This month's playlist is about a certain kind of song and why they're hard to finish. Sometimes you have a very sparse song, and that makes mixing relatively straightforward. Other times, you have a very dense song with lots of parts that sometimes seem to fight each other for spots on the frequency range like trees competing for sunlight in a dense forest. The next JD & the Cicadas record, like the first one (El Pulpo) falls into the latter category. All of the tracks on this playlist are excerpts that come from one song, called A Chorus Line. There are sonic qualities they have that I'll have to let go of when they are mixed into the whole song. For example, I remember feeling like the Crunchy Chorus Guitar, played through a Traynor amp, sounded massive in the tracking room. When I came back into the control room and listened to it mixed with everything else, it seemed to have shriveled, like an erection under the shock of a dip into the cold cold ocean. Another example are the chorus drum loops. I originally wrote the song based off of them, and sometimes I just want to hear them more than anything else, even though that's not what suits the song best as a whole - live drums that respond to the movement of the piece as a whole flow in a more musical way. But as pure texture, sometimes I just wish I could hear those loops!

On their own, individual tracks or fragments of tracks can suggest entirely different directions a song could have gone in emotionally, and that is interesting to me. Sometimes it gives me ideas for future songs that might highlight a texture that recedes into the background of a prior song it was originally recorded for.

I like hearing isolated tracks in YouTube videos, and I'm not sure how people make/get those. I find it demystifying - it makes people like the Beatles seem less reified and untouchable.

These are more or less the way they'll sound when mixed for the record, with the exception of the vocal, which I intentionally degraded out of curiosity to see what it would sound like if I tried to make it like my early a cappella tapes.

The lyrics to the song draw images from the Busby Berkeley film Gold Diggers of 1933, which I saw while taking an intro to film theory class when I was 19. We saw the film while reading feminist film criticism, of which Laura Mulvey's essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" made a strong impression on me.