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started when i stumbled upon this video on youtube:

it’s a very pretty song but the cloyingly sweet americana of it all made it ripe for ironic decontextualization. i took a little loop of the song and used it as an outro for bedroom community, overlaid with an audio recording of my therapist from college leading me through hypnosis to attempt to calm me while i was suffering a very intense manic episode. (this man might have been a bit of a quack but i have yet to meet a therapist who is not on SOME kind of bullshit). it’s meant as a tragic ending to bedroom community, the return to status quo, stepping over the bodybags and going back to regular american suburban life. it’s the moment of panic that god it really is gonna be like this forever and then it’s the repression. the moment of submission to the cissexist culture…

now of course i didn’t even end up using that version, i was a little wary of both any copyright issues that might come from so prominently featuring a well known sample and also sharing what was meant to be a very private audio recording and so i ended up taking the chord progression & melody of the song and using it as a jumping off point for what was basically a new composition. (the old version is in the demos that we released though). the final one is just two guitars playing slightly different arpeggios of the song’s chords and some synths doing the melody. to me i think much of the intended meaning still comes through but being an instrumental with its reference points pretty obfuscated i think most just take it as a very pretty but melancholy song.

i’m fascinated by the near universal nostalgic feeling people seem to get from it. our youtube upload and many unofficial ones are loaded with comments of people mourning deceased loved ones or old relationships. i get it and find that all very sweet and beautiful but i can’t help but feel conflicted as someone who, despite often feeling obsessed with the past as much as anyone, would consider myself politically anti-nostalgia. bedroom community makes that a little more overt with its criticism of the anachronistic suburban “middle class” order being upheld through implicit (sometimes explicit) violence - the “son of a soldier…” verse especially. forever is in conversation with the same idea but has ironically been so decontextualized as to now seemingly take on the meaning of the original song i had sampled. i think its success on streaming through sleep/study playlists contributed to my complete rejection of “vibe” based playlists & passive music listening in general that led to the intentionally obtuse aesthetic & writing of plastic death.

umm anyway i’m glad you like the song!! i like it a lot too. it was one of those rare instances in music making where i truly felt i was channeling the divine. i didn’t struggle with it at all, it’s just, one day it wasn’t and the next day it was. i’ve not really talked about it at length much and last time i did i don’t think i could properly get across what it meant to me or why i did it the way i did. i understand my then 23 year old self more than ever now though lol