So What

This song I wrote the night of after learning a guitar tuning from and by a musician named Emperor X (his real name is Chad Matheny). The song is about life, getting up every day and living it, and wanting to find love. Chad’s music is really, really impressive and very good, such are the tunings and instruments he invents!

Memories of You

This is about an ex, and thinking about them years later. Occasionally we would get breakfast just to catch up and it would make me want to keep seeing them more regularly even though we were living different lives. It is also about having fun and saying hello to “Sweet Pea” (something I called Gorge Mand, whom I was seeing at the time). The middle part of the song is a break into a dream I was having or a channeling of subconscious wishes (to meet the grandfather, Victor Zahner, on my mother’s side who died before I was born and who I was named after), and simultaneously a reflection of my thoughts on ghosts in my past and shadows of paranoia. The end of the song is about a continuum of one’s life, and forward motion, with a long resolution.



Can’t Be Too Responsible

A song about relationships, infidelity, and an inability to make decisions in one’s life. I tried to connect it musically to remembering my favorite aspects of Sebadoh (though of course it ended up sounding nothing like Sebadoh) and I wanted it to have a dark feel. I wrote it on acoustic guitar then transferred it quickly to electric with drums and bass by Sheridan Riley and John MF Anderson. I like that in this song the keys in the verses and chorus change in an interesting way, but I dunno.



Two Cherished Understandings

This is a tune I wrote during a time when I lived with my best friend Brittny Moore in the deep and secretive Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles, California, last year. While her and our roommate Ashley Hankla (they are both incredible artists) were at work I demoed the song on my 2880 multi-track looper, improvising lyrics and guitar parts, which in part made it a song that is under two minutes long. The song is about me and Brittny’s friendship and deep love for each other, and also has a feeling of being confused and lonely about life or communicative abilities. During the time I lived there I was working on this record and doing just about nothing else but tracking on bits and pieces/parts that came to me to add as overdubs. In between I worked intensively on constantly recording random ideas and sound or song experimentation. In a way this is definitely a song that came from that process. Sometimes very late at night also Britt and I would make very tripped out music together including at one point a piano piece she improvised that I named Pokemon and another song that I made called Alexi. I re-recorded most of Two Cherished Understandings track when I lived in West Adams, Los Angeles after Laurel Canyon and finished recording the rest in New York at Nicolas Vernhes’ studio during the six days I went out there to mix the record with him.

Overwhelmed with Pride

I wrote this on acoustic guitar. It has a heavy dose of self-analysis and stream of consciousness fantasy. After doing a demo I recorded it again with these very nice and very skilled chaps named Chris Sorem and John Hanson in Westminster, California. My dear friend and music peer/heroine Sasami Ashworth recorded french horn on this one at my house which is one of my favorite parts of this song to listen to.

Found Blind

This is the oldest song on the record. I wrote it when I was 19, the first half is about deciding what you want to do in life and giving yourself time, and the second half of the song is about a camping trip I went on with my ex a week or so after we broke up and still wanted to go camping because it’s beautiful. This was right after I got back from an exhausting tour in Europe and the US. We drove up and we played at a house show with some friends in San Luis Obispo. I played in the band who was headlining called Boris Smile, who were from Long Beach and I had played with for a while, and I also played guitar for her set, a project by the name of Fort Wife. After that, we drove to Big Sur, California, and camped out on the beautiful coast. The juxtaposition of beauty, pleasure and heavy sadness created the end of this song lyrically.



She Is Seventeen

An homage to a song by a band called Light Music of the same title (I listened to a lot in high school), this is a song about the deep and confusing existence of Orange County, sensitivity and forward motion. It is about checking to make sure you are feeling and have feelings, because sometimes you can be so lost that you don’t know.



Think It’s Gonna Happen Again

I wrote this song at my friends the Soular Brothers’ house on acoustic guitar. It was about my relationship at the time with Gorge Mand which had become very exciting. Other parts of the song reference a macabre desire to eat dogs, enjoying things you never thought you would, and to change where you live, which was to be a new thing for me after that. The end of the song deals with moments of remembered insularity, hallucinations and suicidal paranoia.



Oxygen Tank

This is a song I wrote based on a dream I had the night before the day of writing it. On the way home from the store I sang the lyrics with melody into my phone improvising it completely, and when I got home I sat down at the piano listening back to it and transposed what chords “could be” underneath it. It turned out it was in B flat! Lyrically I think it is another reflection of desire to love people deeper and hope for the better future.



Won’t Be Around No More

The second to oldest song on the record, I wrote this one at 20, long after breaking up with my ex but still pining hard over our relationship, I wanted it to have an open and heavy sound when I recorded it. The first verse is remembering our first dates, and referring to an unrequited desire to explore or escape into the world together. The chorus reflects my feeling in the moment of writing the song, which was that I never would see her again and that life would never be the same or as fulfilling. The second verse is about how your self doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of the universe, and that we are just insignificant and temporary feelings.

At Best Cuckold is out now on Sub Pop