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WHAT IS DOG
Both the major projects I've worked on over the last three years, "Dog" and "The Universe Will Provide," are largely concerned with a variety of private occurrences and memories from my childhood and a general rumination on that time of my life. "TUWP" being the first part of a continuum which "Dog" completes. "Dog" is saying goodbye to a lot of things. It's kind of a sad album to me so I wanted to make the musical settings big and bright and noisy, maybe to counteract some of the emotions the lyrics convey to me.
The lyrics to these songs were written very quickly and without a lot of second-guessing. Usually they're written before I'm able to start figuring out what they mean. Most of the words on this album and the last one, "Wooden Smoke," reveal specific narrative details pretty sparingly. My hope is that they paint enough of the picture without being unnecessarily explicit. Specific details can mess a song up a lot of the time. But "Dog" may also represent a goodbye, at least for a little while, to that abstract style of lyric writing for me. Already I can tell that the next batch of songs I'm about to write are going to be either instrumental or lyrically really straightforward.
I also wanted "Dog" to be thick with guitars but there's not a lot of long solos on it, because I wanted it to be more of a pop album. Just because that's what I felt like hearing.
Every album is an interesting part of a process. I think so far all the albums balance each other nicely. I definitely want the whole catalog to have a compositional flow to it and "Dog" felt like a refreshing way to turn after "Wooden Smoke," and also a nice counterpart to "The Universe Will Provide." Since I was working on both albums at the same time they do refer to each other in subtle or not so subtle ways. I definitely think of them as closely related.
"Dog" is also concerned in part with secret activity and conspiracies ("Louie," "Raining Sound" and "Gravity Grab" are...
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