Influences
Frost*, “Wedding Day” (maybe?)
Peter Gabriel, “Wallflower” (lyrically?)
Story
This one took a year and roughly three distinct phases of lyric writing to get right – the evidence of which you can see in a few places – but it ended in one of my favorite, most personal songs, and I think one of my most satisfying.
Having gone to: A) law school a lot in my twenties; and B) counseling/therapy here and there in my thirties, I am very cognizant and wary of the ways academic culture can warp both legal and psychological cultures. On the one end, they find ways to favor certain backgrounds going into those cultures, and then they prioritize a way of life within those cultures that relates to those backgrounds (in part because professorial appointments have even more pull to certain types of people).
So what happens when you’ve got someone who was jostled into high-achiever stress – which feeds and is fed by academia – asking for help from a therapist definitionally likely to have the same relationship with that stress, and whose ideal life has a good chance of looking like the kind that fits a graduate student – is that it might not work right. And I get worried by that.
This song imagines me visiting a therapist with a YouTube channel – it’s a composite character of roughly 64% Kati Morton, 32% Heidi Priebe, and 4% others. The deformation professionelle aspect of this, plus my own neuroses, ultimately lead me to wonder, in real life as here: am I learning to be the best me or the best them? As many big/made-up words as I use in here, there’s a lot of me left on the line in this one.
The first two lines are comprised of anagrams – “DSM sane” for “madness” and (less obviously, perhaps) “top therapy session” for “pray the noises stop.” For awhile, I tried to get all the lines to have anagrams – e.g., as I “break down” in doubt, you “work a bend” out of my faulty wiring – but doing that, creating a bajillion internal rhymes, and making any sense were too tricky a triangle to create. Eventually, settling on the sensory description in the second verse gave the piece a more consistent camera angle that kept everything together. There’s a little bit of perspective shift – some concrete verses leading into abstractions in the bridge, with my responses in the choruses – that are signaled by panning my vocals slightly left, then slightly right, then centered (and with differing reverbs). The choruses are me synthesizing this all.
There’s also this funky production thing in the second breakdown, where I both hi-pass (or something like it) and reduce the width of the mix while I’m sending it all to the left side. If you imagine taking a song and wadding it up like a piece of paper, that’s roughly what I’m doing with the sound. Then the same writing-on-a-whiteboard loop I used in the first verse gets reversed, and it carries the wad from the left side to the right side, finally unwadding it in the same way I wadded it. It was a good way to work with the first breakdown while also introducing the drums, which there wasn’t a great way to do otherwise.
I realize that’s a lot of story, but there was a lot that went into this song. It’s why it gets the closing spot.
Oh, and dictionary dot com says it is actually pronounced “joie de viv-ruh,” as I’ve done here. I thought it was closer to three syllables my whole life, but, um…yeah. It made singing those lines a lot harder, because I lost a natural breath spot.
Lyrics
DSM sane, rearranged in my brain, turns to madness
And my focus in this top therapy session is to pray the noises stop
I’m grateful I got your one open slot – 3 P.M. on Thursdays
As we sit face to face, our first happy place
Is an oasis you claim’s not too far from my frantic soul
I can get there through a grounding technique you’ll teach me to control
And you think, since I’m smart, that I’m free and clear to try
Dodging obstacles with an eagle mind’s eye
But the emotion right in front of me
Is a massive lance that makes a full-tilt run at me
So a passive glance at what you want me to see
Is all I can try in this week’s therapy
Your office is white, full of natural light falling on your bookshelf
If the YouTuber scene had set design magazines, you’d make the front page
Your plan Saturday is to read at a cafe, just like in grad school
The self-regulation of millennial nation
As you assign me various materials before next week,
Making you the professor of making me more unique
But you’ve missed that scholasticonormative joie de vivre‘s
A primary trigger for making me overachieve
I’m neuroplastic, so you say,
As I walk on my anxiety Champs Elysees
To preserve myself, I must decline your homework day
For flashbacks of when I would get less than an A
You help me every time we chat
You know your stuff, and you care, and I don’t question that
But I fear the only life goal we’re arriving at
Is hours of mindfulness and yoga mats
Do you know how much your preference
Is bound up with the academic evidence?
I hope so, ‘coz the emotion right in front of me
Is ready to take another run at me
Some press about it
“The album’s closing track, “The Emotion Right in Front of Me,” returns to atmospheric electronica, combining new age inspirations with an analytical tone that goes back to the album’s fundamental concepts of perception and reflection.” – Skylight.gr
“The album closes with The Emotion Right In Front Of Me[,] a dark, off exploration of the aftermath of therapy sessions, grounding yourself once more, feel of being played while on woozy tranquilizers, dreaming of Prozac days and a better outcome from that session. The conclusion feels like they are drifting off and are still full of questions but calmed somewhat ready for the next adventure of this emotional rollercoaster of life.” – Whisperin and Hollerin
“There is dark soberness to it but equally a transfixing and contrasting radiance to the caliginous enterprise of sound as Isleib again shares his unique musings in a song that examines the imagination as it courts fascination.” – Ringmaster Review
Next album: Restless Mosaic Presents Declaime’s 10 Umbrellas for Your Soul
restlessmosaic.com 