Love, and Other Drugs: A Featurette Guest Blog
In all the downtime during the pandemic, I found myself exploring spirituality (if that isn’t just the most original thing I could do). True to form, my obsessive tendencies took full hold and I went all in. I birthed a lot of art during that time, reflecting on the isolated experiences I was having, and our album PANIC PILLS was one of those brain children. Each song was an Rx that I took to save myself, or justify my mental state, but our latest album MULTISTATE is a little more visceral. Previous FEATURETTE songs allude to personal traumas, love stories and so on, and these songs are no exception. I’m not trying to rewind back to COVID, but the healing never ends and sometimes that looks messy.
That’s where I’m at right now.
MULTISTATE is spiritual psychosis. It’s the place where you go to discover you’re losing yourself. Your mind is in multiple places at once, trying to find its way back to itself, and all you can do is hang on for dear life.
It isn’t a nice place to be, maybe, but it's glorious at the same time. It’s darker than a lot of the truths I’ve told myself. It’s a lot less pop and contained than PANIC PILLS, because really I’m exploring a different version of myself and my personality. Exploring my limits. It’s almost, dare I say, exploring disordered personality.
Truthfully, I don’t think I’m alone in this place. All three of us in the band feel the same way.
Humanity is going through a spiritual psychosis while discovering itself right now. We’re doing this thing where we’re looking in the mirror with AI, for the first time, and reflecting on ourselves. We’re looking into the scope of what’s out there and we’re like, ‘hey that’s me’. It’s the reflection of all documented and augmented humanity in the past. Is that bad? Are we aligned with the past we’ve committed to virtual memory? How do we move forward with new ideas and discoveries on our own? Do we like what we see in the mirror? It’s this violent whiplash of juxtaposition and contradiction everywhere, and it’s reflected in every part of this EP, hence MULTISTATE.
When I lose it, these are the five places (read: songs) I most often find myself in: “XANAX” is an extension of the ethos of PANIC PILLS; trying so hard not to care but unfortunately I violently care about all these things and always will. (Apathy is a fever dream for me.) “ANIMAL” is about waiting to be chosen; being held back on the sidelines and coming to the realization that maybe you gave power to someone or something that never had the power to choose you at all. “BADLOOK” is about first meeting eyes with that person, and creating a whole world in your head. Your lives together, complete entanglement with one look; whether or not you end up having a relationship with them is inconsequential. “EXIT” is my favourite, a fitting dramatic finale to the EP, and a reckoning with control vs. fate. And “CASTLES”? That’s the peak of the emotional arc. “CASTLES” is for the artists and creatives living in our world of delusion (read: the world as we know it). We make something beautiful out of nothing, we see light in the cracks… ‘we saw castles on the horizon’. There’s always something greater we’re looking toward. Creating worlds when our own won’t suffice. We’re all creating MULTISTATE.
And through everything we’ve written for this EP, it feels like there’s this looming entity that’s controlling our fate - the universe, or God - something beyond us that must be in charge because we don’t feel like we are. And in this futile pursuit of happiness there’s this gnawing feeling - and it keeps asking us:
Why aren’t you smiling?
Answer: because we aren’t having a good time. And I guess it wants to know … why…?, which is something I think about all the time.
We have all the good things on Earth and the summary of how we got here, I suppose, is just an endless list of tiny inconveniences that made humans just uncomfortable enough to trudge forward. Thirsty? Dig a well. Bucket too heavy? Engineer a pump. Had enough water to increase the population and build a city? Plumbing. But we’re so self-important about each step we take. ‘Look at this fancy thing I did, put it on the fridge.’ But we don’t dare to reconcile the hard stuff. We don’t spend time tending to our minds and wrestling with our spirit.
We’re missing humanity in such a real way right now. It’s not a thing that anybody seems to care about because there’s a lot of people that have very little talent using a computer to do the work for them. It used to be that the ones who focused and persevered were talented; the ones who worked to carve their craft and master it. But now we’re competing with other people who want to be talented too, and it’s really fucking annoying because we spent our lives committing to this vision of something beautiful we wanted to call into existence, painstakingly digging that well, and then someone else spends five minutes writing a prompt? (Now that’s thirsty.)
I can’t speak for all artists but when I get to make music with my band, it’s like it’s writing me. I think it’s writing me right now. I think it’s about trusting our ability to fucking care. We have lost it and I’m finding it to be a crime against humanity.
Begs the question… what do you want to do with the life you’re living? Are you living it? Yes, but are you living?
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