April Newsletter: Minor Holiday
Happy April!
Your free demo of the month is… Minor Holiday!
I just so happen to have a brand new song that mentions April Fools’ Day! (No joke.) It’s possibly my favorite of the songs I’ve written this year, so I hope you’ll listen to it! I had planned on debuting it at a show tonight, but since all the shows got cancelled… Anyway, I’ll give you some background on the song, but first, a quick announcement:
My new single, “Why Snow White” is now available! Check out the super cool lyric video that Micah McCaw made for it! You can also find the song on Spotify, Apple Music, Google Play Music, Amazon, and Bandcamp. Streaming and sharing independent artists’ music is a great way to show your support in these uncertain times. Keep an eye out, too, for another new single, “Envelope,” on April 23rd! (If you follow me on Spotify, it’ll pop up in your Release Radar playlist.)
Now for some details on “Minor Holiday”. I wanted to write a holiday song, but I had just finished reading Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and its sequel, The Testaments. Following these disturbing depictions of a totalitarian regime, I jumped right into Atwood’s Oryx & Crake, which deals with an assortment of catastrophes, from climate change to a pandemic. In real life, the bushfires in Australia were finally nearing containment, but the threat of the new coronavirus was suddenly looming.
Season’s grievings to us, one and all
Once we get the hang of it
We’ll forget to get upset
Bearing each unsettling new pall
So adaptable
We’re so adaptable
While reading The Handmaid’s Tale, I had been struck by this prescient warning from Atwood:
“Ordinary, said Aunt Lydia, is what you are used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary.”
I came upon the concept of creeping normality, which Wikipedia describes as “a process by which a major change can be accepted as normal and acceptable if it happens slowly through small, often unnoticeable, increments of change.” I was elated, because this phenomenon was exactly what I wanted to write a song about.
Sitting on the plane to San Francisco for my shows in February, I figured I’d start the project of writing a song that I could release as a holiday single later this year. “Something that can have bells,” I wrote. Then I proceeded to write a song about creeping normality and the end of the world. (See the page in my notebook.)
I jotted down “shibboleth” not for this song necessarily, but just as a reminder to use it someday.
Eventually, I changed Mother’s Day to Boxing Day, because I felt it contrasted more nicely with Arbor Day and broadened the song’s seasonal range. (I also didn’t want to potentially implicate my own mother in the apocalypse!)
The demo includes piano, stacked vocals, some paddy synths, pizzicato strings (bass, viola, violin), clarinet, and glockenspiel. I’ll continue to work on it and hopefully a studio version can be released later this year!
On the subject of this year… I’m not sure whether I’ll have any more shows until the pandemic is over. I have one show booked for late May, but even if restrictions on gatherings are lifted, I may need to cancel to protect my own health. (My asthma can get pretty bad, and when I was a kid my lung collapsed, so if I were to end up on a ventilator it could be especially dangerous.) My Japan tour in October may also need to be cancelled. I’m hoping things will become at least a little more clear in the next month or so. In the meantime, maybe I’ll join the ranks of artists livestreaming concerts. Let me know if you have any interest in this!
Thank you so much for letting me share new songs with you, and the stories behind the songs. And remember, I always like hearing from you! You can email me, or reach out on Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook.
Take care,
Stephan