THERE IS ANOTHER SUN
released OCTOBER 26, 2023
ALBUM 47, RELEASE 133
My original plan for No Use Crying Over Spilled Blood was to make a 2-hour album. I was about halfway there when my full-band lineup collapsed, and I decided our last show would be a release show since I wasn't sure how I was going to play solo again just yet. This album is what I hadn't finished yet by that point. Most of these were written after most of No Use, but still during those sessions, but I think a few had been kicking around for a minute (I know "Red Water Part Two" had been around for a while). When this came out, my twin said that "Cosmic Re Entry" sounded a lot like Hawkwind. I didn't listen to Hawkwind for another 3 years. I think I like the song for what it is, but it really isn't much of a song. "H.J. Ultimate", meanwhile, is a really tight power pop song. The original demo alluded to 2 men with the same last name and very different legacies, but I thought it was somewhat in poor taste so there's really no remnants of it in the final song. It's a good song but I don't come back to it often. It's a little too put-together. If I was an indie band in the 90s, this would be the MTV hit that we have to play every night even though we hate it. I had big dreams for "In The Soft" and I don't think I quite stuck the landing, but the resulting song is still good. It's also maybe the only actual song I got out of the several years I owned a Boss Slicer pedal (the SL-2, specifically). It's a really cool pedal but I eventually had to admit it clashed hard with my methodology. "First Waves" is built off of the first song from the first EP I ever released, on October 26, 2013 (note the release date of this very album). It's not called Hello Whirled, and unless you really really really try, you'll never find it. I probably would have played "I Got Pushed Out Of A Helicopter" live by now if it wasn't in such a fucky tuning. I think it was CGCGCG. "Drunk On Your Roof" was demoed (alongside many of these songs) in 1 evening and this one sounded like a proper hit. Then I actually recorded it and it got way weirder (see: the wild formant shifting on the acoustic guitar) and it didn't feel like a hit anymore. Funny enough, this has become my favorite song on the album. There's a sick solo about a minute in. I always forget how much I like "Like It Says". It's a fairly low-key in the back half of an album I like but don't love, so it happens. "He Buried The Wine" is a proper achievement. I don't get to perform it often because it's a ukulele song (C#G#BE tuning) but it really just feels so huge. It's not necessarily about anything but it hits like it does...but not in an Oasis way. Have some fucking standards. If there's any song on here I actually don't know how to feel about, it's the last one. "Nothing Against / Rip Old Earth" is a medley of 2 demos that I thought fit really well together, but I'm iffy on it because it's so blatantly trying to sound like late-00s/early-10s Kleenex Girl Wonder. I spent a few years trying to write KGW songs and, if memory serves, this is the last one. Some of those attempts were great, for the record (hello "Process"). I mean, this is still an okay song, but the ripoff-ness is so strong. That's sort of how I feel about this album. It's good, sure, but I don't come back to these songs a whole lot.