|
A Note Before: As I sat down to write these song summaries (which is a real pleasure for me, every time), I realized that very unintentionally, I sequenced this album so that the topics in the songs get “bigger” as the album goes. It starts with very simple ideas, but starts to explode in the middle, and by the end I’m talking about some pretty heavy concepts. (The exception is track 6… “System Error” is one of the deeper concepts on the album, and it hits pretty early. But hey. Shut up.) I don’t know if that observation means anything. Probably just a coincidence. But I think it’s neat. I really enjoyed working on this album. It was fun, and it went FAST. A lot of the songs were written after my last album, “Third Act Problems.” (That doesn’t always happen.) I recorded all of the principle instruments in about a week. (Also rare.) Even the vocal tracks you hear are mostly first takes. (Pretty much unprecedented.) When stuff moves that quickly, it’s because I’m wrapped up in it and having a good time. The album title obviously came from the cover photo–that’s my Jonco, who incidentally, does NOT particularly enjoy boops! (He got shocked by one in the first Winter he spent with me and now views them with caution.) I take a lot of cat photos. They’re all over my Facebook and Instagram. This one jumped out at me as an album cover. Title wrote itself. I think this album is a good snapshot of where I am as a person right now. It’s got a lot of fun on it. A little serious. Some maudlin. A touch of anger. But I think it’s ultimately the most hopeful album I’ve probably ever written. My favorite of my albums is the Vonnegut album (“*”) but this one might be on its heels. Let’s go song by song, and I’ll tell you where my head has been since the last time we did this. Lyrics and Song Summaries: |
|
Would you like to do something sometime? ‘Cause we’ve been dancing around it. Would you like to see my cats? ‘Cause we’ve been dancing around it...Etc... Would you like to do something sometime? But I’ve gotta tell you, I’ve been losing sleep… |
A fun little love song. Or almost-love song. Longing? Whatever. It’s about liking somebody and wanting to act on it, but being too freaked out about ruining the friendship or whatever to do it. Y’know. Story of my life. I like how frantic it is. It’s joyous, but also desperate–which is a bit what having “the feelings” can be like. But it mellows out at the end, too…which also seems appropriate. I think it has a Get Up Kids meets Pearl Jam vibe. But that’s just me.
|
|
I wanna watch Game of Thrones with you You and I should build a fort Then I wanna watch Doctor Who with you— You and I should sit around, Then I wanna watch Community with you– |
Another love song. And this one’s positive and fun and hopeful! (What’s happening? Is this a Derek Brink record? Somebody look into that…) Basically, any relationship with me includes a lot of pop-culture. So this is a taste of what that’s like. This is one of those “idealized relationship” songs where I do some wishful thinking. And it falls into the genre of “a list of things I like” which represents a significant part of my writing career. I’ve been saying for years that sooner or later my lyrics are going to just be lists of bands and TV shows alongside lists of the names of my friends. And this is another step closer to that. |
|
No money. What wine goes with eating the rich? No money. Don’t stoke the fire at home No money… |
I was as surprised as you probably are when at one point I realized I’d basically written a ZZ Top song. That’s fine. I like ZZ Top. But…y’know…there it is. I think the solo is even exactly the same amount of measures as “Sharp Dressed Man.” I don’t know. Call it an homage. Lyrically, it’s a simple song about being pissed off at how hard it is to make ends meet. I’m particularly proud of the line, “What wine goes with eating the rich? I feel like it’s a Cabernet.” And I like how few words are in it. I’m learning lyrical truncation, as time goes on. It’s fun finding ways to say a lot with a little. Plus…big scream in the bridge. |
|
(Instrumental) |
I’ve been tinkering with this one for probably a decade or so. It’s really the only “old idea” on this album. I’ve never recorded it before now, and I don’t know what took me so long. Nor do I know why NOW was the time. But I’m very happy with how it turned out. Feels like a modern take on old-west gunfighting music. It was meant for Blue Tattoo back in the late 00s–so I guess it’s been closer to 15 or 20 years. Yikes. Anyway…I think it’s fun. |
|
I put a button on my jean jacket, Not as warm as the leather I put a button...etc… It’s where I want you to see it. It’s just a button... I put a button...etc… |
I wrote a song about my jean jacket. What do you want? Deeper meaning? Well…okay, there kind of is some. There’s a slight commentary about how you choose what to present to the world. Sometimes the things you wear aren’t just things you wear, they’re a mark of your personality. The pins, patches, and other adornments that you put on–or take off–can tell people a lot at a glance. Sometimes so much, it might even be overwhelming, if you’ve got a lot of interests. And that’s somewhat at the heart of this song. But mostly, I just like my jean jacket. |
|
Save me! I know your face. Save me! You’ve never known. I think I can see you. |
There’s a lot to say about this one, and half of it probably isn’t even in the song. I’d say it’s the darkest song on the album, for sure. I think it’ll be obvious to everyone that the song is chiefly about Alzheimer's (or similar), from the point of view of the patient. I think one of the most horrifying things people say about people suffering from those types of conditions is that, “I think he’s still in there somewhere.” Every time I hear that, I just think, “Christ, I hope not.” Can you imagine still being in there? So this song is walking around with that idea. But there’s also an undercurrent that you might not catch… The song is also about AI, which seems to be all the rage these days. It’s about the idea of transferring our consciousness somewhere else, so it will keep going…what if an Alzheimer’s patient’s mind could be kept alive by technology? Maybe THEY wouldn’t be there…but maybe we could still experience them? It’s a hard concept, and that’s probably why it doesn’t come through very well in the song, but that’s what the last line of “...but MAYBE” is all about, as is all of the digital noise (an effect called "Formant") you hear popping in and out, and especially in the outro. (For further, and way more interesting reading on the subject, I recommend the novel “The Unseen World” by Liz Moore.) The song also contains the most visceral scream of my recorded career so far. So that’s neat. |
|
I’m going on safari. There’s lion in my stairway And he’s a good boy, There’s a panther under my coffee table. But he’s a good boy, And they’re purring… |
I mean…you knew it was coming. You knew I’d have to write a little love song for my cats, Jonco and McGuire. This is one of the rare songs where everything in it is true (with the obvious exceptions of calling them lions and panthers). McG does sit at the bottom of the stairs and yell up at me. We play a little game where he does that, and I look over the handrail and ask him if he heard a lion roaring, because I sure hope I don’t get chased by a lion, and then when I turn my back he chases me up the stairs and through the kitchen. It’s adorable. And he’s a little freaked out when people come to the door… And Jonco does hide under the coffee table and runs away if you try to get him out, but he’ll come right up to you and snuggle in hard, when he’s ready. And he does this cute thing where sometimes I’ll be standing or sitting there and he’ll come up alongside me and tap on the back of my hand with his paw. It’s his way of saying, “Hey…use this to pet Jonco.” And I do. Every time. He also really does hate it when I leave. He sometimes gets outright MAD at me when he sees me putting on shoes. They’re very sweet boys and deserved a song. So here it is. |
|
I’m sorry about the noise. Don’t you wanna hear it? Sometimes you sing for joy. Don’t you wanna hear it? Don’t you wanna hear it? |
A little love song to music. Very Neil Youngy–except I sing lower. There’s not a lot to say that isn’t in the lyrics. I just dig music, man. It goes into a minor key here and there that’s a little foreboding…you’d think I’d have something to say about that, right? But nah. |
|
All you know You talk down to build yourself up. When I hear you speak, There’s not a word you say anyone should trust. As anything you’ll return to dust. Return to rust. |
The “influences” list on this song is all over the place. Iggy Pop, Drive-By Truckers, Neil Young (again), Metallica, and so on and so forth. I channeled a lot into this one once I had the riff. It’s been a while since I’ve done a song that can be summarized as simply, “I fucking hate this guy.” And if that’s all you get out of this one, that’s enough, but there’s a little more. The reason I mentioned Neil Young is that the word “Rust” is very important to a Neil fan. He’s used it fairly iconically in album titles and whatnot. Rust is interesting. Because it destroys, for sure. It is decay and rot and ruin and all that. But it also sort of REPLACES the thing it’s destroying. Something that’s rusted retains its shape, at least for a while… It still looks like a bike or a car or a swingset, or whatever it used to be. But it’s no longer safe to use. It’s becoming brittle. It’s becoming a health hazard. Soon it will be full of holes, then it will be gone. But for a little bit, it looks like the thing it was… I sure know some people who keep walking around looking human…but they stopped taking care. They stopped preventing their own destruction. They’re turning to rust. And that’s this song. |
|
When we met, you had a different name. When you were young, sometimes you’d show up looking sad. Somebody asked me if you had been “saved.” |
I released this as a single a while back for Trans Awareness Week. Pulled it down at the end of that week because it would be going on the album (and the single version wasn’t a final mix). It’s a song about a friend–I won’t go into much more detail than that, because in the short time it was already out there, it came to mean different things to different people and I don’t want the whole story to dilute whatever your experience of it might be. But suffice to say, there’s very intentional religious imagery. There’s very intentional Humanism. A lot of care went into this one. The guitar solo is willfully Irish–we do mourning well–and the move to ending with just the acoustic guitar and vocal was a deeply personal one for me. And I was also purposeful as far as the album playlist to follow a song that was very angry with a song that has some sadness and some hope in there at the same time… The implication is that there are those you mourn and those you don’t… But mostly, Trans Lives Matter. I shouldn’t have to tell you that. |
|
(Instrumental) |
Y’know, it’s really hard to know what to say about the instrumentals. And there are TWO on this record! (Which is 11 less than on “Departure,” but y’know…) This one’s obviously very Irish. I’d been playing around with alternate tunings, and it turns out I really love Open C. Counting this song, four songs on this album feature Open C tuning–I’ll leave it to you to guess which ones. (Fun, huh?) This song fell under my fingers more or less as a warm-up that I expanded. It was really fun to construct all of the parts of it, and it’s a blast to play–although I need to keep it well rehearsed! It slips away easily, too! When I started playing around with the riff, it made me happy, so it went on the album. The word “Slainte” is Irish for “Cheers!” (Or actually “health,” but they use it as “cheers.”) Pronounced “Salon-cha” or “Salon-ch” depending on who you ask and where they’re from. |
|
It’s been a while since I was talking about leaving. You’ve gotta make it beautiful where you are. I’ve tried hard to get around it You’ve gotta make it beautiful...etc… I’m not trying to misdirect you. You’ve gotta make it beautiful...etc… |
This song is a companion piece to a song I wrote years ago called “I Go” (available on “Sorry I Didn’t Mean to Shout” and/or several places on the “From the Brink” Bandcamp). I’ve been saying “I Go” is a song about leaving. “Where You Are” is a song about staying. The chord structures are very similar, just with the progressions reversed. The lyrical structure is willfully opposite at all points, too. They both even mention Logan County. When I wrote “I Go,” I was in my early 20s. All I could think about was getting out, going away, and being with some idealized person, who at the time sort of existed, but I was blind to their realities that later came crashing down hard. Over the last 20 years, I’ve gotten much more interested in staying still and making something good for myself where I am, with my support system, with no chasing of mirages. I still have dreams, but I don’t have to abandon the good things I have to chase them. They can be built here just as easily as in wherever the hell “Logan County” might be… I genuinely don’t even remember which highway goes there, anyway. It always bums me out when my friends who live here will say something like “I’m going home for Christmas” or similar. I know that what they MEAN is “I’m going to see my parents/family.” But I always think, “I really wish you thought of HERE as your home.” I’ve voiced that a couple times and it seems to make people mad. I don’t know why. If home isn’t where you are, where the hell ARE you? You’ve got to MAKE home. If all you do is chase it, you’re just going to find yourself looking for it again. Roots matter. You’ve got to set them down–they can’t all just belong to your parents. But, since we’re on the topic…the last song on the album kinda deals with your parents, too... |
|
How did I get here? I’m one in a million. I’ve been so down I couldn’t stand up. I’m one in a million. We all turn into our parents. I’m one in a million. |
Earlier, I accidentally wrote a ZZ Top song. This time I’m pretty sure I wrote a U2 song. I’ve got a lot of influences that I wear pinned to the sleeve of my jean jacket… “One in a Million” came together from a few sources. One was that I had the “we all turn into our parents” line sitting in a note in my phone for like four years and something about the drone-vibe of this riff made me want to use it. And for what it’s worth, I really do think I ended up with my mother’s anger–which can be very hard to tame–and my dad’s bleeding heart–which I won’t ever try to. The other major source of inspiration on this one was thinking about a friend who had adopted a child and was about to adopt another. They expressed some nervousness to me about the coming child, pointing at their present kid and saying, “This one’s been one in a million…” And I quickly said, “Well, so is everybody.” (My Humanist bullshit knows no bounds.) My friend later told me that those words meant a lot to them and helped calm their nerves. So I had that on my mind. And I had my parents on my mind. And I wrote a song about parents and about being an individual. In the whole world, you’re the only you…but you came from all these other onlys… It’s a big thought for a simple song. Knew it’d close out the album as soon as I wrote it. And look at that. It did. I’m especially happy with the guitar tones in this song. I had bought a Strymon Cloudburst pedal prior to making the record, and it’s the primary reverb on the record. Anywhere you hear a glimmer of strings, it’s in the “ensemble” mode of that pedal. The single-note stabs on this song are very informed by that reverb and the tone-shaping in it. And the Jason Isbell Telecaster. But that’s a whole other story for another place on the website |
|
A Word Afterward That’s probably one of the more concise song-summary pages I’ve ever written. Good for me. Just so you know, this feels like it might be the last album for a while. Unless there are new developments in my personal life that I end up wanting to write about, anyway. If I end up dating somebody, the discography could get real weird. But I feel like this one is a good one to let people just kinda sit with for a year or two. Or whatever. I probably feel that way at the end of the process every time, but I keep on putting stuff out about once a year or so anyway. This one does feel like it’s got a “period” at the end of it. But it might be a semicolon. Or a long-ass hyphen. I do feel like I’m in a different stage of my life than I was even when I wrote the “Happy Now” record. In fact, I think that one might mark the end of whatever stage that was…and “Third Act Problems” started the new one. It’s hard to look at your own discography and not think about what era of your life you were in when you wrote it. In that way, I’m a lot like Taylor Swift. You heard me. All I know is that at the end of “Third Act Problems,” I had a couple lyrical sketches and maybe a riff or two lying around. I don’t really have that this time. At least nothing I think needs to be built upon. I might just relax a while and keep throwing copies of the last two albums at people. And the Vonnegut one. It really IS my favorite. Or, y’know…talk to you again next Spring when my next album comes out. One of the two. In the interim–however long it may be–I hope you enjoy “Boop.” It really was my pleasure to make it. I didn’t get bored or frustrated. Even the mastering process went smoothly. And I’m still enjoying listening to it. I hope the same can be said for you, when you’ve been living with this one for a few months! Thanks for listening. Thanks for reading. Thanks for shutting up, like I asked earlier. -db 4/4/24 |
|
All songs written and performed by Derek Brink THANK YOU: Jonco and McGuire. They are the two BEST boys. The Lynns (of all variants). Kim Carpenter. Josh Woodard. Kristen Little. Dave Knobel. Doug Lay. Jim Ousley. The Gambills. Mike, Abby, Tobias, and all the other nice people I work with. Amanda Bergdorf. Erik, Dan, Will, and Steven. The Heacocks. The Heeleys. Mike Feldman. Kevin “Mr. K” Koontz. And everybody who presses “like” on my cat pics. Of course, thanks to Betty, after whom the album is named. And thank YOU, too, whoever you may be. (This is a double-thanks to those above, of course. If you want to be double-thanked on the next album, do better.) Influences: “System Error” draws much inspiration from the novel “The Unseen World” by Liz Moore. She’s fantastic, if you’re unfamiliar. Guitars Used: None of those companies sponsor me, but I’m willing to talk. |
