Grows Wings by Tyler Key
I was in goodwill, doing my usual routine of browsing through the decorative enamel dwarves, when I spotted a weird black box that I thought was a Betamax player in the back of the store near the old CRT televisions. It was an old 4-track cassette recorder, heavily used, missing about 8 knobs, so I knew I had to cough up the $9 to get it.
I brought it home, found a good tape (which I'm positive Logan Graff bequeathed to me), and this is what happened.
At first, I just plugged along, recording some ditties that I'd swept under the rug recently. The first three tracks are in this vein. City Life is about six months old, Litany is paleolithic, even. But Lucky Man just kind of jumped out of the ether after watching the GOP debates, which is to say that I literally wrote a song about Donald Trump.
But these songs, I later realized, were all about things that scared the shit out of me: becoming a wastrel, being ruled by people with enough money to laugh at everything, and those people-ghosts that stick around in your brain matter until they get wedged so deep they become you.
So, continuing with the rather tenuous thread of "scary things," the next three songs are a micro song-cycle about the Mothman of West Virginia who may or may not be a cult leader in the vein of Charles Manson, who may or may not be in collaboration with the Russians in a plot to escalate the Cold War.
Unlike the half-finished "Bro Country-Rock Opera," the Mothman songs are much more cryptic: No.1 is the credo, No.2 is the origin story, No.3 is where the shit hits the fan.
I should probably not tell you all of this stuff, dear internet, but it doesn't really matter. Nobody ever gets the chance to explain themselves these days. This makes me unprofessional. Also, the quality of the recordings ARE VERY POOR. THE SONGS WERE RECORDED ON AN UNSERVICED CASSETTE 4-TRACK AND TRANSFERRED TO DIGITAL. THE MIXES ARE IN MONO. THE EQ IS BAD.
If you like early Mountain Goats or Eliot Smith, you might dig it.
Happy Halloween,
Tyler
