Describing the tracks of 'in every crease'

https://absentine.bandcamp.com/album/in-every-crease

In the long term, I've been very insecure about the potential power imbalances of writing songs about the choices of people I know, about personal experiences including others' actions. The writer assumes a pulpit, where we encourage conflation of musical virtue with being correct, and there's no right of reply. It's also petty. The specifics of one relationship aren't of much creative use outside of their properties applicable to other relationships.

Here's a project in which I can no longer claim distance from that role. I think I'm justified: my life was significantly upended by a long-term-absent friend who suddenly surfaced and insisted on being my partner, which I resisted reasonably then fell for when they constructed enough deceit to lead me thus. They were very mentally unwell and manipulative and harmful, and now they're dead and it's got nothing to do with me, I swear. It's also not got much to do with this album, written prehumously, though they were spiralling and I was objecting & trying to offer support. Their death didn't cause rewrites. The complexity of writing (and publishing) judgementally about someone felt more direct when they were alive, but I'm quite settled with it due to how disrespectful they were of others' thoughts. I barely believe that they had willingly experienced my music. I consider my songwriting leakage to largely result from how communicationally abusive they were.

They were also a pathological liar, and my experience included me admitting fault and apologising within contexts where they were still lying. The perspectives expressed in this album are still from within that gaslighting, so they're a true reaction to an untrue situation, but I don't have instinct to adjust them.

In 2023 I thought I was building another album, which is basically already written and awaiting my executive function to record. Then new feelings and new songwriting came in, in 2024 and some in 2025. The new stuff eclipsed the older stuff, though I intend to get back to it. It was clearly a distinct project. Only one song from that time reached here. As ideas, everything else is fresh, which is relatively distinct among my more slowly-written 'recent' work.

I think and hope I've reached a level where my subconscious is trained near to the level of conscious articulation, so I can trust what comes out of me as sincere expressions without racking my brains and forcing it. Part of my philosophy's always been "I experience repetitive social situations, and I can write in the generic about these concatenated experiences in a way that ends up feeling both open and specific to all". I consider this a success now that many songs from before (things like Forewarnings, March and My Motherhood) apply eerily specifically to experiences from years after their publishing. Note how this success inherently describes a thorough failure in my personal self-discipline.

My partner died and I'm attending bereavement counselling. I don't consider my experiences to be defined by their death much in particular, but their choices and behaviour unto me. I've also spilt hundreds of less refined, more direct songs on my own-name bandcamp. It might be near-maniacal, but it's still the second-hand, relatively sane processing of this chaos I've been handed. Outside of death, they were not fairly open to communication, and I had shit to say. I'm almost insecure about publicly dwelling thus, but if an album's published in a forest...

Absentine works are meant to be more refined and public.

So yeah, all that to excuse that I've ended up making a break-up album. Old age and something so juvenile. Didn't plan it: didn't plan to experience a break-up. For the near-guilt I have in quite publicly denouncing the behaviour of a very mentally ill person... they were a massive Swiftie. They were cool with pointed, retributive, Messy break-up songs.

1. Memory Takes

A later addition that I hope works as a kinda overview. It's meant to express my calm acceptance that I've been overwhelmingly, domineeringly hurt for more than two whole years in ways I meant to have defences to avoid, but my defences were pervious to disrespect.

The amount of Taylor's Versions my partner had playing all the time got into my dreams, and she sang this in a dream. It was a vengeful song: "I hope the memory takes an incredible age to get over", like one of those pop-country break-up tracks where they chastise their ex and say they deserve the pain. It rang in my head a while and I thought I'll try writing it, in the retributive character I describe, and realised how little I could commit to that attitude, and there's (nearly: see next album) no point me affecting such a voice when I can make something that's better and more honest.

This song took a while to get the right sound on, changing keys and pulse a couple of times. For a long while it was more resigned. It's this more urgent, symphonic, building version that makes it deserve front placement. I now feel it's more like Springsteen, but it's even more like Absentine.

Part of it's the embarrassment of repetition. Absentine is stuck because I am stuck because I am alive and I don't escape the pattern. Expressing irk at being stuck is the least hackneyed emotion I can manage.

It's got that very generic Bad Religion four-chord set in it, which I've used before, which turns up later on the album in the same key. It ain't broke.

2. You're Tragic

To me, this one feels like T. Rex, and maybe I've achieved a stomping riff of somewhere near that quality. I also noticed during composition the similarities it has with Oasis' The Hindu Times, and I swerved a little away from that but ripping off Oasis would be a victimless act. It's even a little twelve-bar blues, very trad.

Almost entirely guitar, but I left an organ track in there.

A very overt diss of the kind of behaviour and position I've seen and been cast various times. I hate this, I can't stop it. Maybe I can try to refuse it from now on; it feels like something to leave in yr 20s.

Note how these songs I'm nearly insecure about publishing are very thematically typical for me, not new ground at all.

Thus far, I find this one way more difficult to perform and memorise than it sounds. Tbh nothing from this album is pushing at A-list performance for me yet; maybe it needs more time or maybe it doesn't need that position. Tragic I can choose to deliver more gently on an electric piano. Without a rock band, that's how I'll play it.

"the voyeur" and "there for you" are intended as near-homophones, and I didn't deliver them that similarly on this recording. I didn't want to replace my vox though.

3. A Wraith of the Discard Pile

You don't need all the specifics, but my ex-partner was promiscuous and addicted to having people in love with them. When they came to me they had some concerned exes haunting them, and I wanted not to engage until they'd resolved that. They overruled me and I took the fast track to joining their discard pile. I warned them of this arc and it didn't stop it. I note that I've waived my own ability to stop it.

As with Memory Takes and my whole damn life, my character inherently involves a self-aware eyeroll, a meta disdain where I'm clever enough to analyse and forecast but not to avoid. I've not killed myself, so I suffer. I intend that this song describes break-ups in general, the unresolved inherent in the stupid destruct that results from the stupid construct of all-or-nothing Relationships, and hopefully describes the husks we become in such situations.

I'm not very able to cry, and a few musics can affect me somewhere near that when I'm prone. It's conceited but it's true: I've achieved something near that in myself when the simple instrumental break takes off toward the end.

Again, deceptively difficult to play. It's musically so simple and trad, I'm not sure it even has a black note. But the pulse to it, the pulsing pad, is so essential, and I'm not sure I can maintain the song solo without it: potentially plodding.

4. Easy Part

1st of January, 2024. My partner had come to stay and accidentally brought COVID. I do consider this accidental and 'unavoidable', but in a wider pattern of behaviour they were very irresponsible. They'd not brought enough meds for the new duration they'd now have to stay.

I've previously had conspicuous, sudden medical emergencies on New Year's Day or Eve, and had to wait out the holidays before I can repair. We had a stressful day calling pharmacies, but really, the service was available a reasonably short walk from home; they were just wound-up about it. The extent of the stress of this experience was partly a result of their mental illness. Still, it was cold and dark and exhausting, and we knew we were about to have a couple of weeks of overwhelming illness, and I expressed that we'd had unreasonably stressful experiences, but as long as we love each other... echoes a Paper Truth song, Levity.

I got home and rushed to the bathroom to 'privately' record this melody on a toy keyboard. It was the first song in this project really. I didn't fill it in until a while later, but the art of filling it in was just unpacking the instinct from that moment.

Sometimes you see a 'concept album about the duration of a relationship' and it swings sour so quickly. I'm not telling a chronological story, and it was very sour throughout, but I could express appreciation. I think it's genuine and significant to extract something from that moment.

5. I Know How To Give

VAST have a song called I Know How To Love.

I intend with this one to express my philosophy of generosity, that's far from intellectual, just instinctive. I seriously think Give it Away is philosophically a masterpiece, not that giving belongs to anyone. You see?

Goth music can be associated with whatever performative 'dark' themes, and like, I'm goth and I'm sweet and they're the same thing.

Romance is a story humans made up, and expect us to instinctively understand. I don't know it. I know how to give.

The inverted twelve-bar blues passage, and the riff, are quite similar to Railway Out.

I enjoy the dramatic opulence of occupying nearly five minutes with a song with not that much content.

The way an instrumental comes in once, then appears identically (same sample) later piled atop other layers, continues a technique I used around Sorrow Merchant. Maybe I should cut back on that, but every instance works!

When I delivered these vox, there was that odd gurgle on the word 'how', which I couldn't avoid that day. Maybe I should've left it for some other time or maybe it counts as a feature someHow.

There's a funny conflation Brits do with the words 'brought' and 'bought'. I've not quite played on it but I obviously always remember it when I start that line.

6. The Verge of Tears

The one song that precedes 'this project', written a couple years prior. I have long struggled regarding the ability to cry. I feel it ended around a breakdown when I was 18 or so, and has only returned in glimpses since. The relationship I'm describing sure brought it back to me (not generously, still occasionally. I don't exactly consider this experience resolved, but don't need it resolved).

This song invites us to be able to cry if we can manage it, but we need more than a pep talk really.

I showed the demo to a friend a couple years ago and they said it was so beautiful, and I said it might be the most beautiful nod to Lucille Bluth's vagina.

7. Eats Dust

I've arguably recorded a music video for this (not yet finished).

This one wrote itself so quickly, and it's very obviously an embittered rant about being mistreated and disregarded, but it came from me with so little conscious effort: I managed to let the subconscious flow, and didn't edit it much. So it's even accusatory, judgemental, in ways that don't surface so much to me and don't really come out in my conclusions, but I'm acknowledging their presence on the way there, and tbh they're correct judgements.

I think I first did it in a different key (on piano), but the other one with all white notes. Something felt unmusical about my creative choices of chords and bass notes, but it didn't matter because it's good.

I used to enjoy playing bass more, and now it quickly fries my carpal tunnels. On this brief song I've managed a storming, Cure-like bass. I like the song's overall harsh and aggressive but still dank and understated vibe, like, maybe I've finally achieved goth rock.

8. Sorry I Tried

The nursery-rhyme chorus occurred to me when I found myself zombie-walking in loyalty toward the needs/whims of my selfish friend (same person mentioned prior), and noticing how I literally regret being nice, not as a waste of niceness points or because it was unrewarded, not out of whatever loss to me, but the ways that it was complicit in their harmful behaviour, and how their disrespect of my intended boundaries wouldn't be such a problem for me if I actually enforced boundaries. I'm making a fool of myself dancing to another's drum. Degrading myself is fine, but the indignity crosses into enabling.

"Equinox to solstice" reflects their deflective preoccupation with such festivals, a minor detail that I think suits its highlighting.

Part of it was a challenge to do a song with just one chord set, maybe so I could lead an untrained band through it, but tbh the little pauses nearly overrule that possibility, and I'm in no hurry to try it.

I note how easy it is for this song to sound embittered and sarcastic, and maybe it's at least embittered, but I intend the 'surprise' 'anti-'subversion that it's absolutely sincere, literal direct regret. That's a reward for literate listeners.

Pavement.

9. Folder

A late addition. I wonder already if I've produced it wrongly. For a while, the riff blasted a BOW WOW like that Bon Jovi song It's My Life, and I toned it down a bit and now maybe it's lacking punch, and the chorus doesn't take off properly maybe. In how I claim that my songs describe multiple separate experiences, this is synonymous to I Am an Archive: the conflict I feel over aged papery sentiment that kinda means nothing now.

I remember disclaiming to this partner that the next couple of years of songs I'd make were long pre-written and not a reaction to them, which was true at the time but quickly pivoted. Folder is fresh and does resonate specifically with the relationship I'm describing, but equally with other experiences too. I sincerely intend to claim that my lyrics generally resonate with multiple experiences in my life, I could already apply that to most of this album without contrivance, and will find that easier if I remain alive, but this song most definitely immediately functions that way.

When the riff came to me I told a friend "I've written what Kurt Cobain would've written if he lasted one more day". I dunno, maybe. I'm not a big riffmaster, especially on guitar, so finding something so immortal and throwing it into the oeuvre is a win.

Again, I congratulate myself for making a basically functional guitar solo. The breakdown-build-up verse is also a fun indulgence that's relatively rare for me.

10. All I Ever

Again it just spilt out of me, here in the form of the almost the most generic singer-songwriter powerballad possible. Like, to the extent that the title doesn't reach a verb: it's so overarching it's inarticulate. Maybe explaining it undermines it, but I mean to metatextually reference the way we get emotional and lose words. I'm allowing myself to mourn the flicker of fulfilment I witnessed here, and wondering if I lacked in expression as I'm insufficiently emotionally eloquent. I didn't.

I think for once I nailed the production on this: it's got the shape of something so sugary but it's got the kick of something proper.

I noticed after publishing that the intro riff is nearly the same as Wraith. Maybe I'll pretend it's intentional.

11. Machiavelli

Nah I ain't read medieval Italian stuff. He'd be glad of becoming an adjective people know well beyond his work. I allude here to the choices of a goalless, sneaky, near-idle, compulsive manipulator, just this mental illness of fiddling and destroying. It's frustrating to be near to, to care about, to be targeted by, and it could suggest an intervention or twelve.

This changed key during composition, AND has a key-change, and is quite chromatic, so I really struggle thus far to get it right. There's also an ambiguity between major and minor chords I don't often employ. Maybe it's in a mode?

I later realised that my demo had a different ending, that I think I prefer, but the major-key pivot is fun too. I'll probably dig out and publish that demo, but accidentally discarding that ending just means I can reuse it.

12. Februever

Very trad blues-sulk. I dislike months; I dislike existing and months measure it. Third month namedropped in an Absentine title? I doubt I'll try for all twelve. The turn of a new year can feel especially harsh, and Relationships have that 'cuffing season' thing where February's gonna have this odd purgatorial aspect. I'm describing my experiences with someone who made a lot of false promises and claimed intents, and the destruction of their choices in February 2024 was something they pretended we'd soon try to resolve, while being too irresponsible to actually confront. Here's how it felt for me, and still does.

I would have ended this album differently if the experience it was describing didn't end in a sad, consuming entropy. There's a few tracks in my own bandcamp that you can figure out are 'deleted scenes' from this.

Look up the groundhog calendar on my YouTube.

Nice to get to write a song with pauses and big instrumentals, one of which quotes a melody I wrote when I was like 13.

___

I'm still on a slow pace in ability to record, and this one was delayed by illness and stuff, but it has a quickness and a slightness to it too. I'm gonna spin its songs a bit further in keytar live performances, but it might not be as much a laster as the prior couple, and that might be correct for it and not a qualitative comment. It's still the 'tine.