On the Waves: Linking

 Happening in parallel to this thematic work was the process of creating music to go with the ideas. For the last couple albums I have written the music loops first, then written lyrics to my favourites before sequencing them out into full songs. That’s again how I worked on Emotional Labour, although by the time I started on the music I had a decent idea of the album’s subject matter and so that likely interacted with the music creation on some level.

It’s hard for me to believe now, since I took 5 years to make the album, but the idea of adding some “trap” influences into the loops was originally to help me work quickly. I was listening to EPs from the rapper Future because my brother told me to, and I couldn’t believe how loop-based they were. Plus I read interviews that they worked really quickly when recording, doing multiple songs in a day in the studio. So one day when I was working on a violin-based cover of the trumpet bridge from Bill Chase’s “Get it On” and I accidentally turned the loop function on on the third measure, I could suddenly hear the Future-style trap bass and drums under that weird, minor-key violin loop. 

Trying to make this vision come to life made me realize I didn’t know anything about making trap-style beats. I had listened to a lot, and I had occasionally used cut-up hi-hats and pitched 808 “kicks-as-bass,” but I couldn’t tell you what the distinctive features were enough to do anything but copy an existing beat. So I set out to learn, and the way I did so was to take a couple bars of the basic beat of 15 or so trap songs and recreate them, then analyze them to see what the common things to do were. This was just bass and drums, so I looked at the tempo, key, what bass notes were used relative to the key, and when everything happened. To avoid confusion, in the following section, when I say “kick,” I’m referring to the 808 kick drum sound which producers now frequently use as a bass instrument, on its own or in conjunction with other kick drum sounds.

Superimposing the kick sequences was the moment that convinced me that this exercise was worth doing. When looking at two bar loops of those 15 songs, all of them had a bass note/kick on the first beat of the first measure, which is totally normal. But none of them had a kick on the first beat of the second measure, something that is not true for most rock and pop music. The most basic rock drum beat goes Kick-2-3-4-Kick-2-3-4 (maybe Kick-2-3-Kick-Kick-2-3-4 or Kick-2-3-4-Kick-Kick-3-4). Never putting a kick on the first beat of the second measure was a specific underlying feature that gave the trap songs I analyzed a basic groove. Most had fairly busy bass/kick parts, often including a kick on the “and” 4 in the first measure, and the majority included a kick on the second beat of the first measure. So, at least among the songs that I analyzed, the basic groove was Kick-2-3-4-1-Kick-3-4. Once I learned this “rule,” the things I was trying started to make sense.

Other things I noticed in analyzing songs this way: tempo varied within a fairly narrow range, most of the songs were in minor keys, and the bass notes chosen often included flat 2s and flat 5s, chromatic-sounding notes that contributed to the songs’ dark, menacing sound. I haven’t checked these features against more recent songs, and I’m sure that production in the genre has evolved, but I tried to incorporate these characteristics into my songs. The way I make myself feel better about the appropriative nature of this work is by sticking to older songs, as though if a song has been around for a few years, the exclusivity of its patent had worn off and I was just reverse-engineering a generic version without directly copying anything. Also learning to write within a genre feels better and more respectful to me than using samples or adopting sounds without understanding what’s going on musically.

For the instruments on top of the rhythms I was learning to create, I didn’t try to emulate trap songs so much. But after my inaugural experiment with the “Get it On” loop (which became the beat to the song “Clout Chase”) I went back to the ‘70s rock fusion well and made something based on Chicago’s “I’m a Man.” That became an approach I used when building the beats for Emotional Labour: if I tried something that worked, I would try variations on the same approach to see if I could get something else in the same ballpark. I had said last album that I wanted to use my violin more, and I did that on Emotional Labour. I tried a bunch based on bits of Debussy’s Violin Sonata in G Minor (which I was learning at the time), usually further chopped up by the beat slicer in Guitar Rig. I’ve used this method as a compositional tool in the past, for example on my violin break on Sarah’s song “Saint,” but I think the actual cut-up sounds worked especially well for this trap-style stuff.

Another series of beats were built around the preset arpeggios in soft synths, re-performed by me on violin. Others were just build organically through looping and experimentation; I made the “good” version of the instrumental tracks the first time, whereas in the past I’ve usually re-recorded everything later in the process. This forced me to make some engineering decisions ahead of knowing all the elements I would end up including. 

Once I had my basic loops in place, I loaded them into my Boss RC300 as three separate tracks (usually melodic/chordal instruments, then 808 bass, then drums). This way I could make baby steps towards sequencing, practising turning loops off and on while thinking about lyrics and song ideas. That was my process while at home, but I also followed my previous practice of making 5-minute long versions of each loop and getting them on my phone so that I can listen to them while biking around. An interesting accident that I wound up incorporating into the final song happened when I accidentally overlapped my second violin loop idea by a measure when exporting one of these 5-minute long versions. I liked the sound of the overlap and thought it would create interesting lyrical possibilities when transitioning from part to part (which is how “Who Hurts Worse” ended up being a 31 bar loop instead of the more normal 32 bars). 

As It First Looks: Improvisation

This new album of mine progressed slowly in the background of all of the rest of that work. And it got even slower as I did two years of grad school while working, then graduated and continued to work more than full-time. All of my recent solo albums have involved a fair amount of learning and research. My Myers-Briggs album, MB-LP, was a lot of interviews and a lot of reddit subs and dubious personality websites. My previous album, Extinct!, was a lot of nonfiction books, textbooks, and papers. This album, Emotional Labour, started with a forum thread and an unhealthy amount of social media. I was spending a night at the Toronto airport on my way home from a trip whose purpose I don’t remember in 2016, staying up at the terminal to catch an early flight the next day. I stumbled onto the 2015 metafilter thread on emotional labour. I was lucky to have a lot of time because it’s super long. I see now that people have made annotated, shortened versions of it, which are probably less chaotic. 

The original thread is full of people agreeing, adding perspectives, arguing, trolling, getting back on track, seeing things in their lives differently, understanding their own behaviour or why they felt a certain way about things, written over time but experienced all at once in the reading. I thought it was powerful, not because I’d never thought about some of those things before, but because there were things in it that were new to me and because of the infectious enthusiasm of the (mostly female) participants. It seemed cathartic, not hopeless. People were discussing gender roles and expectations openly, honestly, and critically, and some people were connecting dots for the first time. Overall the thread reveals the extent to which gender is a performance and a construct with less harmful possibilities not out of reach. I’ve read subsequently that much of what was discussed in the thread doesn’t fit the dictionary definition of emotional labour, representing the scope creep of emotional labour into regular or unpaid labour with gendered expectations.

 But I still felt that was interesting, and it was a way of getting at the same thing that had interested me on Extinct!, which I would call uncounted or underappreciated value. For the environment, it’s the value of clean water, essential for life and happiness but diffuse in terms of responsibility and difficult to quantify and thus undervalued in dollar terms. In a similar way, emotional labour is the “clean water” that circulates among and between people, essential to make things run smoothly but under-examined, undercompensated, and diffuse but clearly gendered in its structural responsibility. Women do more care work. This was around the time that I stopped working at a landscaping company and started working at the public library, and the two jobs had very different cultures, expectations, and gender breakdowns.

As I started to figure out how to turn this subject matter into songs and themes that could carry an album, it helped to consider my target audience and what I could bring to the conversation with my perspective. My first idea was that the album would be written to reflect and poeticize aspects of feminism, the insights that I had read about in the metafilter thread. I started to keep notes on the song ideas I came up with, and came to realize that what I wanted to do was capture the effect of grappling with these ideas, as they relate to my specific perspective and identity, and that if the songs were “for” anyone, they should be for people (mostly men) like me, just with less time and bandwidth to think about these things. In making this my mission, I think I started to get back to how I used to think about writing songs, before I got so conceptual, where the point of the exercise is mostly to figure out my own thoughts about a topic and come to terms with how doing that made me feel. As opposed to knowing the message in advance and writing a song as an argument for it.

While this conceptual shift in framing was taking place, I continued to add to my list of song ideas on the Notes app of my phone, which were sometimes a sentence and sometimes multiple paragraphs long, whenever I thought of them. I would consolidate them periodically, and put ideas together or pull them apart as I thought about what the songs would deal with. I liked how working on them made me feel nervous, worried about feeling vulnerable or being misunderstood. It was that uncomfortability that made me feel like I was learning or growing in doing so. Of course, with so many of my ideas related to live socio-political and ethical issues, many of the ideas I had would show up in articles and in society in general over the course of me conceptualizing my album and working on the music. The concept of emotional labour itself was picked up more broadly than it had been. It was difficult to know I would be writing about topics and not feel like I had a good answer, or that the issue was settled. What allowed me to still write was the feeling that my job was to capture reflections at a moment in time, from a subjective point of view with an often explicitly named identity. I wanted to do some character work with the narrator and have a range of thoughtfulness and familiarity with the issues dealt with in the songs. Some would be “woke,” others deeply problematic. I thought of the songs as art, not ethics, and didn’t omit impulses and thoughts that felt harmful, with the idea that the listener is savvy enough to determine what they think about the topic. But I still hadn’t written any actual lyrics.

Past Present Future: Slowness

This series of posts were written just prior to the release of my album Emotional Labour. This one recaps my last album (2016’s Extinct!) and what I’ve worked on musically since. I said my last album was about “how to think about environmentalism.” In terms of inspiration, I went pretty academic and read a lot of books. The songs themselves are halfway between the bleakness of “we’re all screwed” that is people’s general attitude towards environmental issues and some sort of considered, pragmatic optimism. In my own life at the time I wasn’t sure what move I should make next, since I couldn’t find a way to make music pay enough. So again I think what’s driving Extinct! is some existential anxiety mixed with the hope that I’ll figure out a way to move forward. 

Of the things I included in those songs, I enjoyed when I was able to work in what I studied about environmental economics, eg. “money’s a substitute there’s no substitute for / it misses more than it counts” from the song “Something Better Happen Soon.” Although Asperger as a term is less and less PC, I was proud of how the first song on the album, “Asperger Messiah,” wound up predicting an environmental leader on the autism spectrum by a couple years at least (Greta Thunberg). And in “Commit!” and “Second Try,” I drew from my renewed relationship with my partner, Sarah Jickling. There’s an interesting mix of things I got from my reading, my personal life, and my imagination. I made a few videos for it and put it up on Bandcamp, streaming services, etc. It’s much less google-able than my previous album MB-LP so it doesn’t have anywhere near as many plays, but I’ve had some nice feedback on it by now.

My new album is five years after Extinct!, which is a long gap. But it’s not like I haven’t done music stuff in between. We toured the Good for Grapes album I mentioned in the previous post but despite some good reviews, it didn’t wind up taking the band to any kind of “next level,” and with no budget or grants to pay for more music, that project stalled.

I stayed in touch with some friends out east who do fringe fest musicals, and I did three more productions for them of two new shows, (Better Than) Dying Alone in 2017 and BFFs in 2018 and 2019. They flew me out to watch one of the 2019 shows in Toronto, which was super fun. My role for those was limited to writing the music and lyrics for the songs that accompany the dialogue and story that the producer and director would specify. So exercising agency was always interesting since the characters were heavily based on the story writers, who needed to approve of whatever choices I made. I also had to work efficiently, since they contacted me to write the BFFs show while I was in the middle of getting a master’s in library studies (and working!). So I wrote that show over the course of a spring break.

Another thing I did was produce most of Sarah’s 2019 album The Family Curse. I was originally just supposed to contribute some of the instruments, as I did for her previous album, but the producer she wanted to work with ended up being too busy and she didn’t have the budget to make anything else work so I wound up doing most of the songs. I got to play on the Harley Small-produced “Saint,” and also got to work on “Villain,” “Better,” and “Cautionary Tale” with Sarah and her friend and amazing musician Laura Smith (ex-Rococode, currently Daggerss).

Working on the songs for The Family Curse was a cool experience. Normally I would have done them entirely at home, but because of construction noise from down the block we did the vocal recordings in the free studio space at the Vancouver Library. For the songs we did with Laura, we were working back and forth between our home studios. It was really helpful having her involved; I don’t have the nicest bedside manner when I’m in charge of recording. I get a bit abrupt and/or demanding which is fine when I do my own stuff, but something I really have to work on when tracking with others. And the content of the songs meant that Sarah was really stressed about releasing them.

Not that the lyrics are that extreme, but there are some very specific details included that are true to her experience and hard for her to talk about. So realizing that she needed to write about them, then be okay with releasing what she wrote, then preparing her family for the release was a whole process. Music-wise, we were going for some specific references that included Lily Allen, Beyoncé’s Lemonade, and Billie Eilish, but more indie. We had some plans to play shows supporting the album in 2020 that the pandemic ended up cancelling.

Did I say that? Hope I did.

By the time I was settling on the song ideas I wanted to pursue for lyric writing, I had been living with the thirty-something instrumental loops I'd created for a few months. This album is the slowest I've ever worked, not in terms of how long I'm taking to do the work but in terms of how long I had to wait in between steps. I had other projects eat up good chunks of my time, notably a high budget record that I made with Good for Grapes (the band I play in), working with producer Howard Redekopp. 

It was interesting doing rehearsals and pre-production with him; his advice mostly concerned song structure and consisted of finding ways to play the nicest-sounding parts of the songs more times. Tracking parts was long and frustrating at times. I played the violin and trombone on the record and my parts came fairly late in the overdubs, so there were times when the pitch of the violin especially would never quite sound perfect because it was being pulled in so many directions by the pitches of instruments already recorded. Not to mention that I was discouraged from using vibrato, which made pitch even more crucial. I had a tuner with me, so I was able to check what I was being asked to do against concert pitch when it got particularly tricky. Specific notes had to be played a quarter-tone sharp or flat. It was tough to remember how to detune myself correctly over the course of a long line, but I tried my best!

The experience was interesting though, and listening to the finished product I really noticed how everything we recorded was more or less there, but volume was really used as a means of highlighting the important parts. The violin was mostly single-tracked, which I guess is true to how it sounds live. I'm used to the sound of ensemble strings on my own stuff, but I could see getting into single-tracking them at some point.

I think the time off between the various steps of making this album was helpful, since it allowed me time to come back to ideas and sounds and be more big-pictures and objective about them. The downside is the enthusiasm that comes with pursuing a new and exciting thing has also cooled, which means getting back into the flow of working on the songs takes a bit of doing. When I came back to my loops to start writing songs over them, I had been listening to them for a while and shown them to some people, so I knew which ones I was most excited to work on.

The first thing I tried to do was imagine the sort of imagery and mood I might use for a specific song idea, and then try to pair it with a loop that I thought complimented that in some way. Some pairings came easier than others. I generally started with the ideas I was most excited by and then got a little more stuck by the end. There were quite a few instrumental loops I thought I could write good songs over, maybe 15 or 16. I wanted to end up with about 10 songs in the end, so I figured that would give me plenty to pare the album down to something with a cohesive sound and theme.

I enlisted the help of a few friends to listen to my loops and tell me which they liked. It was helpful in that I felt validated when they liked ones that I did too, but it was hard for them to tell me which ones really went together as a group. They could give me some adjectives to describe the mood of the loops though, and that helped me. I had angles of attack in my head for some but not all of my song ideas at this point. I knew, for instance, that I wanted my song about the dangers of unilateral decision-making on climate change to be a first person narrative story song with an anxious sense of impending doom. I chose to pair that with the idea I'd based on a song I'd recorded live at the Fox Cabaret, thinking that I could contrast the hedonism of a club night with the sober but equally reckless decision-making of some Catch 22-ish government/military types. I knew I wanted the song about the next evolutionary leap forward being someone we'd consider handicapped today to be a triumphant fanfare of themed, disjointed imagery. So I picked a major chord guitar loop with horns and strings, all swagger and strength. These choices were just hunches that I would try and make work, and when some of them didn't end up clicking, I either ditched both parts or tried a different song idea with the same loop. So the ones that worked out were really just lucky.

Before I started trying to write lyrics, I spent a bit more time mixing the loops and seeing if there was anything else I could add. Then I printed five-minute versions of the loops just repeating over and over so that I could put them on my iPod and walk and bike around with them. They weren't sequenced, so it was just everything going at once, like it would be at the song's most intense parts, but it was a good way of getting myself to listen to them with my song ideas in mind. Since they were just the same 5-20 second chunks over and over, my brain would get hypnotized and bored enough while listening to them that ideas of how to tackle the song subjects or just images would pop into my mind. I found this worked especially well when I paired doing it with repetitive physical activity like riding my bike into Vancouver (while I was going to the studio to record with Good for Grapes, in fact!).

I conceived of the rest of the song ideas on the album this way. Instead of having a pre-made idea and finding an instrumental for it, I just listened to the instrumental until an idea for a song formed out of it. So I worked both ways on this album. Music came first, but was then set aside while research that would lead to song ideas took place. Then these two bodies of work that had been growing separately were forced together, and each informed the other. I like the freedom to do instrumental loops before thinking about lyrics at all, but for my next project I'd like to have some more early interaction between lyrics and music. That might mean starting more of my instrumentals with vocal melodies; I only did that once on this album. But it was that one vocal melody that made me want to do the album in the first place.

11 AM, time for TRANESTRETCHING

I should rewind, though, because before I did any research for this album at all, I spent a few weeks to record thirty-something song ideas that would form the basis of all of the tracks on the album. The process was a continuation of the way I worked on Little Gwaii and MB-LP, with the key difference that instead of recording demo versions of the songs initially and rerecord once I knew which I was using, I went straight to recording good versions of the loops. I was able to do this because I finally bought a pair of nearfield monitors, so I wasn't stuck trying to judge the sound of the instruments I was tracking through a pair of headphones. The Adam F5 speakers I bought were great, and I felt more confident that I was capturing good sounds on the way in than I have on past album projects.

This no-demo recording process also meant that I cut the Boss RC-300 looper out of the tracking process. Ordinarily, I would record demos onto the looper, using its three tracks as I would when I play the song live. So drums would usually be on track 3, bass on track 2, and guitar/keys/vocals on track 1, depending on the song. Then I would figure out how I wanted to perform the song by muting and un-muting these tracks to create the song structure. But this time, I was recording good versions of my ideas right onto the computer, as I wrote them. I saved the looper for later, when I was trying to arrange the songs, since having the instruments separated into the three tracks as I would play them live made it obvious what moves and mutes would make sense for live performance.

I generally started the loops with a single instrumental idea or conceptual goal. I make a practice of recording any short ideas onto my phone whenever they come to me, so I mined my phone recordings for ideas I'd had that could form the basis of songs. One thing I also tried on this record was recording snippets of existing songs that were on where I happened to be that gave me a specific feeling. One was a classical piece that was on in Good for Grapes' tour bus when we were recording our album, another was a weird electronic jam I witnessed played by musicians dressed as Luchadors at the Fox Cabaret, and another was a song we played in the Delta Concert Band. Specific places and instruments also played roles in loops I included on the record; riffs I wrote on a terrible old bass at Steve Albini's studio in Chicago started a couple songs, and one I wrote and recorded in GarageBand on an iPad while up the Sunshine Coast made the album as well. I also manipulated found sound: one song started with a chopped up loop of the sound of a Vancouver Skytrain leaving the station, and another began with the chirping sound of crosswalks for the visually impaired.

I went for quantity with the loops, knowing the more I made, the more cohesive I could make the sound of the album since then I'd have enough good ones that I could then choose the ones that fit a similar aesthetic. Since I knew I would make a lot, I didn't have to worry about cohesion while I was actually writing them, which was great since I could just follow ideas through wherever they seemed to be leading me. I generally finished 2-3 every time I sat down to work, and considering I was trying to pre-mix and record nice versions of everything as I went it was a pretty good pace.

This was the first album I finally gave up and used drum machine VST sounds instead of recording real drums. I did it because I've come to terms with the fact that I don't have the gear or the ears or the room to make my drums sound professional, but I also did it because I realized that setting up real drums for my live shows is a bridge too far for me right now anyway, so I might as well record the way I'm going to end up playing live, with a drum pad triggering sounds. I still miked up a drum kit and played real drums while recording though, because I didn't want super quantized drum machine timing, just nicely recorded samples. So I converted the audio I recorded on close mics into MIDI and fed that into my soft synth, Session Drummer 3, editing for timing and velocity afterward.

Bass and guitar I recorded much as I have in the past, with both the DIed signal and miked amp and making decisions about which to use or how to blend them later. One thing I did a lot with the guitar was use my Boss DD-2 delay pedal to sync 8^th note delays to the song tempo, and then just hit chords once every couple bars, letting the delays continue almost as loud as the hit. I found that really filled space, when that's what I needed from the guitar.

One thing I noticed in playing the songs from my previous album MB-LP live was that I really underused violin and especially trombone. So I made sure not to do that this time around, incorporating them more often and more centrally, usually at the expense of the guitar. Violin I recorded very normally, with a cheap overhead pencil condenser, but overdubbed many takes onto every part and panned doubles in interesting ways to make a real ensemble sort of sound. I sent the trombone into Guitar Rig 5's talkbox effect, except not with the plugin “talking” but at a static position. The extreme EQ filter effect gave the trombone a nice place in the mix to sit, and I thought made it sound like an old-timey car horn, in a nice way.

I included some other instruments as well; the keyboard sounds all came from presets on my dad's DX7s, and I sent one through the Boss looper for the slicer effect it has. I made more extensive use of shaker, tambourine, and cowbell than I have in the past. Since I wanted this album to be a dancey, beat-driven album, I thought percussion could help propel the songs forward.

Different things would inspire me to write the loops that I used on Extinct! Sometimes it was an instrumental melody, other times a groove, and other times an interesting length for the loop. There are 3, 7, and 14-bar loops, as well as ones where chord lengths are asymmetrical, as in one 8-bar loop where the first chord goes for 6 bars and the second for the remaining two. Any way I could play with my own expectations for how the loop should go, while also making something genuinely nice-sounding to listen to, that was what I tried for. Harshness crept back in with the vocals, but in writing the instrumentals I really tried to make it a priority that they sound nicer than things I'd done in the past.

I TOLD you I was sneaky

I'd been taking notes, running loads of books out of any library that would have me for weeks. I knew the end result of my research would be songs, but I hadn't done much thinking about what they'd actually be about until now. I knew I wanted them to diverge from my last album, MB-LP, in some important ways, and so I wrote some “album rules” to clarify what I wanted them to be like. I could always break them later! They stated that:

1. The album should be fun/funny (the subject matter shouldn't dictate tone)
2. The songs should deal with the theme (or an aspect of it)
3. The subject of the songs should be relatable enough to stand on its own without the theme
4. The songs should be personal and aim for the heart
5. Flow-wise, the album should keep the beat going and be able to do as well as background, maybe even transition between songs
6. This is a head-nodding to dancing party album. Try to keep it light even when it's heavy lyrically

The rules reflect concerns that writing a set of songs about the biodiversity crisis will result in dry, boring, impersonal songs. Legitimate concerns, I think. Since I was so immersed in the subject matter, I knew that would come through even if I tried to just write personal songs about my life.

In fact I usually decide to pull the trigger on a song idea when those two things intersect in an interesting way. When some pressure or joy or concern that I'm feeling in my life is paralleled by the subject I intend to cover, that's when I feel like I can write about it authentically. I don't have to worry about this not happening; the things I find especially interesting when researching are often things I notice because I can't help looking through the lens of my own life. And I'm always trying to figure out how things relate to other things. So it's a way of working I find natural and more rewarding than just setting out to represent my personal life metaphorically.

The second concern reflected in my album rules is that the songs will be depressing or overly serious. This has to do with the tone I want to take for educational reasons, I guess. I wasn't interested, as some of the environmental education teachers I read had been, or taking my listeners on an emotional ride from despair to hope. I just wanted songs that weren't scary and weren't preachy; I was going for informative and wry, with a hopefully infectious enthusiasm for the subject matter. That's how I wanted to share what I was learning.

So I went back and pored over the dozens of pages of notes I'd made, trying to pull out single ideas or topics that intrigued me enough to think that I could write a whole song about them. Sometimes they were ideas that had come up multiple times in different readings across different disciplines. Other times they were single sources or ideas that I found intriguing enough to explore on their own. This is the list I made, with short explanations:

• Hard to Give Up Comfort:
  • A lot of environmental reading said if only people in the west would sacrifice some comfort, a lot of problems could be solved. But overconsumption is cultural and hard to avoid, even if you're trying to.
• Average Person and Environmental Policy:
  • The idea, from ecological economics, that progress can only go as far as an average person understands, in a democratic system. Much like 'no child left behind', bringing up the average is the most powerful thing so passing on education is most important and no one is hopeless.
• Nuclear Winter:
  • Came from a source that said a medium-scale nuclear war could halt global warming, and scientists had considered it as a scheme to combat climate change. Basically fears about unilateral, secret government action.
• American Exceptionalism:
  • Based on readings about the unique ecological circumstances surrounding Columbian contact and how the culture of America was affected by it. How the American dream is unsustainable and the American financial model shouldn't be copied by other countries under different environmental conditions
• Passenger Pigeon:
  • Drawing parallels between humanity's potential fate and that of the Passenger pigeon. Both are weed species, growing more like automatons as their numbers increase, maybe not autonomous enough to avoid crash.
• Race to the Bottom:
  • I think I scrapped this idea at some point, I don't remember exactly what it was about.
• Disabled Messiah:
  • This was about human evolution, and how increased brain size marked leaps in evolution, combined with the knowledge that autisim is basically unregulated brain growth as a child. The idea that the next leap forward might be strange and unpalatable to us currently, but what is “good” is completely contextual, and in the world of the future there may be advantages we can;t anticipate to things we currently view as disabilities.
• Bracketing:
  • The tension between worrying about environmental crises and living one's life. Its necessity but also the possibility of ignoring important problems because they are distressing.
• Sad Geniuses:
  • About the sacrifice required to make progress happen. Is progress usually the product of obsession and unhappiness, and is that the reason new technology can often be cynically used to make things worse?
• Should be Happier:
  • People in the West are complicit in exploiting the third world whether they like it or not, causing environmental degradation and hardship for those people. But they are statistically less happy. About whether ill-gotten riches can make you truly happy.

Looking back, a lot of these initial ideas were folded together or made into certain sections of songs later in the writing process. They're less about the nuts and bolts of biodiversity than they are about the larger cultural forces that are creating and perpetuating the crisis. Maybe that's because I thought the songs would end up too dry and factual if they were all about Amazonian frogs or something, but I think it was mainly because I realized people already feel like the situation is bad and want to change it. They more needed to be made aware of institutional and systematic reasons things got this way in order to feel like they can change things.

I wanted to include my struggle to process all of this data and come to conclusions about what we ought to do because I think most people have become concerned about environmental problems at some point, so it was relatable, and also because then it could be an example of what people could be doing to try and change things for the better.

That said, I definitely didn't want to come from a place of moral superiority. One of the hardest things I found was realizing that even while trying to be more sustainable in little ways, the mere accident of being born into our society as it is makes us complicit in all of the harm it does. One article I read that I found funny in a book about teaching sustainability was about how a museum had switched the candy bars sold in their vending machines to ones that didn't contain (apparently) over-exploited, environmentally damaging palm oil in their ingredients. The funny part was the self-congratulating tone of the article, as if that was the last unsustainable part of their operation and now they were completely done. Still, it was something. And doing something is better than doing nothing.

There is a tension there, in wanting to be a part of the solution, less complicit in the problems our society causes, and not knowing what the best action is to take. I wanted my songs to express this frustration while also reminding people that any action is good action. Even action that later research proves was ineffective can be a good thing, since it builds frameworks and relationships for subsequent collective action, and makes people feel hopeful and that real change is possible. These are the issues that I wanted to explore as I refined and added to the song ideas I was pulling from my research.

I Return This Respect

Ecological economics is not just a specific branch of the field (or the economics of a specific type of goods), it's a completely new set of priorities, a massive overhaul of the goals and mechanisms of the financial system. It was one of the most in-depth fields of research I pursued for this album. This was partly because I never took a class in economics, so I had to learn something about the traditional models before I could understand how ecological economics changed them.

The most fundamental premise of ecological economics is that we have not correctly valued ecosystem services under the current system. Farmers, for example, know the value of having micro-organisms in the soil break down waste and re-fertilize the ground, but pay nothing for the privilege, and wouldn't be compensated if something kills these organisms. Nestlé can make millions bottling water that they only pay a tiny administration fee for. Ecosystem resources have various barriers to being valued properly in our current monetary system. Some resemble traditional commodities, as the pollination industry does: beekeepers are paid to tour their bees around North American farms to help the plants reproduce. But other resources, like air, are consumed whether we like it or not and people in a region don't have a choice of what quality they get.

Ecological economics classifies and recommends how to incorporate ecosystem products and services into the current system, but there is an even more fundamental problem: economics is currently predicated on growth to drive it forward. This is against biological and physical science that suggests that the Earth can only support so many people. Technology may continue to increase the efficiency with which we use resources, and thus the planet's carrying capacity may continue to grow incrementally, but there are limits on the amount of several key resources on Earth. Metal may continue to be recycled, but there is only so much available on the planet and 100% recycling is physically impossible. So, practically, the world economy will have to shift from one that expects everything to grow perpetually to one that expects things will merely sustain themselves.

Proponents of ecological economics express this like a police investigator might: we can do this the easy way, or the hard way. The hard way involves doing nothing to change until we run straight into the carrying capacity, and entails at the very least extreme hardship and privation for most, and more likely war and cultural regression in the struggle for limited resources. The easy way involves preemptive measures to enact the change to a sustainable economy ahead of time, incentivizing positive change with government money and by adapting existing financial institutions.

This is one of the places I had to do some learning about how "our" (I imagine Canada is similar, but the book focused on the U.S.) current system works. One of the major financial changes ecological economics recommends is giving the government back the power to issue currency. I didn't understand that the current U.S. system gives that power to private financial institutions, who can then sometimes lend ten times the money they create because of the fractional reserve system, where banks are only required to have something like 10% of the cash they lend to their clients on hand at any given time. So, for every dollar created, they can lend it to tend different people at once and collect interest from all of them. Ecological economics advocates changing this system so that governments control the issue of currency, as a means of paying for the transition to a sustainable economy: offering financial incentives to conduct research and change environmental practices.

The problem is a lot of people benefit from the current system, and are wilfully ignorant or cynically selfish about their role in perpetuating an unsustainable growth-based economy. They either don't believe we'll ever need to control growth, or think that when the crash comes the wealth that they've accrued will put them in a better position to survive it comfortably. And the people that will be hit hardest by unsustainability and environmental degradation aren't just determined by wealth, but by geography as well. It's apparently a fact that both 80% of the world's population and its biodiversity are located in the tropics, but global wealth is massively concentrated in the Northern Hemisphere, in Europe and North America. In studies that try to estimate the effects of global warming in economies and productivity, most admit that it will either have little impact or a moderately positive effect above the 49^th parallel. The growing waves of immigration into northern countries from those feeling the most detrimental effects seems like the only logical step for those people to take, and considering much of the environmental degradation in the tropics is driven by the need for raw materials and cheap labour from northern countries, immigration quotas and restrictions seem massively unfair.

This is all really big picture stuff I'm not sure I've fully understood, but my readings in ecological economics were very eye opening. Seeing such scary data presented so matter-of-factually, realizing how decentralized power is in our system and how little influence governments have to change things compared to private companies that are benefiting from the status quo; now I began to understand why one of the biologists I had read earlier on blamed environmental degradation on “a lack of democracy in the economic sphere.” The situation seemed dispiriting, but not completely hopeless, since people's individual behaviours and spending habits still have tremendous power to affect everything, including the massive private companies.

I knew I wanted my songs to contain some of the things I'd learned about biodiversity over the course of my research and inspire people to care more about it. But I didn't want to scare people needlessly or recommend specific courses of action since new research often changes what we think the best thing is to do. So I read some books on teaching environmental education as my last field of research before starting to pull some song ideas out. I read some lesson plans and course outlines from teachers, and several took pride in “creating a narrative arc” that would inspire student engagement. It seemed more like emotional manipulation to me. They talked about purposely depressing their students in the beginning of the course, only to inspire them at the end with hopeful reading, trying to create students with an appreciation for the seriousness of environmental problems and the belief that they can personally go out and change things.

It seemed like my instincts matched up more with the educational theorists than with these narrative-creating environmental teachers. The theorists I read emphasized critical discussion which retained student agency, the right to choose what behaviour individual students thought was best. The goal of environmental education, according to them, was to create students that are able to solve environmental problems, that have the capacities to think critically, discuss with others, and act politically and collectively to find an implement solutions.

So environmental education shouldn't be about telling you to recycle, or else. It should be about explaining the problem recycling attempts to solve, the potential consequences of not acting, the ways we've though about solving the problem. As the student, you should understand why recycling is a good thing to do, and then you will choose to do it. But what did this mean for writing songs? Maybe I could write songs that demonstrated the challenges of considering environmental issues, and focus on building a capacity for critical thought in my listeners through example? After such extensive research, I sure was acutely feeling the challenges of thinking about solutions to environmental issues, so I decided to try that.