Hello and welcome to Mini Music Monday. On this MMM, plays and discusses and plays demos of his own garden, and speaks about its evolution from post-election paranoia, to something less paranoid later. Thank you for listening. That was my first demo I made for the song Garden.
I was thinking that that song was like a pandemic song. I started writing it in 2017. That's a lot longer ago than I knew. I didn't know that about that song.
I had a considerable amount of paranoia around the 2016 election because I realized that white supremacy and abortion were on the ballot and people were kind of going to vote for the anti-abortion thing and for white supremacy. And that was incredibly disturbing to me because both abortion is a woman's right and white supremacy is nonsense. Don't make it harder in the garden. So that's the first version of the chorus.
I wanted to write a song to just, I don't know, make myself feel better about what had happened because I was like, look, to me it was very clear. Donald Trump's strings were being pulled by white supremacy. Whether he was even aware of it. I don't even know if he knew the extent of it.
It was very little investigation that I had to do to know what was happening. Yes. So I started writing that song. Eventually it mutated into an electric song.
The lyrics kept sort of evolving. And I decided to take it to Dinosaur Jr. In 2019, when we became recording what became the sweep it into space record. But the song, I mean, it was originally a very, it was very paranoid.
It was rooted in paranoia, right? So rooted in paranoia, this garden song. Even the original chorus when I'm talking about it grows in the garden, it's easy to chew. I was thinking about the collapse of civilization and just imagining you and I eating weeds out of our backyard.
I was so triggered. And then I realized that like, you know, I realized like that that trigger, that kind of apocalyptic trigger, had been in my life for so long. And even before the election, I wrote a batch of songs that came out as Apocalypts fetish. Yes, yes.
Where I had made a video for the title song that was like all black pickup trucks and machine guns. I'm like, because I was like, this is what's going on, by the way. I mean, you know, you can, like that's kind of where we're at. So, you know, we're talking about the sort of legitimization of white male rage, which, you know, look, we all know, it's been boiling.
It's been under the surface for a long time, but Cheeto brought it right to a head. And that's what I saw. Mm hmm. You know, I didn't, that's what I saw.
It triggered me. It's been a long time paranoia of mine. Absolutely. And daddy Cheeto is extremely triggering.
So, I'm like, you know, it's not, you know, it's not him. It's like, it's not a Trump derangement syndrome. I mean, it's not about him. Like, I don't think I'm talking about what he represents.
Oh, yeah. I mean, it is. I mean, he has the face of it, you know, so I'm talking about the enormous shit. But it's so much greater than him.
Work through the body politic, through the America, though. See, I'm like, I've traveled the country for well over the last 30 years. Mm hmm. I've seen cities fucking explode.
Mm hmm. I've seen people change. I've seen roads get paved. I've seen buildings be built.
I've seen immigrant populations come into these small towns. I've seen all this stuff happen. I'm like, wait a minute. This is pretty far along, everybody.
I mean, if you're really trying to pull this back, I'm like, that's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's sad. I'm like, this is going to cause a lot of sadness and pain. Fear, fear, sadness, pain. That's what I saw.
I saw like that. And that was, oh, this is fear and fear is this wild energy. Yeah. You know, it's like, I know it when I feel like, oh my God, the wild, the wild speculation, the paranoia that I'm capable of.
Yeah, I'm this paranoid. I'm this paranoid. Right. Because I understand paranoia.
Right. And fear, you know, I really understand it. I'm not really, you know, I'm not going to be one to point at people and go, you shouldn't be fearful. I mean, I don't believe, you know, I, I have a lot of empathy for people, like anybody, really, for how they become themselves through this spiky world of ours.
You know, it's a very, there's a lot to negotiate and we don't, we don't always do our best. We don't don't, I can't explain it, honey. Oh, maybe I should just play, I play the song that I, so I ended up writing this song and I ended up adding a third part to it. You know, the song was, I first started writing in 2017.
I finished it on February 25th, 2020, you know, just before the pandemic. And, but yeah, this song, it felt, you know, it was weird. It was weird to play the song after the pandemic because I think it almost. Well, the pandemic went no shortage of paranoia.
Oh my God. I mean, really kicked in. Oh man, that was such a short. I mean, that hit all of us, you know, mixing, you know, we're all like homesteading and we're like, oh my God, I was so.
How much, how much do we hoard? I don't know, you know, are the zombies coming? I don't know. Shit is wild.
Sometimes we sway, couldn't have it any other way. Now it happened. Nobody's happy with it. Everybody's living through it.
Must admit it. Get into it. So don't make it harder. Hand me a hand.
Time to wait. Where is the car down? Love how you'll move with me. It takes time.
It takes time. It takes time. It takes time. It takes time.
It takes time. It takes time. It takes time. It takes time.
It takes time. It takes time. It takes time. It takes time.
It takes time living on a razor blade. So don't make it harder. Hand me a hand. It's not time to wait.
Where is the car down? And when can you move with me? It's on the faith. The sentence holder.
It can be broken. It's on the faith. The sentence holder. It can be broken.
Now that it's started in my non-stop. It can be broken. It can be broken. I was just sitting here thinking about that song and about the paranoia and the fear and how, you know, I will say this though about fear.
I do encourage people to try to combat their fear. I do because, you know what, it is an interesting journey to do it, to do that work. And I've really kind of, I didn't know this was going to be something that I was going to be embarking on. My whole life was this sort of like journey of me confronting my fears.
That's interesting. That's interesting. Exactly. Because I was almost like finding out that I was almost like finding out, it kind of happened during the pandemic really.
I mean, where I was like, holy shit, fear is like this twin brother of mine. This is literally like someone that I've been living like fearful Lou is like this person that lives with me. We are like Siamese twins. Exactly.
Oh my god motherfucker. You've been here the whole time whispering in my ear and telling me like insane shit from the time I was like five or six years old. Exactly. And I'm thinking in the same way and telling me the same story that everything is collapsing.
And I have felt that way. And I because I think every time when you do have a real spike and when that spike happened to me after 2016 and the pandemic, I was like, where is this coming? What is this? But then to realize that then to just go back through my life and go, oh no, this is something that you have to like, you have to talk to this fucker now.
You gotta look at it. You gotta look your little, you gotta look your twin brother in the eye and just go listen, listen, but if we want to. You gotta start listening to you. I gotta start looking and you know, and it's funny too because when I went after 2016, that election, I was like, you know, when I walk in the world, I'm gonna make more eye contact with people.
I'm gonna be watching, I'm gonna be watching and looking around, but also noticing like the kind of beauty, the kindness that does like go back and forth between people everywhere. Every day in the country. Everywhere. Because you know that's one thing.
Thank you. Lou and a dad. A few more things to say. Thank you.
Listeners of this episode of Mini Music Monday. And it's very, very strict. No, that's a strict. We're gonna have to move on.
Move on. Thank you so much for moving. Yeah. I want to say this, okay, because this line of the sphere talk, there's a lot to it.
And I just want to say that for me, my unexpected journey has been getting curious about my fears, doing the work to see where, where did this come from? Why do I feel this way? You know, and then also like having some compassion for myself through and going like, okay, yeah, that can be kind of scary, but then also like going, but does that make sense? You know, and putting it to myself to go, you know what, it's also okay to not live in fear.
And it's also okay to look at that thing that used to be have such an iron grip on you and go, this actually doesn't need to have this grip over my life anymore. And it's okay for me to embrace these things that I once really feared. And I will say that when you do move around the world and you do see things, you are actually witnessing that happen in real time. People having to face their fears and move through things that make them deeply uncomfortable and continue to go about their day.
And it happens all the time. And I do believe that like that is incrementally making changes, you know, and my, listen, my folks, as you all know, are in Wisconsin. That state, you can't just say Wisconsin is one way or Wisconsin is a bunch of, you know, cheeto loving. Small minded people.
It's a diverse, unique, interesting, complex place. And don't write off places, you know, purple. It's don't write off places. And remember that things are happening there.
You might not know if you've never been to Wisconsin, but I go there a lot. And in these small communities, like near my folks place, you will see there's a wave of immigrants there. And you know what? They're a part of the community and the community.
They might have been a little like, oh, scared. We love our cheeto and we love daddy cheeto. And this is scary. And then the next thing you know, they're like, well, but now we're going to actually build them a church that they feel comfortable in.
And now I'm going to marry a great and now we're, you know, and it's like, yes. I have, I have, there's so much change that does happen and people do work together so much. It's like that arena tour that I did with the weasel. I'm like, oh my God, people really work together to bring incredible things to life in days.
I mean, like whether it's a sporting event, it's a rock show, it's a monster truck event. I mean, the amount of work that goes into that, these are all people working together. Right. And so, you know, I do, when I do really feel and I see that divisiveness, when I see people pointing fingers, when I see people making decisions, or making choices and decisions out of fear.
You know, I, I personalize it because I think of, I think of how I've made choices out of fear in my life, you know, and I relate to that and I relate to how fear is such a big part of our lives. You know, when you speak of faith, it's a word that you have to take very seriously. Faith is a is hard. It's very difficult to have faith that things are going to work out because we, we carry around so many of us, myself included.
And I've written from this point of view and the song garden is very much from that point of view too, is, you know, I am struggling to have, I want faith in my day to day. It's like, you know, the garden, you know, the fact that things grow. Yes. You sow the seed.
Yes. You grow the seed. Yes. You know, that's the.
We need to take care of our community. Yeah. I mean, so I get, I get super tweaked when I see fear on a large level. And when I see.
Stoking it. When I see fear making decisions for people. And when I see, and especially when I see fear being used to make money, I think it's, it's just when you see people using fear to line their pockets. Well, there's, you know, yeah, it's fear to keep people racist, fear to keep women submissive and not in control of their bodies.
And listen, we don't, that's not okay. Thank you for listening to Raw Impressions Mini Music Monday. Thanks for listening again.