Two Post-its — Apparently I’m Releasing Music Now
Well, this wasn’t originally part of the plan.
I’ve written things for years. Some of them eventually became videos, projects, streams or one of the many other things scattered around this website. Songs, however, tended to remain songs in my head or words sitting on a computer because there was one fairly substantial problem.
I can’t sing.
I know what I want something to say. I can hear roughly what I want it to become. Actually providing the voice required to turn that into a finished song is another matter entirely.
Technology has finally given me a way around that particular obstacle, and after spending far too long writing, experimenting, changing things, listening again and wondering whether I should actually release any of it, I’ve finally done it.
Two Post-its, my first music release, is out now.
Five songs have escaped.
🎸 So, I Make Music Now?
Apparently I do.
The important part for me has always been the writing. I’m interested in taking an idea, pulling it apart, finding the argument or joke hiding inside it and working out how to turn that into a song.
Sometimes that produces something ridiculous. Sometimes it becomes considerably more serious than where it started.
I’m also discovering that assigning genres to my own music is something I’m spectacularly bad at.
There’s rock, alternative rock, heavier influences, bits of punk attitude and whatever else seemed appropriate for the particular song. I’m far more interested in whether the music fits what I’ve written than making everything neatly belong in the same box.
What does connect these first five tracks is probably the writing itself.
They’re satirical, argumentative, occasionally deliberately provocative and generally unwilling to leave supposedly unquestionable things unquestioned.
Which, admittedly, sounds about right for me.
📝 The Two Commandments — And Two Post-its
The release takes its name from the opening track, The Two Commandments.
The premise started with the Ten Commandments and a question: if you strip away the religious rules, repetition and threats, how many commandments do you actually need?
The song proceeds to give them what can only really be described as an efficiency review.
Why does an all-powerful god need rules about people saying his name? Why should respecting your parents be unconditional? Why do honesty, stealing, fidelity and coveting need to be scattered across several commandments when the useful parts can be condensed into much simpler principles?
Underneath all the jokes is a genuine point.
You don’t need the threat of supernatural punishment to understand that you shouldn’t hurt people. You don’t need stone tablets to tell you that honesty matters. And being a decent person doesn’t require somebody watching from above with a list.
By the end, Moses no longer has to drag enormous slabs of stone down a mountain.
He comes back with two Post-its, a bad back and a Bluetooth headset.
And once I’d written that image, there really couldn’t be another name for the release.
🎩 Respectfully Disrespectful
If The Two Commandments approaches religion by pulling the rules apart and laughing at what remains, Respectfully Disrespectful comes at it from another direction.
There’s an expectation that while somebody may not share another person’s religious beliefs, they should nevertheless respect those beliefs.
But respect isn’t something I can manufacture on demand.
I can respect somebody’s right to believe something without pretending that I respect the belief itself. Those are two very different things.
That’s what the song is about.
It’s not asking for religion to be banned or believers to be silenced. Quite the opposite: believe whatever you want. But allowing somebody that freedom doesn’t create an obligation for everyone else to treat the belief as profound, untouchable or beyond ridicule.
And when religion enters other people’s lives, demands special treatment or expects its claims to be exempt from the standards of evidence we’d apply to almost anything else, I’m probably going to have questions.
Possibly accompanied by a guitar.
Respectfully Disrespectful is also the track I’ve submitted to Spotify’s editorial team for playlist consideration, so it may end up being the first introduction some people have to my music.
That seems strangely appropriate.
🔥 And Then There Were Three More
The remaining tracks take that willingness to poke at things in slightly different directions.
God Loves You (And Joe Pesci Too) takes religious satire firmly into absurdity, questioning prayer, divine intervention and the slightly peculiar relationship between omnipotence and fundraising before proposing some increasingly questionable alternatives.
Yanks Don’t Know Their History changes targets entirely. It’s an intentionally provocative British poke at American mythology, national storytelling and the wonderfully selective way countries remember their own history.
And then there’s Militia of the Mute.
That one is considerably darker.
It takes the language surrounding America’s Second Amendment and contrasts the mythology built around the right to bear arms with the words about a well-regulated militia, before moving into gun violence, school shootings and the political arguments that repeatedly follow them.
There are jokes in it, because apparently I’m incapable of leaving them out completely, but it isn’t really a comedy song.
Some subjects shouldn’t be comfortable.
💿 Five Tracks, One Questionable Plan
So Two Post-its consists of:
The Two Commandments
Respectfully Disrespectful
God Loves You (And Joe Pesci Too)
Yanks Don’t Know Their History
Militia of the Mute
They’re not five attempts to make the same song.
Some are ridiculous. Some are angry. Some are deliberately irreverent. Some have something much more serious sitting underneath the humour.
But they’re all things I wanted to write.
And that matters considerably more to me than trying to reverse-engineer whatever somebody thinks people are supposed to listen to.
🎧 Two Post-its Is Out Now
You can find my music on Spotify and Apple Music.
If you enjoy it, you can follow me on Spotify or favourite my artist page on Apple Music. Then there’s at least some chance you’ll find out when the next questionable idea turns into a finished song.
And if you do listen to all five, I’d genuinely like to know which one you end up liking most.
I have my own relationship with each of them after writing and working on them. I’m rather curious to discover whether the songs I expect people to gravitate towards are actually the ones they choose.
🌐 This Is Only One Part of the Madness
If you’ve found this page through the music and are wondering why the rest of the website contains gaming, livestreams, engineering, photography, technology and an assortment of other things, you haven’t taken a wrong turn.
I just do a lot of different things.
You can find more about me on the About Me page, and there is plenty more scattered throughout Transparent Aluminium.
If you already know me from Twitch, YouTube, Discord or elsewhere, then this is simply another one of those projects I’ve been quietly working on in the background.
Except this time you can put headphones on and listen to it.
😈 One Questionable Plan
I don’t know where this goes from here.
That’s actually part of the fun.
For a long time these songs existed only as ideas, lyrics, project files and increasingly large collections of things on my computer.
Now somebody I’ve never met can stumble across one of them, press Play and either enjoy it, hate it, laugh at it, disagree with it or wonder what on Earth they’ve just listened to.
I’ll take that.
Two Post-its is out now.
Five songs.
One questionable plan.
What could possibly go wrong?
— Dr Ravenholm
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