By: Alex Wright
We are living in an age where everything is perfectly curated to make us feel a certain way. Algorithms set us up to fall down whatever rabbit holes they see fit and send us through a never-ending chain of “content” that is manipulated and designed to make us feel a certain way. Often they are looking to make us feel lost or incomplete. Try to convince us that if we just had this one thing that they have then our life would feel more complete.
Now we can’t even be sure if it’s real people telling us our stories, singing us songs, judging our lives, stealing our art. There’s a company that fed its AI bot music from independent artists, had the bot make some regurgitated slop knock off and then issued warnings to the artists whose work they stole, preventing them from being able to make money off of their own original music on YouTube1.
Spotify has several “AI bands” – bot created music posing as a “band” – that are slyly slipped into your algorithms and put on playlists. I’m sure they’re likely to start charging an extra fee to actual artists to verify themselves as non-AI in the not too distant future.
It’s easy for the dullest person alive to type a prompt into a random chatbot and have it make up something resembling “art”, but I think even they know that claiming themselves as “artists” is fraudulent.
All of this to say – one of my intentions in the creation of this album was to make something that was unmistakably human. I don’t want anyone to listen to it and wonder if it could be.
Even before AI started looming, the music industry was already sounding squeaky clean. Thanks to auto-tune and other production tools, it has become easy for someone to make their record sound as spotless as possible. You can take away all of the mistakes, punch in and re-record small pieces of songs rather than having to re-track a whole part when you just flubbed one note.
Let me go on and note here that while I am very anti-AI, I am not against using production tools and I’m not saying that I won’t ever make another record in which I use some of them in moderation. I used some reverb on this record. I am just trying to note how easy it can be to hide imperfections and make it look like someone is perhaps a better singer or more skilled than they actually are.
So when it came time to record some songs, I wanted to try and record something that was pretty true to what I sound like if you were to come and see me play on any given night. While some of these songs would work with a full band – and it’s my intent to make some full band recordings of a few of these songs that haven’t already gotten that treatment – I felt strange releasing an album of full band tunes when right now if you booked me, that’s not what I would sound like.
A few years back I recorded a project directly to an old Sony Boombox, following in the footsteps of those I’m fond of that came before me like the Mountain Goats, and loved the way that it turned out.
Unfortunately, that boombox was overtaken by ants at my house in Washington state and I never found a replacement. I searched around for what felt like months – thrift shops, yard sales, estate sales, etc. – and even gambled and bought a few but each one that I bought had one issue or another that kept me from making it happen.
Eventually my dear friend Chris reminded me that he owns a Tascam Ministudio Porta-02 4-Track Cassette recorder and offered to let me borrow it.
So this set me up to sound better than I ever could have on a boombox and also gave me more tracks to play with – while also limiting how many I could do. I am aware that there are ways to go in, bounce tracks, and one could technically record more than 4-tracks for one song but I was really into the limitations and having to pick and choose what gets to make it. So each of these songs legitimately only has 4 tracks.
There’s also no auto-tune. It’s a point of pride for me that I don’t have to use auto-tune and rarely have even with past projects recorded in a more professional manner. So I wanted that to remain here. That does mean there are some imperfect notes here and there but that’s life.
I find beauty in the imperfections and frayed edges.
I wanted it to feel like a friend made you a mix tape about what they’ve been up to the last decade and change because that’s what this is. This is a batch of songs about what life has looked like for me as I’ve navigated this dream, complete with the pops and tape hiss.
I know that I’m not re-inventing the wheel here. So many great artists have done this before and done even more with less. I just wanted to contribute my own piece to the tradition.
It feels even more prescient in these modern times when convenience can take away the joy of actually getting to live inside of your art for awhile and what it feels like to put yourself into it completely.
ALEX WRIGHT CONTAINS MULTITUDES 