It Doesn’t Matter Why It Is, It Doesn’t Matter If It’s Wrong IV
One thing about the pandemic: there is going to be a lot of art created in quarantine. Friends have been sending me recordings they are making since March. I’m sure visual artists are doing their thing. Authors, poets, filmmakers, ceramicists…all these creative people locked down and shaken from their usual routines. Some, I imagine, haven’t made anything at all. That’s part of the process too. Ebbs and flows.
I have been creatively flowing pretty much all year, starting with The War On Cars single released pre-pandemic. There really is no timing these bursts. I’ve had months and months of nothing happening and every time that happens it feels like I’ll never make anything again. Endless source of inspiration Bruce Springsteen talks about it beautifully in this excellent new interview.
Every four years since 2008, I have made an album that I consider part of a series called “It Doesn’t Matter Why It Is, It Doesn’t Matter If It’s Wrong.” Of the third installment, my friend Ted said: “This is a really weird album.” And later in the conversation, he said it again: “It’s really weird.” I assume he is right because Ted is almost always right. Fortunately, it’s not my job to judge what comes. I just try to get out of the way as much as possible when it’s happening.
The fourth album in this series happened all at once in June of this year. “Burn Minneapolis” was the first song I wrote, the weekend after George Floyd’s murder. About the same time, I bought a handmade notebook from a batch that my friend Lindsey Verrill made (another quarantine creative burst in another medium). Over the next two weeks, as the country exploded in protest and unrest, I wrote the rest of the songs and filled that notebook. The album was finished by the end of the month. I tidied up the mixes this week.
I wish it were always that easy. This is the fastest turnaround from seed to fruit in two decades of sharing recordings. Less than five months! Is it weird? I suppose it’s pretty weird. I don’t know. I love it, but I’m biased.
The prequel to “Ned,” a song from the first album in the series, is on this one. There are also songs written from the perspective of a Qanon YouTuber, a white person who is not me and believes it is hard to be white, and a person experiencing eviction (also not me, thankfully). It has long been a goal of mine to write a collection of songs in which the characters are speaking for themselves in the first person and I am not present. I accidentally accomplished that with this project and it was really really fun. I had A LOT of fun making this. I hope you have a lot of fun listening to it.
It has been such a joy to feel the flow this year. There is an inevitable ebb and inward turn that follows productive periods like this. I look forward to that part of the process and the listening it entails.