HHeLiBe by Makeup and Vanity Set
"Matt and I have known each other for two centuries now, first meeting through him sending music to be played on The Mixdown, a radio show devoted to underground electronic & experimental music on the late, great WRVU, 91.1 FM Nashville (I still have to say it like that all these years later.) We were even neighbors for awhile when he & Lisa moved into a house in Sylvan Heights literally a stone's throw away from ours in Sylvan Park. (It would have had to be Roberto Clemente throwing the stone, but still...)
So when he told me that his Christmas gift to me in 2015 would be the two of us collaborating on a year-long project to create a new song each month, it wasn't shocking, but it was amazing - the non-musical music nerd equivalent of being asked to be Chuck Norris' sidekick for a year. Sure, Chuck is going to do most of the ass-kicking, but maybe I'll get a lick in every once and a while. The premise was that I'd send him inspirational items (photos, text, etc.) and he'd use those as the foundation for a "techno" piece of of the month. I came up with a theme that I didn't share with him (since you're reading this you can easily see what it was) but that he more or less figured out by the end of the year.
I want to close with a couple of stories about the March track "Li" which have nothing at all to do with it being the chemical symbol for Lithium. An excerpt from this piece became the theme song for my new radio show The X-Factor on WXNA 101.5 LP Nashville (see, I still gotta do it the FCC-approved way) which is only appropriate since Matt came to the very first episode in June of 2016 to perform live and has been back for an anniversary reprise every year since. It was composed at least in part as a response to the story I told Matt in February of that year about the tragic accident that befell our nineteen-month old Aussie Tina. She ran off the porch of our house right into the path of an oncoming car - I will never forget her turning to face the oncoming headlights, defiant and fearless to the last. As I lifted her from the pavement, neck broken and limp, I could feel her heart slowly stop beating against my chest and you can hear the echo of that in the slowing rhythm at the end of the song, a wonderful testament to both Matt's musical brilliance and the great gift of his friendship.
By the end of the year, I even managed to get a couple of dance tracks out of him (turns out his definition of "techno" was quite a bit different from mine) and so if you like to move your body, you can thank the sidekick for that. I'm glad this music is now seeing the light of day and I hope you enjoy this record as much as we had fun making it. Be good to one another and live each day like the headlights are coming for you - because they are."
djb
May 2020
