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"Opposite Day"

Some notes on "Opposite Day," the only survivor from three album attempts.
10

I wish I could share with you some of the attempts at making Eggs that were undercooked but I’m afraid we’ll have to wait for the boxset. Some tracks are genuinely cool and could have made the final cut, others are just curiously bonkers. Many were just overwritten and stylistically everywhere and nowhere. I had to do songs like Lull on Weather Systems to prove to myself that two chords are all you need. Sometimes you can write yourself into a corner and maybe complexity is something to hide behind because you don’t have faith in what you are trying to say. I certainly was in that boat for a while.

Another factor was feeling that I had to see everything through to the end even though I knew I was off track because I was spending time and money and was desperate to have something to show for it. It’s the creative version of the sunk cost fallacy. I didn’t use a producer for my first nine albums. Producers are by nature decisive but who is to say what the best idea is? There are infinite possibilities. It’s maddening, overwhelming and can potentially lead to a failure to launch so a producer can certainly help there. I needed to go through this trial. A producer could have saved me some heartache and I might have committed to version 1 or 2 of Opposite Day instead of version 6 that you hear. I had to put my record collection in storage, clear the room of all the strong personalities in my life and stop deferring to them. I had to my teach myself how to make this album.

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