Entitled Little Bitch. The indie debut album. I spelunked into my past. Mining underworlds populated with formative memories, destructive patterns, tragic flaws, excruciating regrets, and loves lost. I found something resembling redemption. But not before doing bloody battle with the demons of these times — narcissism, loneliness, oppression, depression, obsession, dysmorphia, addiction, greed, codependence, ego; above all, simply, time.
“Tonight we are infinite and beyond,” I wrote on “Prom Night”. It was true once. But while moments may contain infinities, we remain painfully finite. And it’s not long before the bells begin to toll. Whether champagne drunk on a beach house balcony romanticizing Virginia Woolf in “Why Ye-es” or trapping summer memories like suffocating fireflies on “Eurydice”, time is an unstoppable force throughout Entitled Little Bitch, looming over these upside-down love themes like a clocktower in a Disney classic. The album, too, animated, specific, archetypal.
The imagery of icy blue-eyed soul banger “Frankenberry” is quite distinct: tailored Brooks Brothers suits, toxic combinations in styrofoam, a Thin White Duke washing down cake with snake oil and Drano. But you may see yourself in it, regardless, building relationships on the shaky foundation of style and substances, not true connection. Or maybe in “Real Boy”, a bluegrass ditty meandering directly toward a breakdown, a confession.
Loss imbues Entitled Little Bitch, but not only of love. In ego’s yuge hands, everything slips through the fingers. “For Fall” counts shooting stars and our own fifteen minutes. “Cameras Steal Souls” scribbles out selfies with question marks. “The Jaws” devours the party, the partygoers, even the beat, leaving only the creak of bones and the knowledge of the inevitable. It’s not all bum notes though. Exuberance, even in the darkest moments. These songs are smiles flashing across tear-soaked faces. Celebrations of big, beautiful feelings, and their fleetingness.
The tape embodies those feelings in both substance and style. It is self-produced, stitched together from instruments, samples, and found sounds I’ve collected over a near decade. A bedroom project, to be sure. There’s no mistaking it for the polished product of a studio. Vocals are saturated with the character of basements, attics, backyard cabins. Guitars tracks crackle with varying levels of competency, laid down at all stages of the journey. Beats are built from snapping cameras, bubbling brooks, and ticking clocks. And the atmosphere — keening peepers, Vermont campfires, dripping Hebridean caves — has been plucked out of thin air, captured via digital recorder from the spaces occupied while writing it. Its luster oxidized; still, urgent, coursing with electricity, metal as hell.
Entitled Little Bitch is far from one artist’s vision. Features from the artists and loved ones who shaped my sound and life punctuate it front to back, gracing it with genres I know nothing about: cloud, neo soul, post-hardcore, spoken word. Thank you to Phano, Josh, Jalen, Ethan, Calvin, Fromthisaltitude, JP, Joey, Yuri, Xavier, Matthew, Lex, and Joanna Newsom. Also to my family for the cello lessons and right brain genetics, my friends for support, Connor, Kendall, Zac, those I shamelessly ripped off, Disney, Morrissey, Born Hero. Sue me. I’ll settle. Sue, too. Thank y’all, truly.