#lyric annotations

Candy Apple Planet Only a couple parts of this album were direct responses to specific real-life circumstances, and the opening ("opening", lol, like 2:22 in) quatrain to this track, about the shooting of John Crawford III, is one of them. It's both frustrating and deeply saddening to me that people can look at recorded video proof of a murder and still say, "Yeah, no, that's OK. We're good. Everything's fine." The spoken words from this track relate this feeling directly; that's something I like to do sometimes because I feel on occasion if I were to communicate certain thoughts in verse it would feel contrived, obvious, and heavyhanded. There's plenty of room for conversational prose that just says what you mean, even in poetry and music. Anyhow, you'll notice the same monologue is repeated twice; once before the singing and again at the end of the track -- it's probably difficult to hear all of it at once, but I imagine people will catch the first half the first time and the second half the second time (because those are the parts that don't have to compete as much with the rest of what's happening musically). Meanwhile, the rest of the words are about the same topic as given through a probably-taken-"too far" comparison. (I generally operate under the opinion that if you're going to use metaphor/simile/etc. you should just roll with it all the way down the hill even if everyone ends up breaking bones and ruining their clothes and you see I'm doing it right now) I wanted to communicate a world that isn't just a little bit awful but one that's just absolutely, fully coated in awful... because I think that's the world we actually live in. And I had this visual image of the world covered in dripping red candy coating and that's where the core of this lyric came from. The closing couplet ends on the idea that recognizing the apparent hopelessness of a situation doesn't necessarily preclude action taken ostensibly to change that situation... like the action and attitude of defiance matter even if it all may ultimately be fruitless. Rainbows Beneath The core lyric of this song, repeated many times, starts out describing an injury -- "eyes sewn shut" wasn't meant to be taken entirely literally as it's supposed to refer to swelling, but essentially this begins as a description of the surreality of injury, the feeling of being betrayed by one's own body. This switches pretty quickly, though, into the description of a recurring, constant, or "normal" physical problem (tinnitus) and along with that comes in some ways the silent recognition of the idea that this might not really be "betrayal" if you didn't exactly have a positive relationship with your body in the first place... which obviously is a big part of the experience of being transgender, so that subtext definitely exists here even if I never refer to it directly. Anyway, the rest of the lyrics continue these themes as they describe waking up on a normal day and not feeling particularly healthy. The first Gaelic line says "Wake up!" or "Get up!" basically, and the second just says "dark morning". I have trouble waking up before the sun which is I imagine something almost anyone can relate to as people are diurnal and sunlight is really important to the human body. The second two lines of each quatrain, though, switch to talking about mental health rather than physical and about grasping for confidence when you don't have much to run with.

DeaTH WoRM Lachrymose Mesoglea, Our first album as St. Kain & Wormwood, focused a lot on implied narrative and horrific or disturbing situations, especially the words I wrote in "Told You to Run" and "To The Bears". Ashen Landscapes, in contrast, delivers pretty much what you feel promised by the title; there's a lot more ambience and atmosphere, and I tried to paint settings rather than events. This track just has two lines, and all they're meant to invoke is the feeling of standing up after some unexpected disaster and surveying its damage. Socrach This is the other lyric I alluded to earlier -- the only other part of this album referring to real life events -- and it's about GamerGate, or specifically about its disorganization. In theory it really doesn't seem like it would be very effective due to its lack of organization or internal agreement ("you don't even know what you all hate or who you love"). The central idea of this track is the accusation (in Gaelic) that "Y'all don't believe in anything at all" or "Chan eil sibh a' creidsinn sìon idir". Later the targets of the song's words are implored to stay where they are ("Cuir suas") either to listen or just to stop what they're doing. The rest of the Gaelic says, "You weren’t steady. Were you done?" ("Cha robh sibh socrach. An robh sibh ullamh?"). Despite the unimpressed attitude and insistence of an unstable foundation the rest of the lyrics establish, I get a little pathetic toward the end. The sad truth is that no matter how inconsistent or pointless a group like GamerGate seems, they don't have to have consistency or a point to brutally harass people, so organizing under a banner didn't make them any more effective than they already had been at ruining lives, but it unfortunately also didn't make them any less effective, either. Left to the Hunger of the Stones Before Lachrymose Mesoglea I don't think I had ever really worked with someone else on a music project, and in general across both these albums I was a little hesitant to say anything too personal because I didn't want to seem like I was speaking for both of us. I had to get over that to some degree with the lyrics to this track. This is primarily about feelings of insecurity about my work, and specifically music, and even more specifically this music. I struggle off and on worrying about the quality of my music -- I do occasionally listen to it and think, "Argh, this is garbage; all of this is the worst; I'M the WORST," but most days I'd say I really like it. But on those days, my concern is that maybe it doesn't matter if I like it. What if I'm wrong? What if the music's quality is just very poor or it's too weird? The bottom line is that no one will even listen to this music (as I write this, only twelve people have downloaded Ashen Landscapes), and I really want there to be a reason for that, so the reason I settle with is that it's just too bad or too weird. Because of that, though, I end up really frustrated when I see people my age or younger who are more successful and more popular than I am with music I feel like is equally unusual. This track is about that; the "you" addressed is just anyone who's gotten a bigger break than I have. It uses some imagery of destruction at first to build a picture of the impressiveness of what these other people have experienced... and yeah, there's probably a cheap double entendre going on with "star" there as well (by the way, the small bit of Gaelic in those lines is just adding to the same picture: "astral dust"). A lot of the feelings in this track can be summed up with that question, "Is this envy? Or is it fear?" Am I just regular-old-jealous, or am I more worried that all this work is never going to amount to anything meaningful? The second part of this track works off the same sentiments as the rest of it, but with a bit of defiance now. At the end of the day (or most days, as I said earlier), I am really proud of this music. I am specifically proud of the tone of this music -- I do like happy music sometimes, but more often I just need sounds that match the tone of how I'm feeling, and I can only hope that someone else feels the same way and will get something of value out of listening to this.