but it's my heart.

i thought we were going to have a fairy tale ending

instead you left me here to choose my own adventure

like the goosebumps you crawl up me, so condescending

you slaughtered love. i am here to avenge her

they say it gets easier with every heart break

so get your foot off my pedal and slam on my heart brakes

slow down, i need to give my heart a break

tend my veins to a driving pulse that a heart makes

inside our separate bodies, your touch makes my heart quake

so put yours and mine together in a blender for heart shakes

for valentine's day you made me leche flan heart cakes

for valentine's day i proved hard time beats heart aches

when i told you i loved you with folded paper heart shapes

and i tried to play it cool with sideways grins and heart fakes

reservations to commitment, you know how a heart flakes

the suspense of our plot piercing me with heart stakes

you made me drown in my own blood stream and heart lakes

til i gagged ferociously from the very love that my heart takes

you became the blood and the body in which i would partake

and search for inspiration, the same kind that art makes

but i could never stand the thought of us being apart, eh

while the layers of our love separate like a parfait

our honeymoon nights turned into dark days

smoking whiskey drinking weed to sleep with hard blaze

you left me flailing underneath blood water like shark bait

i couldn't write a decent song or a deep melodic phrase

so i keep looping what we're doing like we're fucking James Blake

god dammit i still love you. i'm not ready to part ways

though you've found someone else to sleep in my place

to satisfy the image of the hunger that you craved

and every time i close my eyes all i see is her face

in the same spot we pronounced our sacred embrace

demolishing the sanctity of our Sundays

she let you strum on the strings of her guitar base

you let her score on your empty net like Jon Toews

and i bled from my face like my skin to a skate

your lips on her skin sending me to a violent rage

so put a lobby on controlling my guns, disarm hate

i still imagine us together in 29 years growing grays

and the half white half filipino kids we would raise

Samson, it wasn't just for fun, we gave them names

i'll wish on the stars that right now is just a phase

and that what we have coming was worth this cruel craze

maybe it is.

mabye

(Sambye)

it's not.

so i guess i'll go about my solitary day

i won't worry about you texting and driving when it rains

i'll lead by example and follow my brain

and lessen my trips on the orange line train

even Thom Yorke says that True Love Waits

and this just feels like spinning plates

i'll take myself out on some meaningless blind dates

add them all to equate the numbers of my heart rate

until the fissions from the electricity we create

escape my blood vessel and out my heart gates

"I've made a terrible mistake."

There are approximately 17 steps from the entrance of my apartment to the front of my door. This is the amount of time it takes to walk up those 17 steps, in a manner that would become a metaphor in a Camus novel, maybe. It's a pointless drawl, with little to no intention. By the third time around, I am out of breath. I can't control my airstream. It sounds like shit and I'm not happy with it. It's probably the worst thing I've ever published. But I only had 20 minutes to write about 17 steps, 20 minutes before the 18 bus leaves me at the stop. As stubborn as I am, I won't re-record the mistakes. This is it. The first take. The truth. The ugly, naked, honest truth. That I am erred, that everything I write sounds the same, that I don't venture from my comfortable compositional techniques, though I know what I am capable of doing and creating. It is a genuine disrobed falsity. It is me without the mask I'm about to put on before acting the part necessary to survive in this world. It is my artistry with no meaning.

But it is a real feeling, and everything imperfect about it is what makes me human.

I am sorry for rushing to conclusions when you deserve the passion I know I have.

Download:
A Walk Up The Stairs

O, me patrie!

I love its fragrance of romanticism. It was a favorite the second I heard it, and I will never forget its fragrance. Chopin liked it a lot, too. Something cool happens to your right hand when playing this... it does harmony and melody at the same time. His voice was in his fingers. I always wonder what he would have done if he lived longer, in terms of composing for orchestras. I look at stuff like synth keyboards and am intrigued at how many different voices can be used with a single button. But that's the thing- it's a button. Yes, it's an instrument, but it doesn't have the same effect of a real piano. That's why I like it so much- because you literally have to grasp the sound. And it makes my heart melt.

This guy was birthed to this song. It's a memory I'll always have to myself.

Harder = a terrible safeword

you're depressed because you compare yourself to john coltrane
but when did you stop thinking you could be like john coltrane?

here's a little lesson in hard bop:
they didn't call it hard bop because it was harder than be-bop
they called it hard bop because everyone shot a bunch of dope
it was the 1950's
all them cats
art blakey
paul chambers
miles and coltrane
lee morgan, dude who blew trumpet on this track
he played an angled horn on the record
given to him by dizzy
another heroin addict
i mean, what better way to put funk into jazz
other than being inside the jazz?
anyway, lee morgan died too young
his woman took a glock and shot him up on stage
i guess she lived in the music, too

i wonder what he could have possibly done
to have his woman kill him like that.
is it even possible
to separate the murder from the music?

have you ever tried to write a song and realized it has already been written?

All for freedom and for pleasure

Nothing ever lasts forever

Everybody wants to rule the world

Procrastination...

I recorded this exactly two years ago, on an upright Young Chang . It's titled "September 8," though its working title was "No Substance World." I don't know why I never finish songs unless prompted. Perhaps I'll finish this one... winter's coming. I miss having a piano. I swear my creativity soars when one's around.

Download:

Interrupted

Also, sidenote: notating music on Finale Notepad is excruciating. I swear to never use this notation software again... back to the pencil and paper.

Also, another sidenote: graphic scores are the shit. They're probably my favorite way to notate music. When people say they can "read music," it pretty much means they can look at a piece of paper and execute the intended results, usually with other people. But what if those intended results aren't really... intended? The New York Miniaturist Ensemble has some really interesting shit to say about that. And they have a fairly decent, part humorous collection of graphic scores on their site.. check them out.

Mistaken for strangers by your own friends

I guess I started this mix a really long time ago with the working title "Corrine's Mixtape." I got the idea from my friend Rob when he made a mixtape that "completely defined him" or something like that. I don't know if this mixtape completely defines me. But I could see myself writing every song on it, or at least contributing a chorus or something.

Download:

An Ode to Serotonin

(click to enlarge)

13 tracks, 47.2 minutes

I noticed that my mixes are getting progressively shorter and shorter. I think that I subconsciously envision the larger framework as a "Side A." Also, I like making mixes for a specific environment, event, activity, ala music for purpose. I guess I always envision theme music for everything I do. This one's the background to my everyday life. Just sitting down. Talking and thinking. Staring out the window. Folding clothes occasionally, maybe learning a song or two before getting ready for work. You know.

A few notes: the Untitled Brand New track comes from their untitled demo album that was leaked in 2006 before The Devil and God are Raging Inside of Me was released in November. Some hardcore fans would argue that those demos are infinitely better than the mastered recordings. What people don't really know is that most of those songs were SUPPOSED to be on The Devil and God... but Jesse was so pissed/embarrassed that the songs had leaked, so he purposefully didn't put them on the album.

Now, in retrospect, I want those songs to be on the album and many of them aren't, and I'm probably more to blame for that than anyone. This record already feels incomplete to me without those tracks and probably will forever.
-Jesse Lacey

It must suck to hate the product of your art with only your own neuroticism to blame. Oh well. That's what major labels are for, right?

Rufus Wainwright's version of "Instant Pleasure" can only be found on his Best of album... and the Big Daddy soundtrack. What a perfect song that kind of describes what my queer friends and I (or maybe just I) call poly, or ambisextrous. Why do people always get branded for wanting to spread some lovin'? Are we so caught in what society thinks about love and people that anything out of the stereotypical, hetero-normative state of relationships is considered to be sodomy or evil or slutty or whatever? I say, just do what feels right, and it is right.

Anyway. Enough of that. "Reparations" by Saul Williams is my battle cry. I impulse bought tickets to see The National in Kansas City last month.. super excited to see them again, hopefully from the rail, again, and this song is amazing live. I love the chorus to the Vampire Weekend song "Run." Apparently, according to my room mates, it sounds like Paul Simon. It's funny listening to old records, by the way, and realizing that most of my favorite artists now are mere reincarnations of 70's and 80's bands. I'm always weary to put Antlers songs on mixes... I just think that each song fits so perfectly in the new-age song cyle, Hospice, that taking them out of context makes them lose their essense. Whatever, I really like the second part of this song. Can't get that Kid Cudi song out of my life... Sam showed me an acoustic live version by this chick Lissie and I can't get the melody out of my head. The only reason I like the original better is that it's produced by Ratatat, and they're incredible.

I totally had this idea for a video before I saw this by the Morning Benders. Now I don't want want to do it because I feel like I'd be jocking their style. Still cute.

Yeehaw!!

And in the crush of the dark...

I could not, for the life of me, get this song out of my head at work today. Minor flashbacks of pole dancing on Halsted. Ow. I also blame Nikalas and Samantha for having the same exact music tastes. It came to my attention that I don't really listen to chick singers. I don't think it's on purpose. I guess I just relate to male front men more in the same way that Nik relates to Alanis Morisette. Haha. This one's for you, buddy.

Instruments: Ukulele / trumpet / my mouth / pill bottle filled with rice

Download:

Psychobabble all upon your lips

Currently listening to: Sufjan Stevens - All Delighted People EP (2010) (just came out omg) (so good)

In conjunction with: The National - Boxer (2007)

You should maybe listen to: La Roux - s/t (2009)

A triumphant return

Me 12:45 am

i say fuck it, you only live once

12:45amChelsea

lol until you die

12:46amMe

hmm.. i guess i never really thought about that part of it

It's been a year since the initial conception of this project. Life has come full circle, but everything is still the same. That being said, music is and can no longer be just a form of escape- it must be the propeller of creative energy, a substantial reason to keep going, surviving, or else all this "figuring out" turns to a pile of bullshit.

After the JTIC meeting last night, Dietzler (who is a more badass version of me in 4 years... or the other way around) helped me to realize what I already knew. That time happens, that life happens, and we are responsible for our own complications. Is Conor Oberst right? Should we just take it easy, love nothing? Or is everything really everything, as Lauryn Hill says?

I made this mixtape thinking about solipsism, but it eventually transformed into something more hopeful. I guess some human beings can't help who they are or who they've become, but if life changes like the colors of the leaves, then I guess we have to believe we can, too.

Click to enlarge:

Night Diving

I've been on some creative block for some time now. I don't know, I guess part of it is finding a reason to do.. anything. The motivation. It's kind of like the formation of a wave. I mean all these natural forces in the world create the actual wave. Without the external, it would just be existing there as water. Does it give less meaning to the physical and tangible liquid that it is? No boundaries in a world where waves exist, almost in spite of the meaning we give or don't give.

Little things happen and exist for that specific moment. When the waves come barreling down the rocks by the museum campus on the southern side of downtown Chicago, the ictus between them being and them not being is: the crash. Once it crashes, it no longer is. Parts of it splash onto the sidewalk- if lucky, onto the same people that determine their meaning. Most of it falls back into the water. Is there pleasure in the height of a wave? Or do people just think too much and make metaphors about dumb shit that nobody else gives a fuck about?

I'm back to "I don't know." But. I guess it's better than "I don't care."

So, I had a record button, 5 notes, and these instruments at my immediate disposal. AKA in reach of my chair, so I wouldn't have to get up. None of these instruments are mine, by the way.

Andrea's ukulele and Jamie's trumpet with Phil's harmon mute


An ocarina shaped like a little bird


A canister of loose change


Just ride the waves, like moving incidences, crashing into one another. I guess it's what makes life have momentum.

Listen with earphones, I recommend it most:
Incidents, like waves