My debut full-length record Nonfiction is officially out as of today. It sounds crazy to say. To celebrate, Blood Makes Noise graciously asked me to break down all the tracks on the album, and boy do I have a lot to say! Let’s do it.
Track 1: “Saccharine”
This is a classic song about a relationship that has ended. Despite its sugary title and indie-pop adorned sweetness, if you look closely, a lot of the lyrics are actually pretty bitter or sarcastic. It just encapsulates that feeling you have when you’ve dated someone and can look back on all your fond memories but also recognize all the major red flags in hindsight. This song’s origins are probably the most mysterious out of any of the songs, because the production process just happened so seamlessly and inexplicably. Which is interesting since it’s my most sonically different song. The sax solo is just impeccable, too.
Track 2: “Birthday Cake”
I wouldn’t say this is a dark song, but it definitely occupies the space of one of the album’s most contemplative and analytical songs. The song isn’t about anyone in particular but it was definitely inspired by stories friends have told me and friends of friends. The protagonist in this song is a sort of anti-hero who you really want to root for, but their self-destructive behavior makes it hard. The initial character was built off a pretty specific archetype of a drugged-up, troubled kid who tries to move as far away from home as possible.
Track 3: “Norway”
The track listing is very intentional, and “Norway” builds off the themes of the previous song. I can’t remember which came first, but they feel like two sides of the same coin. “Norway” deals with this idea that someone will try too hard to escape their hometown and reinvent themselves, but they try so hard and fail that they just end up right back where they started. It speaks to this idea that the more you run from something, the less it will work. It’s almost a call to work through and embrace your origins as opposed to escaping them. This song is one of the ones that sounds the most different from the demo. I challenged myself to make a departure from the demo.
Track 4: “Things You Say”
“The things you say will always stay in my mind / You’ve become someone I can’t recognize”. These first lyrics really exemplify this song’s theme, which unsurprisingly, like quite a few on this record, are about falling for someone who doesn’t feel the same way or is unable to. I like to call this one of the creepiest or maybe eeriest on the record, because it fits the very bleh way I was feeling when writing this. The guitar work on this track is some of my favorite on the record and I’m really proud of how the end of this song builds up into this frenzy and climax. This was one of the most fun to make, easily. And my friend Danny Murray absolutely crushed the drums on this.
Track 5: “Epigraph”
This is meant to serve as a sort of interlude on the record and a bridge between tracks 4 and 6. Initially it was actually called “Interlude” but I didn’t like how on-the-nose that was. I actually wrote the guitar for this song in 2016, when I was only 18, which feels insane that the origins of this album could even go back that far. This song is actually the exact recording I made in 2016, just the first demo for the song. This was admittedly the last addition to the album — it felt like it needed an interlude or brief instrumental moment, and I searched through the voice memos on my phone and then found this riff, one of my favorites I’ve written. It’s also the only track on the record that I mixed by myself.
Track 6: “Spiderwebs”
I really like how the interlude creates this moment between “Things You Say” and “Spiderwebs”. The two songs are so different in dynamics but I think they might share a mood in some ways. Although they’re thematically similar: “Spiderwebs” also deals with having a crush on someone who is unavailable. “Things You Say” is more of a recognition that this same crush is pretty shitty, while in “Spiderwebs” I’m still very much in my feelings and doting over this person hoping it might work. “Trap me in your web and watch me start to spin”, I sing. The slide guitars on this song and the bridge guitar riff are two of the most special sounds on the album to me.
Track 7: “Dance Inc.”
If you asked me when and how I wrote “Dance Inc.” I genuinely could not tell you. It wasn’t one of those things that started with a demo on my phone. I believe I made the whole backbone of the song in one sitting in my recording software. Now that I’m thinking about it, I think the very first thing I wrote for this song was the bass line. I structured everything around that, because that’s the driving force. This song is the most dance-y and funky Teen Idle has ever been. There was just the urge to have a song like this. I felt like I was emerging into this happier and more confident place. Yet the song itself is a diss to the corporate world and an ode to my frustrations with job-hunting and recruiters. The “world of the blazers and blood-hungry headhunters”.
Track 8: “Every Night”
“Every Night” is equal parts love song as well as a song expressing concern about a former friend. Its guitar tuning is definitely the most odd on the whole album, and I really do think this is one of the album’s strongest. I really went crazy with the production on this, and it’s definitely in a subtle way, but I think the very basic drum machine beat supplements the growing and changing song nicely. In previous songs I hadn’t really given piano much of a spotlight, but it’s a main feature of this song, and I think it ended up making the song what it needed to be. I don’t really know how I wrote and played the piano part on this song because I have no idea how to play it now. I’d have to dissect it note by note.
Track 9: “Stranger”
“Stranger” was actually the first song written for this album. At the time I didn’t know this song would be on an album or that I was about to make an album. I wrote this song the night I got back from the airport after I’d finished my semester abroad in Denmark and moved back to the U.S. The whole experience was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever experienced (it still brings tears to my eyes!) so it was upsetting to leave that. This song is basically a love song dedicated to the city of Copenhagen and all the people I came to know and befriend there. This was the hardest song to record on the album. I spent day after day rerecording it and trying to figure out the right tempo, type of guitar, and best recording method, and of course once I made it as simple and raw as possible, close to the original demo, it finally worked.
Track 10: “Winter”
I like a closing track to an album to be cinematic in some way. I’m a very literary-driven person, since I was an English major, and I look at songwriting like plot development. Especially in this case, with an album called Nonfiction, one would expect the last song on this record to be like the closing chapter of a book. And I think “Winter” fits this mold. It’s really a heartfelt, sweet ending to this little portrait of my young adult life that this album is. When I wrote the song, it was immediately an album closer. I’m really proud of the chorus in this song as well as the build up and production. If you listen closely in the outro, you can hear my friends Nat and Nick singing “the door is open” with me. I went really wild with the ending, even using some tubular bell sounds. Plus, the year ends in the season of winter, so what a fitting end to a record.
Track 11: “On Fire” (Bonus Track)
This song was never initially meant to be a bonus track, but the record ended in a very different place than I started it at. By then I felt like there were too many songs similar in sonic palette to this track. This felt like it had to be a bonus track because I didn’t want to do away with it entirely. I wrote this song after learning more about the early New York music and art scene of the ‘60s and ‘70s that included Lou Reed, Patti Smith, and Andy Warhol. The self-destruction inherent in some of those artistic circles was very interesting to me, especially in cases of people like Nico and Edie Sedgwick, two seemingly beautiful souls who really destroyed themselves. As someone who doesn’t even really drink, I was just very interested in how this polar opposite lifestyle of indulgence and excess can present itself.
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