kevin æ ramroop

i pissed my faith

off to stage dives/drain pipes into the lake

where lies sleep tight with fishers/vicious kings

bridge and sage burns asimulate

When the water stands

Still - the space between waves will

These chains | ties follow

When change | tides fall low

These canes, klans, cancers,

Cleansers to one kin-

Dread blood pales against the

Water wash the sordid sins

The ink in my skin

Run off the pages

And soak in the grains until the day

These chains | ties follow

When change | tides fall low

These chains | ties fall low

Then change | tides follow

6/30/20 

mans finished this song with this ramshackle setup while the window in my basement is getting installed. What’s your excuse?

I realize that this song follows the prototype of the line of ballads that have defined certain moments in my musical growth. It started with Stay For Love (May 2014), which would have been 6/8 if I knew what that was. I made an acoustic version later in the year and was playing in 6/8 without realizing because 6/8 isn’t something you’re thrown off by if nobody points it out to you - it was probably more common than 4/4 until the Beatles. Then Make Me Move (Feb 2015) I learned 6/8 intuitively by trying to emulate the rhythm of D’Angelo’s Untitled. There were time constraints on that song because I had to finish it for class the next day. For the final project I rewrote Make Me Move because I thought it too simple of a song and I made Live Inside Your Love (May 2015). Then there was Into Your Heart (June 2016) which I don’t think anybody heard except Gray. And That was 6/8 and 8/8, so I was getting experimental with the time signature but the songwriting was still trope reliant and probably the worst song I’ve finished top to bottom. The ending is sick though. I basically left that kind of ballad R&B until I made Ultrasuede (August 2018). And that was me more comfortable with different time signatures so I just wanted to try and make a 5/4 beat sound like a 6/8 beat. And the lyrics were much better but each song follows the same vowel sound. Stay, Make, Take, Suede. Love, Move, Love, Heart. Suede had the entire meaning in itself so it didn’t need the entire phrase. When you break it down by each of these words and seeing how I was basically following the same song structure, it’s a pretty accurate tracker of where my head was in terms of what I thought I aspired for in my musical career. Stay for Love was a freestyle, as was Make Me Move, but all of those songs with the words love and heart and shit were in the time when I thought I had to be an R&B artist talking about love. And even though I hadn’t been in a relationship and was running out of things to talk about, it clearly reflected in my songwriting as I shifted away from the ballad structure completely for a bit until I came back with Ultrasuede talking about Milton’s Paradise and hella biblical references to the Adam and Eve story because that was when I decided songwriting was for my own devices. Now you have this song, where at first I was thinking if I should make the time signature weirder since it’s 2020 but I was like fuck it I’ll just use the drum kit I just made from recordings in the Rouge Forest and not quantize and put the snare on the 5. And I also knew that this project that I was working on to make this demo was purely for the purposes of finding my verse and chorus, some harmonies, and just the best lyrics I could come up with. I spent like 2 days coming up with the chains/change ties/tides thing but I knew what it was when I settled on the melody: I was making the 2020 version of Make Me Move. Or Stay For Love is actually a better comparison - stay/for/love, chains/fall/low. So I had to maximize that two or three word phrase for the hook that all the other ballads I made follow - that this one would follow based on the freestyled melody I liked - and make it as interchangeable as possible. The way Make Me Move went from a song I hastily finished at 2 am for a class assignment to the song that has people looking at me different showed me that I just need to write songs that I’m proud of and we can go crazy on the production later.  And the first demo will always be quaint and memorable. But bonus is this is a Neenyo sample so that in itself is funny too how the times when I was making ballads like this heavily I would have loved to have worked with somebody like Neenyo. But I met him because I basically didn’t meet somebody like him all those years ago and just decided to write songs that I would want to see, and I can’t imagine finding my pocket if I was looking up to somebody else’s archetype of successful artistry. The journey is individual but the happiness is universal. And once I found chains and change I knew I was good to go with writing this song because of the times we’re in. It’s strange how that works, this is the most fruitful time of my songwriting and overall artistic career. I’m using the vertical line whatever they’re called | called like Emily Dickinson and em dashes. That’s gonna be my thing. 

As I near the moon

Wailing moans

Come sailing on

And my weight (wade) is drawn

In and out it traces me

In the clear your call starts to fill the fog

Getting faded (fated) on you, got you locked on me

If I showed up tied (tide) with both my hands

Could you rest the ties that bind the body bags?

As I bail upon

Shore the bonds

Hailing louder

We ain’t waiting long

When your eyes set off on me

You gon lay me down

I ain’t gon stop it

I've been stuck between the belle of the ball and the fly on

the wall and sometimes an

elephant in

the room

Yet I never claimed the space

Unlike the Pharoah in the Tomb

The plebes ply on the wall

Pharoah designs for death

in the Womb of a Pyramid

fleas flee and flies fly through

Hieroglyphs

Yet they never claimed the space

Ceilings like veilings

Translucent black tapestry wrapped

around the skeletons in the closet

They can see what separates them

from the Houses we built of

Brick and marrow

upon some arrow that should set

the narrowed walls to

Build our own forty year boxes

Still we won't dare peek over the

Hill, that silken dew dresses each leaf where we're put out to pasture

A. Let yourself in

B. Let yourself win

Let uuin

6/13/19