This song was written on my brother's upright piano but the finish line didn't come into view until, years later in 2020, I heard I the debut episode of the SOFT REVOLUTION podcast by Torquil Campbell and Ali Momen.
I was deeply moved by one of Torquil's monologues and was inspired to sample it for this tune.
Torq's microphone was slightly distorted for that episode, so rather than try to clean up his voice, I chose to lean into the distortion. As a result, I tried to make the entire song sound like a transmission sent into space – slowly decaying but persisting.
Therefore, any sales made from this track will be donated to SOFT REVOLUTION.
lyrics
"What does SOFT REVOLUTION mean? It means that the only things people have ever done that are beautiful is when they took on fights that they were pretty sure they were gonna lose.
And they accepted that.
And they said to themselves, 'Even if I lose, I just want to leave this place more beautiful, and I want to be beautiful in losing.'
And I think that's what Art gives people is the opportunity to be beautiful and accept loss.
I think that's what we need to do in this dark, dark time.
...
We're all losing together. You win alone but you lose together. But it's central, I guess, to my own personal way of living and I guess what gets me through the day is that life is loss – that we lose this game. Everybody loses this game. And the price of love is loss. The price of life is loss.
And our society focuses on winning to a degree that is sick. And maybe if we had all accepted loss more in our lives and been more OK with it in the past and more fully actualized in acceptance of loss, and not constantly trying – striving – to win.
'Be the best,' you know? 'Be best.' No, don't 'be best,' just be ordinary. Be you. Be fucked up. Be a mess. Just try and be beautiful. How about the idea of trying to be beautiful for a change instead of trying to be best."
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