Culture Reject
All, It Feels True, Over There
Aug 16, 2009
Words by Sean Moeller
Illustration by Johnnie Cluney
Sound engineering by Mike Gentry
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Welcome to Daytrotter
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Inside The Cinema
original version appears on Culture Reject
The song is a vignette about three people I knew who worked in three different artistic mediums. Their messages seemed to be the same. This is what they seemed to say: sometimes everything sucks. Your parents think that being queer can be healed. Or will pass, like puberty. You get your ass kicked cause you look funny. You leave the small town you come from for the biggest city nearby to live in a shelter because it's safer than facing the demons of your home and hometown. You start to express more than just everything around you sucking. You start talking about how it sucks. Then you start to articulate how it can change: from people's obsession with commerce and fashion, to shitty attitudes towards homelessness and cultural diversity. You make art that says it. The way you dress says it. Your silence says it. And you attempt to resist the feeling of being "hip" or "cool" because you know that's just the sensation of the machine eating you.
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Fireflies Are Fading
original version appears on Culture Reject
An articulation of my mushiest feelings manifest in the complete mystery that are fireflies. How to keep your lover and you on an edge without falling and without playing it so safe that you become pathetic and unvital. I dunno. I just try. I was listening to Shuggie Otis a lot when I recorded it.
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Beach
original version appears on Culture Reject
I have zero regrets. Anything I could count as a regret, I have instead decided is the stuff that makes up the body of shit that I have learned from. Simple. This is a song for the senses about the senses. I want the smell of the pine forest and the rushing of the water in a Canadian forest as you approach the beach of a great lake from a small tributary river to rush the listener. The only reason why you're on the path in that forest is that you couldn't resist the chance to share a moment with the person who is also walking with you. And you know that talking about what you're doing while you're with that person is gonna screw the whole thing up, so you smartly keep your mouth shut and your other senses wide open.
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Blueprint
original version appears on Culture Reject
Steven Truscott is Canada to me.
Michael O'Connell, if we were just to take this man on the intense and thoughtful descriptions he gives for this collection of his songs alone, should make us reexamine what the hell we're doing. All of us. No one should get out of this. He should make us rethink our pettiness and all of the contrivances that we seem to so simply become infatuated with. It should make me finally feel dumb about checking something like Twitter two dozen times every day, without fail. It should make us bite our tongues about so many of the things that we throw out there with our spit and visible teeth - either caught in a grin or grimace. It should make those thoughts never even grow their legs. They just wouldn't exist anymore, eliminated from the ether and the everywhere. In speaking with O'Connell, it's so obvious that he's making art for the betterment of all, using it to embolden others, to strike all of the dirty deeds or the seeds of them down to the ground. He chooses his words wisely, adding a cabaret of sounds to their backs and letting them just hover and flap around in a spectral fashion, making living feel nothing like dying, as some seem to stress too much these days. He is the kind of person who doesn't care what vintage the wine is, just that there's some wine on the table, enough glasses to go around and loved ones holding them in their hands happily. He strides on his songs, allowing everything to feel as if it were begotten through stream of consciousness, but the kind of matter that only reveals itself after hours and hours healthy introspection and an attentiveness to all of the backwards ways that others let themselves be ruled. He sings, "Who fucking loves New York," on the ace second track of his self-titled album, called, "Inside The Cinema," and it's doubtful that he's looking for hands of support. He's just asking in a way that he knows how. He steps into his arguments, all arranged with some gorgeous and stunning orchestrations that are equal parts like the experimentation of John Vanderslice and Scott Solter as well as Zach Condon and Beirut, as well as Jeff Mangum if the reclusive songwriter were to go on a reggae-at-twilight bender occasionally and leave the field recordings behind. Later on "Inside The Cinema," O'Connell takes us on another draft of his, singing, "I want to get home/I want to get stoned/Make myself food/Make myself good/Make myself good," and it's a sentiment that he continues to explore on the record, the idea of making himself good and seeing how it will play out. He seems to challenge us to recognize more closely and to scrutinize what we're really letting our senses discover and be turned on by when they're being lit up by our surroundings, getting trampled by the sparks and the loud noises, all of the chatter and clatter that cushions everything we face. He seems to be challenged as well in all that he allows past the fence and the filter, getting caught in the din and sifting himself out of it like a prospector. He's working on the noise, finding ways to hear himself think easier, to become someone less distracted and more at those tables with the good or the bad wine, makes no difference as long as it feels true.
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