Human Being: A Moment with smiling broadly

Before her newest record as smiling broadly dropped in November, Hazel M. had slightly different plans for it. She had her own short but sweet rollout mapped out: one week before the record would be out, she’d drop a video tease where her Logic Pro window broke as soon as the blistering guitars of “close” kicked in; a few weeks before that, she’d quietly have YouTube user Nightcore Jones (whose work is exactly what you imagine) release an edit of “mysterious bond,” which Hazel intended to never comment on herself, only ever leaving it as a retroactive Easter egg for fans. Then she’d drop the full record at a later date of her choosing.

None of that went to plan, due to a large medical bill that forced Hazel to take sudden measures. The DIY pop record she spent six years tinkering on—for a moment i saw myself as inexorably beautiful—came out without any prior fanfare in November, and with it, so too did the supplementary material meant to be preemptive hype. (“Because I released [the record] when I did,” Hazel says, “I just emailed Nightcore Jones and said, ‘I’m sorry, could you just set this to public now?’ And Nightcore Jones obliged.”)

But another major change took place long before that point—at an earlier stage, Hazel intended the record to be her last.

“I was thinking about retiring from making music,” she says, able to look back on it now with an incredulous laugh. After her YouTube channel covering manga and anime began rapidly gaining traction, the pressure of keeping up with the site’s algorithm began cutting into her endeavors making music, getting so intense that she began conceptualizing the record as a swan song for this side of her work.

“I knew that wouldn't really be the case,” Hazel reflects, now having completely changed her mind about the possibility. “I just hit a point where I needed to start thinking about it that way, so that I could start thinking about the record as a means of closure.”

And so, for a moment is no longer a conclusion, but the latest in Hazel’s continual reinvention of her brand of vocal synth pop that’s gradually become a cult draw in recent years. Often buoyed by crunched guitar tones, MIDI orchestration, and occasional bursts of pure noise, the record’s pulsating throughlines of infectious energy are what anchor the myriad of modes it encompasses. It’s not unlike the altogether riveting jumble of styles Hazel used to shepherd this new project into existence last year on an eponymous EP of outtakes. for a moment is a record where a blast beat breakdown on one track can give way to a bass-heavy sample collage from ThorHighHeels the next. It’s a record where the cathartic, tender, glitchy swells and falls of “mysterious bond” jut right into “fake blood recipe,” which has, bar none, one of the unpredictably loud and blown-out endings I’ve heard all year.

I first came across Hazel’s work by total happenstance, as a random discovery on Bandcamp back when she was releasing music as Twinkle Park—a project that she brought to a close in 2022. Her excellent 2020 LP As Much As I Forget immediately grabbed me for many of the same reasons her music still does today: its vocal synths are as much a warm texture of the music as any of the instrumentation, and the ambition of its song structures always feel like a natural exploration of every emotional depth a song can possibly mine.

In all the time since then, though, Hazel has never given an interview about her music. Her music often goes up without further commentary, without any listed lyrics, and rarely any liner notes other than brief recording credits. "I've got sort of an allergy about stating things about my work unprompted," Hazel says early in our Zoom call, marking her first time speaking about her music in this capacity, "so I imagine this record looks pretty opaque from the outset—a lot of details that just aren't contextualized."’

Given the sudden nature of for a moment’s release, the various drafts the record has undergone over the years, and Hazel’s own shifting perspective on making music, there was just as much material in this sprawling first-ever interview about smiling broadly on the beginnings of Hazel's vocal synth endeavors as what fuels her approach to distortion tones today. There’s also a pervasive generosity in much of how she describes her process—gratitude to the many other artistic friends in her life who inform her perspective, and an eagerness to include their creative voices in her music just as much as her own in any given record.

Below, read an exclusive, extensive interview with Hazel M. of smiling broadly about structuring her records to make listeners laugh in bewilderment, loving music that sounds bad, the DIY pioneering of Herschell Gordon Lewis and Soulja Boy, and the unexpected connection between Scatman John and the works of Hayao Miyazaki.

You mentioned in a commentary track a couple years ago that both Twinkle Park and smiling broadly have always been vocal synth projects from Day 1, but what drew you to vocal synth in the first place?

Being a fuckin' nerd! Being a goddamn weeaboo!

I probably found Vocaloid in 2008, and I could not comprehend it. I was like, "Wait, so this is a character, but it's a real woman singing... but it's a character? Okay, no, it's a program that has a girl's voice in it, but then, is everybody who's using the program and calling the song 'by Hatsune Miku'... is there a...?"

A hivemind?

Yeah, "Is there a hivemind of musicians who are allowed to write songs for Hatsune Miku?" At the time, I was pretty computer-illiterate, so I didn't really know how to get any answers outside of just watching more Vocaloid music videos and beginning to infer how it functioned. Increasingly, I became very fascinated with the whole concept, and fell really head over heels for a lot of the songwriting conventions prominent in it.

A lot of Vocaloid music of that era—and probably still through today, even—operates in conversation with a lot of other different kinds of pop and popular music, more underground stuff, stuff that's borrowing from independent music production scenes. All walks of life were coming to Vocaloid from the beginning. So when we think of Vocaloid having a style now, that's really only because it's been very iterative, rather than anything about the software itself giving way to certain styles of music.

What sorts of Vocaloid music ended up being most formative for you?

Years and years later, I stumbled across the first mikgazer compilation—the Hatsune Miku shoegaze compilation—and that completely expanded my mind. I knew that you could write rock songs with Vocaloid, but in my mind, they were pop-rock songs. Obviously, everything on mikgazer is extremely poppy, which is part of why I love it so much. But the very definitive stylistic decision to make shoegaze music and use those voices was very compelling to me. Immediately, I was like, "Wait, this style of music really does suit these voices, and vice versa." So that was kind of what set me down the path of wanting to experiment with [Vocaloid] in the first place.

And also there was the practical element: I did not know how to sing at all. And I'm a deeply self-conscious person, so living in places with thin walls and other people who I was mortified of hearing my singing voice geared me toward wanting to make music with basically as little sound coming out of me as possible. That's also why I used synthesized VST guitar amplifiers, using direct input with a plugged-in electric guitar, around the time I was really codifying my solo musical workflow. I guess, it's clear to me in retrospect, that it was born out of practicality—trying to work the kinds of music I wanted to make into what was in front of me.

My first couple experiences playing with Vocaloid software was just experimental, and something that I assumed would be supplementary. But increasingly, I just came to prefer it, because there was a degree of control with the finesse of the performances. Even though that's not something I think I really got "good at" good at until I started using Synth-V, rather than the Vocaloid software.

That honestly tracks with a lot of my own experiences with Vocaloid as a listener. I remember, back in college, that I just didn't get the appeal of the formative stuff in "Vocaloid music." And then, years later, it was hearing vocal synth being used in sounds and genres I was more familiar with, where it was almost a texture of its own, that really helped me get what its potential could be. I remember coming across Supercell and that being a big record that opened my eyes to what Vocaloid could be.

That record was pretty big for me, actually, because I think that was the first Vocaloid record I ever heard. Seeing that you could structure an album out of what felt like a style of music that really only fit singles was interesting to me. And reading about the fact that Ryo was using such an early version of Vocaloid that he had to have a female friend record inhales to put a little more life into the performances. Of course, Vocaloid software would implement that into later revisions, but getting that peek behind the curtain and seeing the additional steps you could take to humanize that more... it was the kind of thing that was so creative that I don't think I could ever come up with it in isolation. But there have been times where I've gone out of my way to isolate those similarly mechanical sounds of instruments and put them in stuff.

It's interesting, because seeing vocal synth get implemented more frequently in DIY music in the last few years especially, I'm sensing that the ways musicians are using vocal synth as a texture is evolving alongside the new innovations in the technology itself.

Something I started doing recently—it doesn't appear anywhere on the record I just released, but I think it's on one song on "smiling broadly" EP—is that I record plosives. I get too close to the mic, and I hit some p and s sounds, so that I can double it and make it sound like the voice is being recorded too close to the microphone.

"I found a couple of techniques that really allowed me to get to the part where I was writing the song faster, and I was gravitating more to things that sounded bad."

You alluded to this briefly, but the way your vocal synth parts sit in the mix has shifted over time. They started getting folded more into the distorted textures of some songs, starting around touched, or been touched by in 2021. That was also around when you started intentionally obfuscating your lyrics too. What pushed you to go in that direction with how the vocal synth would sound, and was that at all tied into what you were doing with lyrical clarity?

That was kind of a happy accident, initially. As I was working out the sound of touched, or been touched by, I came to realize, "Oh, these vocals are unintelligible... I can write anything I want." And so I did! Which was freeing, because I could write more stream-of-consciousness [lyrics] and pull from places that otherwise I would've felt embarrassed, but also because I could occasionally just write nonsense—things that sounded right, but didn't make sense grammatically.

More for the melody?

Exactly. I got a taste of that secrecy and I loved it. As far as further figuring out how to [blend] the synthesized vocals with the compositions, I think that really did just come down to where my listening habits were, and changes in priorities to how I produced my music—chiefly, that I just stopped doing as much of it. On records past, I didn't really know how to get sounds that I wanted to, so I tried to get close by way of really overproducing stuff.

Then I found a couple of techniques that really allowed me to get to the part where I was writing the song faster, and I was gravitating more and more to things that sounded bad. It was really freeing to listen to the Evergrace and Evergrace 2 soundtracks, which my friend Thor[HighHeels] got me way into. Those things are mixed insane. No normal person would mix them that way. My friend Nicky [Austin] got me into the band Citrus. Their album Wispy, No Mercy also sounds like shit, but it's amazing. It's one of the best-sounding things I've heard in my life.

I wanted to embrace straightforward mixing approaches. I stopped trying to round off every single EQ on every single instrument, because there's like a hundred fucking instruments on every goddamn track on this record. It would've been completely impractical. I think that Logic's built-in amp simulator plug-in appears maybe a couple times on [touched, or been touched by], max. The rest of it is just direct input with a distortion pedal, most of the time. That was just the sound I was really gravitating to at that time, and I kind of still am. It was a happy accident that then ended up meshing better with the vocal synth that I was using, because I definitely felt so limited by the Vocaloid software I was using on As Much As I Forget in particular. It was so difficult to work with the syllable sets. Most of the work I was doing in that software was fighting against it, more than anything. And I think the kind of music I was listening to at the time just wasn't as well suited for what I could execute on, vocal synth-wise. It was sort of a collusion of things.

I just want to say "justice for music that sounds like shit." [Laughs] I'm a noise music freak, so every time I hear something that sounds busted, I'm like, "Oh, you made it sound good!"

Which is funny because, when I was first starting out making music, I really bristled against my dear friend Brett [Hanley], who currently makes music under the name You Are Something True, because his early experiments were like, "I recorded this with my laptop microphone and put it in GarageBand and put a distortion plug-in on it." But I go back to those recordings and I'm like, "That sounds fucking awesome!" I don't know what I was so resistant to.

But I was kind of being told by people in my life who were trying to make much tighter, much better-produced music, "This is how you do it." I think it was really important to me to get that framework, and I really appreciate that those people would take the time to walk me through all of that stuff. But eventually, I came to realize that was just not working for me.

I feel like the sort of underproduced, very straightforward, raw mixing approach is... I mean, I'm pretty tuned out of modern music, especially modern DIY music. But I get the feeling that's kind of the trend right now.

I think that's especially true of the way distortion is implemented in DIY lately. It's weird to look at where things are right now, because the "incorrect" way wrapped back around to becoming the norm, just by virtue of it taking on enough influence over the years.

Yeah, it all starts with Soulja Boy making a million dollars off a cracked trial of FruityLoops.

That can be made in 20 seconds!

Exactly! I think about the exploitation filmmaker Herschell Gordon Lewis saying, "The only thing you never hear on our sets is 'take two.'" It's a classic quote, he'd say it in every interview, but his ethos was, "Why would you spend money or time on something that's not going to get more people seated?" It's so shrewd, but if you twist the dial a little bit, [it becomes], "Why spend more time or energy or money on things that are not going to make you happier as a creator?"

With the generation of musicians around my age and younger, our most formative experiences with music were shitty YouTube uploads or LimeWire-downloaded...

8 kilobytes per second...

...8 kilobytes per second "Naruto Opening 3." There's an inclination toward that sound, but also the underlying ethos therein. My understanding is that a lot of musicians coming up right now are embodying that ethos, in addition to the aesthetic, which is great.

Moving into talking about this new record, when you say that you've been working on this album for six years, what did the development look like?

The initial sketch for the oldest song on this record ["new year, new me"] was written in 2018. It was something I wrote as a very simple four-chord-ish pop song that I didn't really know what to do with, and I didn't really have a lot of aims for it. I just shelved it away and didn't even consider going back to it, until I was listening through old stuff and was like, "Wait, this is awesome, and I think I know how to expand on it and make it something I'm really happy with." Inherently, because that's true, I get to say that it took six years. But each song was probably, functionally, written in a different year in those six years.

At the time, I was living with a friend of mine who was one of my bandmates. We were writing and playing at open mics a lot, and we were talking about a whole bunch of ways to collaborate with each other. I was keeping a lot more song ideas in my back pocket than I was at other times. I held a really high standard for myself for songs I wanted to go on my records—I applied my standards very highly; I don't think the standard of quality I was capable of at the time was necessarily anything special. I wanted to make the best songs I knew how to make, and I wanted those songs for this solo project. A lot of songs just got put aside and I was like, "This isn't as good as these other songs, so I'm not gonna touch it," which is a crazy way to approach music. Eventually, I cycled back to ["new year, new me"] and thought it was really cute and catchy. Because it wasn't really complex, I saw it as inferior. But I found it was a well-executed, simple song, and that's okay! That's great! That's fine! So I brought that back, and tried not to overcomplicate it.

After I finished As Much As I Forget in early 2019, I knew I wanted to start work on another full-length record, but I didn't have any material in me at that time. In my mind, every single piece of music that I continued to work on got filed away as "for the full-length" or "not." Every now and again, I would get sick of having what I felt were very high standards to clear for the songs on that record, and would squirrel away a couple of songs that wouldn't really fit that vibe and make an EP out of [them]. All Fall Floral was written and recorded entirely after As Much As I Forget was done, but came out beforehand. touched, or been touched by was written and recorded in a month.

I think about four tracks for the new record were somewhere in the chamber, but a lot of that six years became opening up the project files, refreshing myself on what was on them and what needed to get done, making a little bit of progress, and then shelving them for another couple months while I worked on other stuff. Part of that was other musical projects. I predominantly shifted focus to a project [called Living Room Ghost] that I was doing with a local friend of mine, Chris[tian Aguilar-Garcia], when I was living in Southern California—he plays guitar on one of the tracks on this record. That band folded after releasing a single song, and we had a shit-ton of material that we have been doling out into our respective solo projects since. I was really focused on that, and then I shifted my focus back to the record at a couple different points, and looked at all these songs I had written for [Living Room Ghost], and went, "Which of these can I slot into this full-length record?" The songs I was pulling from that project changed at a bunch of different points. It was like a rotating cast. This record is a total Ship of Theseus. I think the tracklist doesn't at all resemble what the tracklist looked like the first time it hit ten songs.

"I want to make music that makes me laugh in bewilderment. That's an experience I love having as a listener. So instead of trying to top myself in quality, I want to make things that are very amusing to me."

You have a bunch of recording locations listed in the album description on Bandcamp, so let's get some stories behind these. The two I had the most questions about: the abandoned parking lot and the "very scary basement."

I took a trip to Pennsylvania in early 2023 to visit two very dear friends of mine, to meet them in person for the first time. While I was there, I hit up my longtime friend and collaborator Tim Lindsay, who I've been working with since the beginning. I was like, "Hey, I'm in Pennsylvania, and you're in Maryland right now and about to move to Korea for work. You don't have to make the trip if it seems extreme, but I would really like to see you." He wound up coming through, and it was a really special, important moment. I was very happy to have these people around me, and I wanted to document this moment by putting them on my record. I knew that I wanted gang vocals on a couple different points on the record, and that felt like a really good way to get them in there.

At first, we were recording in Mae [M.]'s very scary basement, but at the time, she was living in a place that was like a townhouse that had been sectioned off into apartments. There were other people in the building, and it just so happened that she was the one who got access to the basement. But I just felt very self-conscious—which, I guess, hearkens back to what we were talking about earlier—about the idea that we could be imposing upon these other neighbors, because of the amount of noise we were making, yelling in her basement.

So we hopped in her car, and we were driving around, trying to find a good place, and there was this abandoned newspaper factory, or something like that. Maybe the newspaper press was still working, but there was a parking lot nearby that nothing was being used for. So we parked there and all climbed into the back of the car. I had my laptop so that I could play the reference tracks and a cheap Tascam hand recorder—that thing is a fucking powerhouse. It's the primary microphone we used for the shooting of [me and Mae's] film [Divine Hammer], which should make anybody who's familiar with those devices very frightened for what that film is going to sound like.

You mentioned that you're not super attuned to what tends to be in the conversation with contemporary indie and DIY music, so I'm curious to hear about what you do find yourself listening to and taking influence from, especially when it comes to influences on the music you just put out.

I'm never going to be able to identify how much my influences are bleeding through as well as a third party who knows my influences. So I can only speak to what I've absorbed about my own process.

I was working on a podcast with my best friend Nicky, and that was getting me to listen to more music than I had listened to in a very long time, just so we would have more stuff to talk about. I was taking a lot of their recommendations, because they were discovering a lot of really new, amazing music. I think part of it was just being exposed to a lot of stuff, period, irrespective of what that was. But I was also taking more direct influence from different stuff.

There's a lot of the band BP and their album Golden BP. all over this record and, honestly, smiling broadly stuff in general. That's a pretty obvious one. Something about that band's specific style and application of that style really clicked with me, and became inherent to how I was thinking about writing and structuring songs for a while.

A lot of this record was me trying to fill out some of my bucket list for songwriting. I wanted to sample something pretty famous, pretty directly. I wanted to use the Vocaloid whispering technique. I wanted an unmetered pause like in Korn's "Blind." [Laughs] There were all these incidental things I just wanted to do, musically, that were from a bunch of influences all across my time as a music listener. So I wanted to make that stuff happen. There were definitely points where I was strapped for ideas on where to take a song as it was developing, and I would occasionally fall back on that: "I want a fucking Rick Wakeman organ solo on one of these tracks! Let me fit it in here! I think this is the spot for it."

I feel like somebody could almost posit that it's a little mimetic in that regard, in that there are these moments that are extracted from other sources and places in my own life, rather than an entire song inspired by [one thing]. Except for "close"—that's 100% just BP, baby.

BP and "God Knows."

BP and "God Knows," yeah.

All music is a form of mimesis too. Everything new is just iterating on something that came before it. If anything, we're just seeing music splinter to a much further extent and pull from more and more disparate sources in this moment.

I agree, and I think that's really special. I'm glad that you... [Laughs] As soon as the word "mimetic" left my mouth, I was like, "I don't want people thinking I'm making fucking meme rock." I'm not setting out to signal to an audience, "Hey, do you recognize this?"

You've called attention to this in a commentary track on Connections and Feelings, but you rarely use verse-chorus structures in your music, though you regularly use "pop" as a descriptor in your music. Did your songwriting style always follow that atypical approach to structure?

I think the formal approach I take is different than how I conceptualize the genre of the end result. When I was younger and I was getting into more kinds of music and going through the history of how genres I liked developed, genre felt like a very important way to contextualize and frame the stuff I was making. But as I got more comfortable writing music and was exposed to more kinds of music, the entire concept of genre ceased to mean anything to me. [Laughs]

I say that, but I constantly find myself thinking, "I want to listen to a shoegaze record right now." As a descriptor, it's one thing, but as a movement, genre means less. Looking at it from that perspective, it feels presumptuous to insert myself into. I don't think I could convincingly say that what I'm doing is anything other than pop music, because I hope it's catchy and fun to listen to. Anything else is secondary to that. You can see that as being reductive of my own work, but if anything, it's a nicer way of framing it for myself.

A lot of my aversion to pop structure just came from being unconfident in any of my parts as choruses. That was a big turning point with smiling broadly as a project, incidentally. It wasn't my goal to write songs that had definable choruses, but as I wrote more and more, I was able to identify, "This is the hook in the song, and I should return to this at a couple different points." So, in my mind, this record is the most conventionally structured, both as an album and in the individual songs. That feels like a sign of confidence in myself, which makes me happy.

At the same time, there's also been an increase in distortion over time.

Definitely! [Laughs]

That mostly pops up here on "close" and "fake blood recipe," the latter of which you mentioned on Twitter might be your favorite song you've ever written. What's it been like folding that side of your sound into your music more and more over time, especially given how overcranked that "fake blood recipe" outro is?

It's sort of embarrassing, almost. When I started making music with Chris, he noted, "You really like clean tones, but you also strum harder than any other guitarist I've ever met." And I was like, "This is clean? I thought this was distorted?" And then I listened to his tones and I was like... [Moves close to the microphone for comedic effect] "Oh my god, I don't know what distortion is."

I was taking such a restrained approach to distortion because I didn't know how to get a really good fuzzed-out distortion tone with the tools that were at my disposal, which is me not being creative enough, frankly, or not knowing to identify those sounds as something that was lacking from my music. But I think that's why I felt so concerned about having a bunch of different synth layers and stuff that was filling out the sound on As Much As I Forget. There were a lot of parts and ornamental sounds on that record, which is sort of true of everything I've made so far. But, in particular, there were a lot more synthesizers filling up the mid-range that the guitar isn't taking up. There's very little of that in this record, because being in a band with Chris made me realize what distortion actually sounds like.

At one point, I traded him my SM57 [microphone] for his Boss Blues Driver pedal. That's now a daily drive pedal for me, so that was a big moment of having to rediscover what distorted tones are. That worked out because, then, with this record, I was listening to a lot of heavier stuff, just by happenstance more than anything. Nicky also listened to a lot of very heavy music, which is where the ending of "fake blood recipe" comes from. Shortly before they died, we were working on a track that was taking [cues from] a band called Walrus that we'd gotten really into at that time and their album Hikari No Kakera. Amazing album, amazing album cover. Just a really bizarre, singular rock record that sounds massive, but in the weirdest fucking way. The low end is really heavy... it just sounds weird. I was trying to really into get into what could have possibly made that record sound that way, so we were experimenting with a track that was pulling from that influence, but obviously, it never got finished.

Occasionally, I would stumble across that track again, because I just had it as a random MP3 file in a folder full of work-in-progress stuff, and I was like, "This is awesome. Here's another thing that's on my bucket list. I want something that's so blown-out and distorted that it cripples the digital audio workstation I'm using." I think in 2015 or 2016, I was working on a song with a total junior songwriter technique— "I've got this part that I'm going to have repeat, but each time it repeats, it gets a little louder and a little more distorted, until it's just noise!" [Laughs] I was also thinking about that, returning to an idea I just didn't know how to execute at the time and felt much more equipped to make good on.

That's also part of a principle that was also informed by working very closely with Nicky: I want to make music that makes me laugh in bewilderment. That's an experience I love having as a listener. So instead of trying to top myself in quality, I want to make things that are very amusing to me.

Likewise, I'm always captivated by something that keeps me on my toes. The most memorable listening experiences for me are the ones that keep upending expectations, even if it's just in subtle ways in the general sound they're working within.

And that even made its way into the sequencing of the record. For a long time, "mysterious bond" did not go into "fake blood recipe." And then I realized that, if I sequenced it that way, I could have a jumpscare on my album. That was so fucking funny to me that I absolutely had to make it happen. The intro to "fake blood recipe"—blast beats with a synthetic kit, which was another thing on my bucket list, and tremolo picking as fast as I could—was there from the beginning, but in the original sequencing, it followed a track that was also pretty loud.

In similar terms of bewilderment, let's talk that outro to "120% get it together." How did Thor's outro on that track come about?

I had been writing that song linearly, but I knew that I wanted it to have a certain arc. So when it breaks down into that picked part—that figure that becomes the basis for Thor's section at the end—I didn't really know where to take the song from there. I hit Thor up, and collaborating with them on a record was another thing on that bucket list. (It really wasn't codified; I just kept remembering things where I was like, "I want to do this, I've got to make this happen this time.")

I had that figure and I wasn't sure where to take the song, so I just sent it to them and was like, "What do you think you could do with this? Because if you want to write an outro for this, it would be really perfect and might give me some ideas on how to build the back into another section." So they took it and started working on it, and I just decided where I wanted the song to go next anyway and got a good amount of the structure worked out by the time they sent it back.

I loved [Thor's outro] immediately. It was so perfect. Thor chose a completely different chord progression than the one that was implied by the figure, and I think it sounds amazing—just a total recontextualization. I can't actually remember if they were intending for me to keep the DJ/producer tag? But I had to. Of course I was going to. I'm not going to suppress their voice on the record. I want them to have a part on the song right here because I want their sound to flourish there.

There are a couple tracks here that explicitly draw from songs you've released before: "on goat rock" and "mysterious bond," the latter of which pulls from "Legs" off Never the Same Again, Thank Goodness. How did the urge to return to those songs and reinterpret them come about?

"on goat rock" was one that I had not even considered revisiting. Originally, it was written for [me and Chris's] band, and it was much slower. I decided to pick it back up and use it for touched, or been touched by, because I thought it would be an interesting experiment to see if I could make that song fit into the style I was going for with that record. I think I managed to make it sit there pretty comfortably, but other than that, it wasn't really a song I thought about when I thought about that record. But, once again, Nicky really loved that song and was really taken by it, and that was a huge surprise to me.

This was a time where I was feeling very creatively strapped. I was so focused and invested on making a living making fucking YouTube videos that I just didn't have the creative energy to expend on making music. I guess I'll just come out and say it now: A lot of this new record was conceived and written under the idea that it was going to be the last thing I'd ever write. [Laughs] I was thinking about retiring from making music, because it was just such an uncomfortable and painful process at that point. I say that, but I knew that wouldn't really be the case. I just hit a point where I needed to start thinking about it that way, so that I could start thinking about the record as a means of closure, which is where I think my insistence on fitting all of these things I always wanted to try came from. And so, you know... when you use something like a musical motif, or you bring back an old song, it's less you have to write!

I also did start to think that "on goat rock" would sound good with a really massive supersaw. I had written tracks that were very "synth banger whatever the fuck" in the past, but I just didn't know how to execute on it right. Around that time, I was working on the vocal themes for my friend Alyssa [Dalangin]'s games. We were talking about how we wanted the vocal themes to be pretty directly inspired by 2000s eroge visual novel openings and character songs. So I was listening to a lot of that stuff, which then got me thinking about other music I really enjoyed in that style, because, at the time, I was pretty much exclusively listening to rock music, and I was thinking about this artist named YUC'e. She makes these extremely maximalist, really loud electronic pop songs that have this incredible force behind them. I was thinking about that as well and was like, "I want to see if I can finally make good on this style that I've been trying to work with for a long time."

Long story short, I decided trying to merge that style with a preexisting song of mine, and "on goat rock" was the first one I picked. I was thinking about the fact that there was a parenthetical [on the touched, or been touched by version]—"(in winter)," which was completely arbitrary. I don't think my intention was ever to come back to it. I just liked the idea of the specificity there—the juxtaposition of it being a beach and you're there in winter, or whatever. I was initially thinking about calling this one "(summer version)" and then I just decided to axe it.

As far as "mysterious bond" goes, "Legs" was one of those things where I knew I had a nugget of a hook that really appealed to me, but I didn't really know how to structure the rest of it. There were a couple of diversions the song went into that didn't really feel like they fit with the rest of it, and the production was strange. I just felt like it deserved another shake. I wanted to take all of the elements I really liked in "Legs" and return to them. But as I kept writing, the song just started differing so much from the original that I just wanted to let it be its own thing, which meant sacrificing returning to the refrain at the end [of "Legs"], but I think that wound up okay because I did at the end of [As Much As I Forget] anyway.

What you mentioned about trying to balance music and your video work is something I've always wondered about with your output. And, just from how you phrased it just now, it sounds like you're not thinking about retiring from music anymore.

[Laughs] Yeah, definitely not.

What's shifted there, in terms of how you balance those pursuits?

I think it's a combination of things, or a knock-on effect where the final domino was my musical creative impulse. As soon as I saw that my videos were starting to take off, I leaned into it completely. I was pumping out a video every other week for basically the rest of that year, which was fucking grueling. A lot of what came out of that was stuff that I did not know how to execute on enough to be satisfied with in such a short span of time. I put myself in the Torture Nexus. I was working like 60 to 80 hours a week at that time.

I developed a pretty severe case of workaholism, because I felt like I needed to be making good on perpetual motion. Unfortunately, given the trends that YouTube as a platform rewards and incentivizes, I think that was the correct move from a business perspective, which I hate. I hate the whole "grind your way through your first several years and then it gets easier" mindset. My work-life balance was just a work balance at that time. I was suddenly entirely living out of my computer, in my bedroom. Thankfully, I wasn't living alone at the time, or else I think I would've gone really crazy. But I was living a very isolated life and I was in a big city that I wasn't really utilizing all the way, because I was stuck inside all the time.

The times in my life where I felt the most creatively invigorated, where music is concerned, were periods of time where I was around a lot of other musicians in a physical space, and we were trading insight and recommendations, letting each other borrow gear. There was a really bizarre happy accident that occurred when life circumstances just forced me to put all my work on hold, because I was living more. As Scatman John would say, I was being a human being and not a human doing, which then just made writing music feel more natural to me. I was seeing and experiencing things that were inspiring ideas for songs in me. I felt like I could see my life and the world around me in a way that was more intrinsically inspiring than I was before. Even now that I'm back to making videos again, that's still something that holds true, and I'm really grateful that that is how that shook out for me.

I feel all of that really intensely. The constant pressure to feel like you need to keep doing something to keep whatever momentum you have is agonizing.

The invention of the term "productivity"... the ramifications have been a disaster for the human race.

It's so bad. Everything is just turning our bodies into machines of capitalist, post-industrial bullshit.

Exactly. That's what Scatman John was singing about!

That's what Scatman John was singing about! We all would be better off if we were living in Scatman's World right now.

Exactly!

He presented us with a vision of utopia!

There's no police, everybody's nice to each other... God, imagine.

He tried to warn us.

He did! We could've been in Scatman's World this whole time.

But I do feel all that, any time I recognize I have to take a step away from everything—when the urge to do things doesn't rest, but I just can't. It's just a physical impossibility sometimes, because of the ways you overwork yourself.

Right, and part of what made that so painful for me is that I had the urge, but nothing was coming out of me. I didn't know what to do when I had a guitar in my hands, and that was really upsetting and painful. Eventually, I just had to stop thinking about it in those terms.

You know who else told us this shit? I know he's a curmudgeonly old man in the minds of many, but goddamn Hayao Miyazaki! Goddamn Kiki's Delivery Service is about that entirely!

Absolutely!

Every time I think, "It's not going to come back this time," guess what? I wait, and it does.

I know nobody every truly has their next move fully planned out this far in advance, but now that you've decided against retiring from making music and put so many bucket list elements into this record, where do you feel pulled creatively at the moment?

Part of what's exciting and inspiring is that it's difficult for me to know. I know what I'm enjoying doing and what's working for me right now, and I can identify how it's very different from the way I've worked in the past, but it's entirely possible that—by the time I'm actually assembling another thing to release—it will take a very different shape. That used to be something I was almost chasing: evolution. At this point, I've recognized that thinking a little less rigidly about the music I'm writing has made that feel not quite as necessary, because it never was.

Every time in the past I've thought to myself, "This is going to be very different from the last thing I put out. I wonder if it's going to resonate more with a different part of my audience than aspects of different projects have in the past," I put it out and it's not really been that different. It's not something that necessarily garners much reaction as a giant shocking turn of form. I think part of that is being young and being so honed in on the stuff I'm working on presently that I lost myself in the ways I thought it was very different.

At this point, I put out the record after a lot of anticipation of releasing it, and I was just like, "Alright, it's out." Not in an underwhelming or self-defeating way, but I don't feel the need to now compare this against what's next. And, if I did, I would be reading more into it than is there. I guarantee that the stuff I'm working on now shares a lot more DNA with my songwriting inclinations in the past.

What I can say is that I'm really glad I released it when I did and under these circumstances. It sucks I had to pay a very large medical bill, but it's incredible that didn't frighten me to my core the way it did when I first got that letter. I'm proud of myself for recognizing that as an opportunity to assuage a really intense anxiety I was having financially with something that was emotionally productive and paid in dividends. I think it's really incredible that putting out that record could immediately give me a cushion that I didn't have beforehand. It gave me tremendous peace of mind. I'm just extremely grateful it was warmly received and that people have been so generous, that it was something that was an exciting, abrupt drop.

It's nice that it can just be a record I put out, and not representative of this grand definitive statement I was thinking of when I was going into it. It's nice that it can just be a record I worked really hard on and like very much.

smiling broadly's for a moment, i saw myself as inexorably beautiful is out now as a self-released record through Bandcamp. Listen to it below.