Living Too Late – Starting To Be // Returning Cavalry

I’ve just put out the first music from my new project Living Too Late. Starting To Be // Returning Cavalry is a double single release, accompanied by two B-sides taken from the recording sessions. I consider it a tasting of the album coming out next year.

You can find the music here: https://livingtoolatemusic.bandcamp.com/album/starting-to-be-returning-cavalry

Starting To Be

Probably the first tune written in this batch of songs… drawing some pretty strong influences from Heatmiser and Sebadoh, specifically Neil’s and Jason’s songwriting. Lyrically it’s a bit of a personal manifesto regarding this whole project: take a break from being a cynic and get busy making art.

Returning Cavalry

A mathy, screamy number. The demo was actually called ‘Jesus Lizard tune’, which gives a sense of what I was shooting for. Late last year The Jesus Lizard put out an album, their first in twenty six years. It blew me away… while they certainly didn’t veer too far from their classic sound, it was such a strong record and every time I put it on I wanted to run to the guitar and try to write something like that.

Vocally I learned a lot from writing and recording this one, particularly playing around with screams and vocal distortion. You can judge if I pulled it off, but I had a lot of fun doing my version of Black Francis.

Lyrically it’s abstractly drawn from Goethe’s Faust and Marshall Berman’s All That Is Solid Melts Into Air… ‘the experience of modernity’ as the subtitle of his book reads.

Rusted Bullet and Blues for Adam Cooley

The two singles are accompanied by two outtakes from the recording session… Rusted Bullet and Blues for Adam Cooley.

Rusted Bullet is an instrumental in a post-punk kind of style. A couple of interesting things about it: my initial challenge was to through-compose the chord progression, moving from section to section with as little repetition as possible, while tying the whole piece together with a repeated motif or melodic idea. I think that worked really well; however, the lack of repetition meant I struggled to write a vocal melody for it and never quite got there in the end.
The other interesting thing is that I broke a string on my Telecaster while tracking the guitar. Since I was in a bit of a creative frenzy and didn’t want to stop, I went to the spare room and grabbed my first ever electric guitar… a Squier Bullet Strat, complete with rust on the jack and probably the strings too. Hence the title of the tune.

Blues for Adam Cooley is, as the title suggests, a tribute of sorts. In late high school and university I was a lurker and occasional poster on the Sonic Youth forums. In that earlier phase of the internet, forums like these were genuinely fertile places to discuss music, discover new artists, and generally muck around. On this particular forum, a user called atsonicpark was the clear ‘main character’. He was deeply involved in almost every conversation, from mid-century avant-garde Italian cinema to the guitar tech specs of Korn. In many ways, the forum felt like a psychic projection of Thurston Moore himself.

Atsonicpark… Adam Cooley offline… also wrote huge, rambling music recommendation essays as part of his “classic album” threads. Without exaggeration, a significant number of these opened up musical worlds that went on to shape me deeply: Number Girl, Boredoms, The Fall, among others (I distinctly remember him responding to another user’s query about one music topic or another, responding with THE FALL in every conceivable font, colour or other HTML variation to the point is blew up my browser. I probably grabbed I Am Kurious Oranj later that week).
Beyond the specific bands he introduced me to, his artistic energy and work ethic were genuinely inspiring. The enthusiasm, relentlessness, and silliness-yet-seriousness he brought to his writing, his own music (Scissor Shock), and his filmmaking became a kind of benchmark for how to carry oneself as an underground artist. On the forum he didn’t suffer fools, but he had endless patience if he sensed someone was engaging in the right spirit.

Adam Cooley died in 2014. I never met him, and only interacted with him directly a handful of times, yet I still think about him regularly. Just yesterday I was blasting Number Girl in the car, remembering his rave review of their final album on those now-deleted Sonic Youth forums.
I’m fairly sure he would have found this tune unlistenable… too derivative, too earnest, BORING. But one small Cooley-esque touch I added was a barely audible poem about him, complete with pitch-modulated text-to-speech in the style of some of his films.

While reflecting on him, I came across a piece titled Intimate Strangers: Growing Up on Internet Forums, in which the author describes a remarkably similar experience of observing Cooley from afar: https://www.theindy.org/article/453

The debut album from this project, titled Autochrome, will be out early next year.