If you think music is the soundtrack to your life, you might be under the impression that life is a movie. It’s not.
Listen to the album while reading the text.
Thinking about life this way leads to making dangerous assumptions that blow up in your face when life plays out realistically. But we continue to move deeper into mediating our lives in a flashy display for public approval, obscuring each other’s humanity as well as our own.
From the first song I ever publicized, which was called “World Out There,” I’ve been trying to write music that reaffirms the humanity of the people who hear it. Or with songs like “Austin Powers” and “Indifferent Drummers” I play with the premise that pop culture is so uncanny and unhealthy it will be the end of humanity.
Anyway, a lot of what I hear going on in music these days is posing with genre, people striving to perfectly capture and recreate old sounds, or they’re creating music that tries to make the listener feel cool — like it really is the soundtrack to a scene about you and your friends hanging out, making it really seem like life is the movie you think it is. Which I find uncomfortable. I think that ‘cool’ tends to fade or change shape, and that people aren’t just idle partiers who are constantly having sex. Others try to make you feel rage or sadness, and it’s all very cleanly produced, rhythmically tight, and overwhelmingly pentatonic. I find all that to be suffocating and pretty inhuman. It’s also limiting. Music can affect people so much more deeply and intricately than just getting them to feel pumped up.
So for me, I like the idea of making music that sounds like it was made by people feeling what humans feel – sometimes indistinct clouds of a lot of emotions. I like music that makes you think and feel any number of ways so that it takes you to places in your mind where you can reflect, so that’s what I try to write.
I recently put “SEEMS” online for people to listen to, a collection of songs I put together while I was in college (2013-2016). If you like what you hear there, I’m on SoundCloud as Andrew Frankel. And I upload songs and covers every week onto my Youtube channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCm52M3WLqezKcA1nFpSt6Cg.
