Track by Track: Invalids, Eunoia
Not too long ago, I thought I would reach out to Pete Davis of Invalids to see whether he would participate in our ‘Track by Track’ feature for the site. Pete had previously been kind enough to answer some questions for us in the site’s very first artist interview, so I had hopes that he would be willing to contribute again. Fortunately, he was agreeable, but admitted that he already posted brief song descriptions on Bandcamp for his killer record, Eunoia. Nevertheless, he felt he could go into further detail for the feature, which got me really excited.
Shortly after Pete agreed to work on the feature for the site, he tweeted that he was working on the “complete, unabridged autobiography” for Eunoia. When I saw the tweet, I thought to myself… “Ha, Pete must be exaggerating.”
I was wrong. He was serious.
Below you will find the most in-depth synopsis of one of our most beloved math-rock albums, Eunoia. Weighing in at 5,540 words (ten pages), Pete has presented us with our longest, most entertaining feature to date.
Enjoy this raw, unedited glimpse into the greatness that is Eunoia.
Suggestion: Listen along to Eunoia as Pete details each track. Click here to stream the record within a separate window.
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Eunoia is a Greek word, or at least a word taken from Greek, meaning “beautiful thinking” or something like that. Like a perfect clarity of thought. I came across it when I was trying to look up what word has highest ratio of vowels to consonants. There are other words that are entirely vowels, but Eunoia also has the tidbit of containing every vowel, and each used only once. So I mean come on already it’s a gnarly cool word. The fact that the definition was sort of fitting really sealed the deal. The next Invalids full-length is titled “Strengths,” which is very much the opposite of eunoia. Where eunoia is a consonant in a sea of vowels, strengths is a vowel in a sea of consonants. No other English word has a higher consonant-to-vowel ratio. I have no idea what to do for the next album lolol. I could do a “Facetious EP” as facetious contains all the vowels in alphabetical order.
I can only promise the rest of the complete, unabridged, unsolicited and unbridled historical director-commentary track-by-track of Eunoia will be as heady and verbose :333
This song came to me when I was falling asleep one time. I mean, not really the whole song, more the intro riff and the idea of the guitars cutting out and the vocals coming in over drums/bass to mimic the lines the guitars had already established. I’ve heard from many fellow musicians that they frequently have instances of imagining the most elaborate, creative, beautiful music in their head just as they’re falling asleep; that somehow this sort of half-waking state is purely conducive to allowing the brain to produce the perception of music almost to the point of believing it’s being played through headphones as you lie there. I wonder if there’s a word for this. But I’ve definitely experienced it, and this song was the first time I really tried to retain some of the things I was mindjamming on and try to write the song out the next day. The rest flowed out of me almost effortlessly; it’s wonderful when that happens.
The lyrics to this song are about childhood and growing up, which is a subject I like to write about an awful lot. There are many lines in here that are referencing my brother and I when we were kids. He used to have this giant plastic crayon that was about 5in in diameter and probably about three feet long with a slot in the top to serve as a coin bank. I remember when he cashed it in and it was some unfathomably large amount, or at least completely shocking to a child with no sense of money scaling. I also particularly remember one time when I had favorably obtained some hot cash for my birthday or something and I was lying on my back on my parents’ bed and holding $60 and thinking to myself this is the most money I’ve ever held in my hands. Lololol of course I was like 6 years old.
I was told by my parents when I was young that my dad and my brother had once been horsing around in the living room, and amidst a divebomb attack narrowly evaded by my dad, my brother wound up faceplanting right into the sturdy metal dial of my dad’s stereo system and busting his head up pretty bad. I was too young to remember, but we apparently all rushed off to the ER and my brother had to get stitches. My parents always referred to it as my brother having “cracked his head open” and that imagery always stuck with me.
I’ve stated before that every song has some kind of hidden Easter egg that references another song, be it from popular music or from friends of mine. The line “you better leave it running” is a reference to a song by my brother’s and my band in high school. The melody also mimics that of the song. I currently have “A Spoonful of Slurry” as my ringtone when my wife calls me and whenever my boss hears it he mimics Sherman over it, albeit missing most of the words in a sort of “nanananana this weekend…” Truly it wasn’t intentional, as I had used Spoonful of Slurry as a reference in School Social, but of course now it’s very clear the similarity between the intros of both songs. I’m okay with it :D
When putting the MIDI tracks into Cubase with which to record against, Nick used to manually adjust all the measures in the tempo track or whatever so that the click always lined up. When he got to the end of the song, he found the measure that contains a single extra 32nd of a beat and asked me how the heck to convert this to a viable time signature. Lololol I’ve since suggested he put the drum track in first, which will carry the tempo changes and such, and just use that to keep time. I don’t think he still does that.
The last thing I’ll say about this song, having already written an entire page about it lololololol is that the name of the song came from a road sign in Connecticut. I was driving my brother home from New Jersey to Boston in the month before I moved to California to do an internship at E&J Gallo Winery. We went a route I hadn’t taken before and passed the road sign for Sherwood Island State Park in CT. The sign simply read “Sherwood Is Connector.” When I was writing this song some 1.5 years later, I had remembered the sign as “Sherman Is Connector” and used it for the name of the song. I later found out, after driving the same route again on a later trip to Boston after moving back to the East Coast, that I was indeed in error.
This was the sixth song written for Eunoia.
“It's a Pipe Bomb, Jobriath”
I was trying to make this the slow song lolol. I have heard before that I always have a way of writing a song and not being able to resist Peteing it up with craziness. Like I can’t just keep a constant flow throughout a song, I always want to put some big change or reveal or musical spasm. I don’t really disagree; I guess I just get bored with myself in certain restraints and find surprising elements very progressively motivating. So this started as the slow song and that lasted for about 12 measures lololol.
This was heavily inspired by Japanese bands, particularly toe. I wrote this after watching one of their live-performance DVDs in its entirely instead of writing a song, which I had originally set out to do. The drums are very Takashi-inspired. This was the inspiration for the pseudo/mangled Japanese phrases in the background. I asked a Japanese friend from grad school to help me with some Japanese words I could say that sort of made sense in the context of the song. I wanted to craft it after the metering/rhythm of “Chain Wandering Deeply” by Envy. I’ve since been told that the Japanese is pretty much unintelligible, but that’s alright. I don’t think they hold it against me :`)))).
The slow high-note section under “go ahead, I’ll be fine” is directly inspired by toe’s “I Do Still Wrong” (~2:29).
I love the strange chord under the line “to beat in the back roads, to fit in a better role.” It is achieved by playing a major II chord (i.e. supertonic) as a dominant 7th when it is normally supposed to be minor, then inverting it so that the major third of that chord is the new root, and otherwise removing the original 2 note in favor of the dominant 7th, which is the 1. This creates a chord that contains the 1 of the scale, the 6, and a diminished 5 or augmented 4. The minor interval between a flat 5 and 6 coupled with the minor interval between 6 and 1 (8) thus creates a diminished chord. I used this chord so often in my old solo work that friends started referring to it as the Pete Davis chord. Another way to think of it is if you take a IV chord (i.e. subdominant, e.g. F in a Cmaj scale) and augment all instances of the root of that chord by a half step (e.g. all the Fs become F#s). It creates a great tension.
The name of the song is a Simpsons quote from the episode “HOMR.”
This was the last song written for Eunoia.
This was the first song I wrote as Invalids. I got the name Invalids partly from just liking the sound of the word (which, of course, is the pronunciation IN-vuh-lids we’re talking about here), but also from remembering this play I saw in middle school for French class that was titled Les Invalids about a group of people and their unstable relationships with each other. The play consisted of several scenes, each of which was first acted out in French, then subjected to a pantomimed “rewind” sequence where the actors quickly performed their actions in reverse, and finally re-run once more in English. Eh I mean it wasn’t like earth-shattering or anything; kind of neat, but the name is what stuck with me. I loved the idea of this super technical, athletic music against the foil of a word implying a deficiency in these attributes. My wife suggested the word might be offensive to some people, but I would never think so. I had actually written a song many years before under my Surface Area project that I named “Invalids” in a similar manner; the song was largely in 7/8 and had lots of frenetic guitar parts and tapping lines. It wasn’t really math-rock per se, as I didn’t really know what math-rock was (despite being aware of the term). It was only ever written in the Tabit program and never recorded. I lifted the name from that for this project.
I wrote this song after hearing Trees, Swallows, Houses by Maps and Atlases. I wrote it well before I could possibly play it lolol. But I was so enamored of the technique that I was inspired to really work on diligently improving my skills and working up to being able to play the parts. Ever since then (~2008) I have very very rarely played a guitar with a pick, and have very very rarely played an electric in standard tuning. This kind of stuff is just more fun when I’m picking up a guitar and playing for fifteen minutes 8-]]
I wasn’t originally going to have vocals in Invalids songs. I actually wrote four songs as Invalids before trying out vocals. I was afraid that there was just no room for them, considering the density of notes and overall use of the sonic space. But after getting a bit better at mixing and starting to hone the craft, I started listening to "Diastole" with a vocal melody in mind and something just materialized. I’ll often rip instrumental versions of songs to my iPod and play them in my car and try to sing over them to come up with vocal melodies. After I recorded the vocals for this song, I really loved how the vocals added this sort of somber juxtaposition to the upbeat music and ultimately decided to do vocals for all of it. Since math-rock is a heavily instrument-focused genre and many fans of it greatly prefer instrumental music, and also because my voice is kind of goofy and I tend to have an almost pop-punk-esque style to my singing (not really by intention), I decided to offer up the instrumental versions of everything we make for Invalids. It’s as simple as opening the Cubase project file, muting the vocal buss, and re-exporting J.
The main guitar lead in this song is quite clearly inspired by “Every Place Is a House” by Maps and Atlases.
“J Whiting, from Our Hearts We Send Thee”
In order to get an accurate background for this track, we need to talk about Tabit. Tabit is a program that plays music in MIDI format based on notation input as tablature. I first acquired Tabit from a friend in 2001 when I had just moved from Wisconsin to New Jersey and didn’t know anybody and didn’t do anything after school and stuff. So I started tabbing things as a hobby and in doing so became pretty proficient at it. I noticed the Tabit website had an area to upload tabs and also a dedicated forum, so I started posting and continued for many many years. Almost all of the users there were also musicians, and many of them wrote music using the program. There was a veritable golden age of new uploads between like 2003-2006, a time before DAWs and VST plugins were so easy to come by, and when Facebook hadn’t become a ubiquitous default of social online interaction. Many of the friends I had made on the Tabit forums wrote really really great music in tab form that never got to see a recording beyond the MIDI notes made by our respective machines. A few tabs from others have always stuck out to me, including one in particular, “Methods of Completing and Impossible Task” made by my friend James Whiting for his sort of fantasy band project called Saved by Magic. The tab is still up here.
I would highly encourage everyone who plays rhythm-section-driven music to at least try out Tabit and see what they could come up with. There’s something enormously helpful about being able to hear things as a full band when it’s still in notepad/mid-composition form.
This whole song came about when I used to jam on my guitar for a long time while working on my newfound style of playing. Being in an open tuning, I found myself constantly playing this one melody and remembered it was from James’ aforementioned song. So I stole the section and credited him in the name. Someone once asked me what I yelled at the beginning of the track. I simply said “yeah J!”
This was the second song written for Eunoia.
This is the track I show people that have never heard Invalids before lolol. Actually, usually it comes following a long spiel about the math-rock continuum and how there are clean, followable, groove-oriented bands on one end, and crazy, noisy, downright zany, unfollowable bands on the opposite, and how there exists a center point full of wonderful tapping and time-sigs and melodies and grooves and everything. So this would involve “c” by toe, “When Worms Learn to Fly” by Tera Melos, "Nekomajin vs. β” by Nuito, and “Every Place Is a House” by Maps and Atlases. Sort of my quick math-rock primer.
I once showed this song to some guys I went to grad school with before I released it to anyone else. They said it was a lot more pleasant than what they were expecting based on my explanation of math rock lolol.
This was one of the few songs I wrote almost entirely on guitar before tabbing it out. Some parts were very difficult to figure out how to represent in tabs. Usually I will write most of everything directly in Tabit while I’m just sitting at my computer. I’ve since learned it helps to have a guitar in my lap the whole time to a) make sure I can play what I’m writing and there are no wonky hand twisters and b) help come up with some good ideas. A lot of single snippets of each guitar line or bass line will materialize from playing my instruments for a while and just improvising. I’ve never been one to play other people’s songs, or even my own full songs, when I sit down to play an instrument. I’m basically 100% in improve mode 100% of the time.
The Easter egg in this song was meant to be “Spoonful of Slurry” by Tera Melos. There is a section in the middle with an alternating major and minor IV/iv chord (i.e. subdominant) that sort of mimicked the intro to Slurry. It’s a bit obscure though.
This was the fifth song written for Eunoia.
In open tuning, the most natural thing to do is to consider your open-string chord to be the root of your scale, thus the fifth fret is the IV, the seventh fret is the V, etc. However, one can assign the open strings to another degree of the scale, say the IV, shifting the position of V to the second fret, vi to the 4th fret, and I to the 7th fret. This totally colors your chords differently when you use as many open strings as I do. The entire reason for open tuning for me was to make use of open strings (which is something I do a lot even in standard tunings) and increase linearity for tapping shapes (i.e. thirds, fifths, sixths, and octaves can all be made by tapping the same fret on two different strings). Ursine Valor was my first foray into shifting the root of the scale from the open strings to the 7th fret. I loved the sort of dark, somber tone it created.
This song was very much inspired by Mouse on the Keys, particularly “Spectres de Mouse.” This is reflected in the drums especially. There are also lots of areas of quintuplet polyrhythms (fitting five beats into the space normally occupied by four). Lots of the riffs in this song are really fun to play (albeit very difficult). I first recorded the guitars to this song not long after I wrote it, but they never sounded great, so I re-recorded them before releasing the album. The same goes for Diastole, J Whiting, and Worth, since those had been recorded as demos in 2009 using an entirely different recording setup. For the sake of uniformity I relearned each song and did them again. There’s a certain shame in the way I create things, because I’m always in a state of moving forward and rarely play songs I’ve already recorded. Once I’ve learned them and practiced enough to record the parts, I don’t really ever play the song again and ultimately forget how to play it completely. It’s always easier to relearn a second time (what with muscle memory and all) but I still forget a good 60% of every song lolol.
I practiced for a good week to develop a scream for the end of this song. I even looked up tutorials online how to do it, because when I try to just force from my gut it comes out super shrieky. I eventually was able to come out with this in the moment of recording and was happy with it. I played it for some friends of mine to see if it stuck out as sounding really lame or not lololol. I wasn’t used to this kind of thing.
The drum beats in the first fast section (0:44) and the last section (4:38) are the same beat.
This was the fourth song written for Eunoia.
This is my favorite track off Eunoia. This, too, was an exercise in assigning the 7th fret as the root of the scale in open tuning. The intro riff to this song is one of my favorite to play because it requires a lot of switching of the left and right hands to create a seamless part. I was really pleased with how all of the parts of this song came together, especially the last like third of it.
There is an obvious allusion to “Worms of the Senses/Faculties of the Skull” by Refused in this song. Shape of Punk to Come was a great album, and one of the tapping lines I had been working on was reminding me of that section, so I decided to pay homage.
This song is about interpersonal relationships and how sometimes our expectations of them don’t line up with how they actually evolve. A lot of it, like many parts of Eunoia, are very much autobiographical: the section “and it was uphill, it was uphill all the way home…” is referring to when I used to walk home with my wife (who used to be my girlfriend) before we were dating and sort of embracing that uncertainty of whether or not she felt the same way about me as I did about her. Her dad was very strict and old-fashioned in some regards and we had to maintain a platonic façade as much as possible around him lolol.
The name of this song was a thought I had when I was driving home from school one day and saw a crane in the distance and thought it looked kind of like they were setting up a carnival. I later came to the realization that I meant carnival rides, not carnival games, as the lyrics were written. But I sacrificed good lexicon for the rhyme, just as I did good grammar for the title. Truly should be Far-away Cranes but whatever man. I used to do this thing when I wrote songs as a young lad where I’d write lyrics and then try to find some little grouping words within them that sounded in some way neat and obscure when presented completely devoid of context. This was sort of one of those times. Another example would be “Shuffle, or Else” of my acoustic solo stuff.
This was the seventh track written for Eunoia.
A treat for any fellow chemists out there, this song was inspired by McLafferty Rearrangements, which is a phenomenon that occurs during mass spectrometry. Certain excited molecules in the analyzer can undergo a change where the molecule curls onto itself and transfers a proton to a central point, which cleaves the molecule into two distinct sections (the masses of which indicate that the rearrangement has taken place and thus help identify the starting molecule). I was taking a mass spec class at the time I wrote this in grad school. I started toying with the idea of each guitar and bass playing parts that were echoed by each other and having a sort of additive structure as they passed between each instrument. The part I’m talking about starts right around 1:50.
The General MIDI guitar harmonics instrument can be heard in the early part of the song when everything kicks in (right before “cracks in the windows…”). The bass harmonic didn’t come out as well as I’d liked because some strange things had to be done to achieve it (finger one note to shorten the string length and then do a harmonic higher up at the same time). I decided to leave the blended MIDI sound in there as an homage to my Tabit roots.
The later section is an homage to “There Can Be Only One Intercontinental Champion (and the Heartbreak Kid Wants His Belt Back)” by The Premier, which is the band that Nick Steinborn (who lent guest vocals to this track) used to have with a few other members of The Wonder Years (of whom he’s now a part). I met Nick the same way I met bassist Nick: the Tabit forums. Truthfully, this is where I’ve made basically any musical connection lololol. All my friends are on the internet. But seriously, I knew of Nick Steinborn and loved his tabs/music and when he was in The Premier I actually went to see them play a local show (he lives in eastern PA, not far from NJ). He was the first guy I met from the Tabit forums and we’ve always had a supportive respect for each other’s work. I absolutely love the part of The Premier song that I alluded to and asked Nick if he would do a guest spot for this track. I actually wrote it specifically for him to sing on it (and thus complete the homage) and am really glad he agreed to do so. It remains one of my favorite parts of the album; his line “when we felt the room was burning down around us…” gives me goosebumps pretty much every time. The name for the song is thusly a portmanteau of Steinborn and Seaborgium, the chemical element named after Glenn Seaborg (which has the goofiest-sounding name of all the elements and I love it).
The outro riff that’s sort of waltzy fingerpicking in 3/4 (albeit 5-measure phrases) is a riff I’ve played for years (probably since 2002 or so) whenever I had a guitar in open tuning. I’ve always been drawn to it and finally put it in a song.
After I recorded this song and went back to remix the whole Eunoia album about a hundred times, I noticed this song had really nice-sounding guitars compared to the others. I finally remembered that I had put fresh strings on right before recording this track, and, surprised by the significance they had, vowed to change my strings before every song I record. Recording guitar tracks for a song now costs $9 because I buy those Ernie Ball Cobalt strings that I love so well. :33333
This was the ninth song written for Eunoia.
“I'd Rather Be Driving; Skyscrapers”
This song, as credited on the album, was not written by me. It was written by Stephen Navarrete who was also a member of the Tabit forums back in the day (a noticeable pattern appears). Steve was one of my favorite songwriters on the forums and made tab songs that I still love to this day. I decided to take two of them and turn them into Invalids songs. I really did my best to keep most of the notes that he had there and really just convert them into an Invalids style of playing. Replacing arpeggiated chords with tapping lines and such. There are a few moments of fluttery riffage that I added but the majority of the song is just a different medium of the same material. The drums are particularly unchanged; I really liked his drum parts. After we recorded the song and got it all mixed together in a final state, I showed it to Steve and asked if we could use it (giving him proper credit, of course). He was entirely on board and we are forever grateful.
I had to write lyrics for these songs, since Steve’s originals didn’t have any. I took inspiration from high-school revenge movies like Bully and from model examples from Modern Physics class about general relativity. The line…
“And now you've got to work so hard
To stay in the same place
The engine and the iron rails
Will win it either way
All that’s left behind
Its only saving grace
There’s nothing close enough to tell
Just how fast you really go”
... is a sort of metaphor for life change wrapped in inspiration from close-to-light-speed-train-travel problems in physics class, how traveling near the speed of light dilates time so that the observer observes time much much slower than it actually passes outside the moving system. And idk I feel like there’s some beauty in that (`:
Near the end I was sort of improvising vocal parts and actually sang a couple of harmonized lines in the backup vocals that were almost gibberish but sort of molded themselves into words. The derivation of this is my method for trying to develop vocal lines: I’ll pretty much play chords or listen to a recording and try to sing made-up vocal lines over it, but I’ll actually sing sort of like half-word gibberish to make it sound kind of like actual words. I didn’t include it in the lyrics, but I think the idea I was going for was: “a dull, uncounted grace, a sullen second place.”
The line near the end where all the instruments cut out and only the drums are left doing the snare rim clicks is exactly as it was in Steve’s original. Somebody once called that the best one-measure break they’d ever heard. Lolol I love that part.
The Rhodes piano lead in IRBD is one of my favorite riffs of music ever; it’s basically one of the saddest things I’ve ever heard and I absolutely love it. I play it often whenever I’m at a piano or something with keys. It’s a such a simple and well-worn progression, but the notes/melody above it are perfect.
This was the sixth song arranged for Eunoia.
“And Was It Worth It in the End?”
This was the third of the original demos I made for Eunoia. It was meant to be completely crazy and difficult, and it really was when I wrote it. It took me a lot of practice to be able to play it. This song in particular was a problem for synthetic drums because the drums in the beginning are so repetitive on the cymbals. Having the same (or similar enough) samples for the cymbal hits really made the monotony of sampled drums stand out as fake. I spent a lot of time working on a natural variation of velocity/volume for each hit and changing up which cymbal lands where in order to make it more believable.
This song was inspired by “Yeah You Remember That” by Funeral Diner. When my brother went away to college he started getting into screamo bands like Funeral Diner, Black Castle, Hot Cross, etc. He would often show them to me and, while I wasn’t always into music that was entirely screaming, the drums always stood out to me as super thrashy and awesome. I was visiting UW Madison where he went to school and played a show at their Ratskeller doing my acoustic stuff (I opened for Owen). I was able to swing the days off from high school by writing it off as a “college visit” by getting a paper signed by their admissions office. After the show my friend Tyler and I walked like 2 miles to get some donuts somewhere. I feel like I got a blueberry donut. But anyway, in my brother’s dorm room he put on this Funeral Diner song and then the melodic guitar line came in under the screaming and thrashy drums I just fell in love with it. I asked him for it a few months later and goosebumped out like crazy when I heard it again.
There is also a nod in the vocals during the lines “…a dull circuit repeating…” and “…a full subset depleting…” to “Black Elbow” by A.M. Overcast, one of my favorite artists whom I’d just discovered when I was writing vocals for this song. The vocals were particularly difficult for this song because it’s in A major; I couldn’t find a good melody to build on and form a decent climax because I was writing the parts really high. Some of the notes on this song are unbearably high in male register. Lots and lots of screaming lololol. I actually originally wrote it differently when I first finished it and sent it to Nick. Originally, the middle dancey section only had the lines…
“We suck young blood
Our deceptive cadence
And we raised it well
But we couldn’t name it
And when it finally went to sleep
It just went to sleep”
…repeated twice with a subtle variation. When I sent it to Nick he said he felt like something was missing and it didn’t pay off as well as it could have, so I thought about it and shuffled some things around and added the section…
“Leaning up against the open door
It’s all empty now, we moved it out
And our reluctance to shut it once more
And leave it shut, and leave it, we left it
And the swollen boards rose up from the floor
And tripped you when you tried to walk away”
“We Suck Young Blood” was the name of the channel or whatever on Direct Connect that Tabit members used to share files.
The lyrics in this song are again about life change and longing for things, moving different places and leaving others behind. They are very melodramatic lololol I do realize this. But I just find myself liking things like this, wanting to be fully absorbed into this emotional world conveyed by the art. It’s like playing an embarrassing RPG that is totally not even that good but beckons you to get sucked into it and really connect with the story and everything. In my solo stuff, I always want everything to be as soul-crushingly depressing as possible. I just love super sad music, and love trying to achieve it in my music. But with Invalids I felt like trying to keep the emotional edge but just upturn it slightly into a positive outlook. The last line of the album is directly speaking to that: “Did we miss the last bus, or is one still coming? I think it’s coming.”
Thank you for reading; as always, feel free to ask us anything!
Pete and Nick (in spirit)
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Be sure to check out Invalids:
