The Lifeline & Twisted Happenings of…/WOHIS (2000)
a two-fer! it doesn’t get much more exciting than that.
the first “album” is part of an assignment i had to do for a grade eleven parenting class. it was some kind of “lifeline” shit, which was basically a selective autobiography outlining important events in our lives. i decided to make a concept album about my life with the ex-family. i figured it would be a good opportunity to take a miserable, abusive childhood and carve it into something incisive and entertaining. i didn’t get around to recording a few of the songs i had written, and i used a different mastering template for virtually every song (with wildly fluctuating eq and compression settings, making things pretty sonically inconsistent, with some songs ending up much louder than others), but i managed to get a decent mark for just the lyrics. and here i was looking forward to impressing the teacher and my classmates with my improving guitar skills and the hard-hitting emotional content. sadly, it wasn’t to be. most of the songs are just me having fun while singing a very selective and somewhat sugar-coated account of what went down, but there are some nice moments, particularly the atmospheric one-two punch of first girl ever to bloody my nose and temptress (brief bass-driven summaries of two of my first brushes with young puppy love), the latter of which features one of my best guitar solos of the time during the coda. the rest moves from the twin-guitar assault of the early years to the bossa-pop of school days to the disturbingly catchy piano balladry of the stepfather to the death march of the good old days are gone and i’m no ninja, which is sort of a cross between mellow lou reed and a children’s help phone commercial. brain glass: an epilogue is probably the best track, somehow managing to squeeze a mini-rock opera into five minutes while still coming across as epic. multiple characters come into play, and my voice for anita (“i’m a wrinkled prune & i know you’re a sinner!“) has to be one of the most ridiculously appropriate things i’ve ever done on a whim. the alternate takes of the first two tracks are surprisingly interesting, because while the lyrics are the same, the music and delivery couldn’t be more different, changing the feeling of the songs entirely.
the other album (WOHIS) is closer to an ep in length, and i actually got paid to record it; these were songs for potential use in future videos made by WOHIS (which stands for Windsor Occupational Health Information Service, though my title was “Water Only Hates Itself Silly”). i don’t think more than one or two tracks were ever used in anything, but it was fun to limit myself to short, sharp instrumental vignettes for a change. again i managed to cover a fair bit of musical ground in a short period of time, from the new-age-sounding piano of 3:00 a.m. sunrise to the distorted guitar riff-age of dead chicken blues. in the city and die young feature some additional tasty guitar playing (the “harmonica version” of the latter track is the superior one, with maybe the best noise i ever tortured out of a harmonica), and i couldn’t resist throwing my voice in briefly on at least one track (naked ’round the campfire, which ended up being the catalyst/inspiration for the PG track “juice”).
neither album is my best work by any means, but together they make for some interesting listening.
TRACKS:
the early years
school days
the stepfather
first girl ever to bloody my nose
temptress
i’m no ninja
the good old days are gone
some things don’t change
brain glass (epilogue)
the early years (alternate version)
school days (alternate version)
holden on
3:00 a.m. sunrise
dead chicken blues
in the city
green leather boots
nosehair cancer
die young
die young (harmonica version)
naked ’round the campfire
nosehair cancer (alternate take)
