Fucking up my life
NiT #4
The first thing I’ll say here is this new george clanton song is so fricking good i wanted to share it please listen
the second thing i’ll say is → new glutenhead record this friday!! It’s nothing at all like that george clanton song. much more folky and stuff. ripped off leonard cohen a lot, but also inspired by 90s alt country (songs: ohia, silver jews, etc) and others like Sufjan, Weyes Blood, Joni Mitchell. if u want to help support the record: share the songs with ur friends! add them to ur playlists!! request them on the radio!! write about them online!! or just listen lots and smile!!!!
If people are interested then next week or the week after I can send a newsletter with a lil blurb about each of the songs as a kind of “liner notes”. talking about the process of writing and recording it, what it means to me, where its influences are. ps Releasing in the fall is no accident! I think this record is crisp and melancholy and dark and pretty and takes place in this unique yearly transition.
i’ve been thinking the past couple months about ‘meaning’ and i had a conversation with my friend emma recently which kinda spurred it up again. and i don’t mean ‘meaning’ in the cringe way of “what is the meaning of life?”. well i guess it just is kind of cringe and saccharine no matter how you put it. so whatever i do mean it in the cringe way. what i’m trying to say is that it can sometimes be hard to understand day-to-day why we do what we do in an abstract sense. like if you’re working at a job that’s meh but it pays the bills and you’ve got a family or some financial goal, then the WHY is salient and obvious and you can easily rationalize what you’re doing getting out of bed and all that. but i think it’s kind of easy to do things without a WHY, and just maybe instead with a WHAT ELSE? like working a job or being in a degree or doing a hobby or hanging out with certain people just because that’s the situation you’ve found yourself in and you don’t really see any reason to do anything else. this has kind of become an aimless ramble but the main point is that thinking up some kind of big overarching values or goals or whatever can be really useful and powerful towards bringing meaning towards your days. just having a narrative to place yourself within instead of floating.
anyway, theres no right way to live a life and i don’t know shit so just do what’s right for you!!! for quite a few years i really got off on just chilling and working on projects that seemed cool, doing a dance with my days and romanticizing real time. but recently i’ve felt some fulfilment from working towards longer term stuff and building a life story. both can be fun.
now : here’s a poem that became a song called Round and Around that we’ve been working out in rehearsals. hopefully will be on the next project!!!! we’ve applied for a grant to record it which would be very cool to get. hoping to record a full length this time. we pretty much have it ready to go!!!!
Hair bands I don’t mind
Books on my nightstand
That I’ll never read
A pair of lungs
Filled with air
Switching from punk to pink
With a shattered sense of shame
And some shaky ink
An American tongue
A Canadian stare
Oh now
Take that frown
Turn it upside down
That room
Doo doo doodoo doo
Bones meet
Skin leaks
Touching cheeks
Rapid heartbeat
The only good theatre in town
Start break
Bars drink
Force links
Memory shrink
Round and around
Long time
Hard climb
Smell of pine
Trick sublime
Round and around
A piece of bark
Growing for two hundred years
I tore it off while distracted
By the smell of the lake
The weather’s bad
But we’re already here
Used the last cube of ice in my whiskey
Caused a hurricane
Went to the park to meet my friends
A break from thinking about the end
If you’re feeling generous to the glutenheads today then please presave Palmerston!! It pretty much just auto-saves the record to your library on Friday so I guess it tells spotify lots of people like it enough to save right away. I’m told this is useful so figured i’d ask.
here’s a playlist I made for u!!! it jumps around genres a bunch but it pretty much represents the extremes of how i’ve been feeling lately. heavy and light, this way and that. moving around a bit. feeling there.
, i love u!!! thanks for reading this far. really apprecaite your patronage of this damned newsletter. see u soon!!!
-ben