Neotomic

EXCLUSIVE: Mikal Cronin On His S/T Debut, Track by Track

Editor’s Note:

Album reviews can be an iffy thing, because while negative should never exist in the first place, and good ones can read like poetry, no one can truly and accurately speak for the artist except for, well, the artist. But it’d be an obscene understatement if I told you I’m sitting on cloud nine today with this post. Mikal Cronin has long been one of music’s most exciting musicians, and it’s been a long time coming for his solo album debut; easily becoming of this year’s greatest releases. Thankfully, today’s review doesn’t come from me or some other two-bit writer, but straight from the source himself. Mikal Cronin was more than kind enough to write a little insight into the writing and recording on each of the ten songs off his S/T debut. A million thanks to Mikal for not only agreeing to this, but doing a brilliant job of it, (just because I wrote editor above, rest assured I changed not a word of what he wrote). You’ll just have to read on to see how brilliant…

1. “Is It Alright”
This song I wrote knowing it would be the first song on the record and would in a way sum up the direction I wanted to go with it, kind of a thesis statement or something. I had made a lot of music outside of other bands before this, and it had always been all over the place stylistically, but it took me a long time to find a kind of thread to follow that would make some kind of cohesive album. I remember coming up with the whole first part of this, the opening harmonies and the guitars before the first verse, while in the shower… hearing it all at once and then running to a piano wearing a towel and writing it out. Dwyer’s flute solo rules!

2. “Apathy”
I was thinking about the power of silence in music (and the lack of it usually) and the feeling of tension and momentum it could create when writing this one. The sax part at the end sneaks into a fully intentional “Hey Jude” ripoff because: a) I thought it was funny, b) I had that song stuck in my head the few days before writing this.

3. “Green & Blue”
The funny thing about this song is that the bare bones of it came from when I was writing a soundtrack for my friends short film, and for the end credits he asked for a song “with kind of a hip hop beat but more guitar and lyric driven”, or something. Looped a casio drum machine that played what basically became the drumbeat, and it went in this direction. Thought of that lead guitar line because I had seen a person practicing tabla on my way home and was thinking about Indian music. It was soon clear that this song would not work at all for the film, so i scrapped it and came back to it when writing the album.

4. “Get Along”
Wrote the lyrics to this song the morning of one of the last days of recording, sitting outside a coffee shop. My too-recent ex girlfriend had called me the night before to give me the news that she had been sleeping with a friend of ours, a situation that for various reasons was very very wrong. We were intermittently fighting through text messages the entire time i was sitting there writing. So… definitely a big element of “Fuck You”… but more a feeling, or a plan, that I was going to immediately start moving past and beyond it.

5. “Slow Down”
This is the only song on this record recorded at my house in Val Verde, CA and not with Eric and Ty in San Francisco. I had a really terrible night, one of those nights where a combination of alcohol, stress, and too many strained social situations and histories start to get tangled up and agitated and explode into something really bad. Woke up hungover, thought about what happened, wrote the lyrics in a notebook in a paragraph form (probably my first song where lyrics come before music) and sat down at a little air organ I have. The whole thing was written and recorded within 20 minutes of waking up, live with one mic (except the 2 harmonies of course). My roommate convinced me to put it on the record (which I now thing was a good idea but not at the time)… and I didn’t re-record it because what is important about it to me is much more the timing and situation I recorded it in than the actual song itself.

6. “Gone”
This song was originally the A side of a 7” released by Goodbye Boozy in Italy a little while ago. It was a one run pressing of 300, which I and any of my friends barely saw any of, so I thought it was okay to re-record it. I’m glad I did because what came out was pretty close to what I heard in my head when I wrote it, something I couldn’t accomplish recording it by myself in my garage originally.

7. “Situation”
One of the first songs I wrote with this album in mind before I had a clear idea of the direction the overall thing would take. To me this is the most straight up “garage pop” song on here, something I tried to steer clear of later. Not because I don’t like straight “garage pop”, of course, but I realized that I didn’t want the whole thing to be like this, which probably could have happened. I like this song and think it fits, but glad that the whole record doesn’t sound just like it.

8. “Again & Again”
Was worried about this song because I thought it was way too cheese poppy, and I couldn’t come up with lyrics until last minute, but now I think it’s one of my favorites on the album. Have never been sure if the lyrics are from my point of view or somebody else’s projected onto me.

9. “Hold On Me”
I wrote this in my head while sitting in a library. It was strange, I heard the chords the melody and the harmony and was able to write it all out, in some sort of scribbly shorthand on a piece of paper, and managed to make it home and work it out on a guitar while it was still up there. A very cheesy straight up throwback love song.

10. “The Way Things Go”
One of the only songs I’ve written on a piano instead of a guitar. It’s interesting, because the chords you gravitate towards on piano are much different than those on the guitar, and overall the arrangements have to change to work with that. I have a demo of this song that’s almost twice as fast, with kind of an ELO bounce, and much more piano heavy… starting with a total John Lennon piano and voice intro. The demo was just for fun, an exercise in writing a really really poppy song… but I’m glad I included it on here. I was just going to scrap it, unless I could come up with a way to drastically change it to make it more interesting. Ty helped a lot with this… He got on drums, me on piano and we started playing it slower and heavier, kind of druggier. Recorded the piano & voice intro, but it was weird and Ty suggested playing it on guitar. I was thinking of fading it out, but after the first take of Ty on drums (playing along to my recorded piano) I thought of the end where every track slowly separates into a shitstorm. Much more interesting than a fade out, plus it’s kind of my way of saying “Yeah, I know I wrote a really overly poppy stoner buzz ballad, but I like fucked up music too”. Haha. I’m glad it worked out.