pennies

pennies

Album Cover

It’s time to put my pontification to rest and finally say my piece on pennies.

I wrote these songs more than a year ago, and have been listening to them—the redone studio takes, the voice memos, the non-included tracks—nonstop for that year and change. As I’ve talked about that period of songwriting over the course of the rollout—in shows, interviews, and facetime calls with my mom—I’ve primarily danced around three ideas: the vignettes, the live shows, and the ending.

I’m not going to do the Tarantino thing and start with the ending, so…

Vignettes. I feel quite strongly that these are the simplest songs I’ve ever written. The hooks tend to be a few words, and they relay the cyclical nature of the emotions. In the simplicity, I have tried to nurture relatability; we’ve all been not invited, we’ve all needed love, we’ve all wanted someone to walk us home. The messages are so simple because I don’t want to sing them alone.

Live shows are the guiding force of this album. My goal is that a passerby—who’s never heard my voice, who’s never seen the band—can sing along and scream by the end of each song. Hence, the repetition, the simplicity, the youthful energy…

In fact, most of the songs—at least the way you hear them in your headphones—were born in our shows; baby i need you is a epilogue jam we came up with based on a guitar riff Gui Matos played over the chords of need your love. The studio recording of fuck your show, alternate cut is a retake from a song on our first EP, wrong page, based on how we play the song live. The songs continue to be ever-evolving entities—no part of our most recent set replicates these exact takes. In a way, it becomes quite impossible to reach any kind of conclusion…

The ending—the last minute and 28 seconds of pennies—might feel a bit incongruous with the rest. I’ll admit, on the record, that a person screaming “I really love you” seems a bit odd in the context of a somewhat cynical, escapist album laid to an alternative rock.

Perhaps though, I mean to say that in our cyclical vignettes, in our moments of simple and universal darkness, we often overlook the vectors of love pointed in our direction. And as I performed the shows, recorded the album, and wrote the poem—wrote the poem about some pennies in some book on some plane—those vectors of love were all I could hear.