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Re: Heads /

This “coin” of a double-album-split-into-two is comprised of 24 songs, and Heads / is the (mostly) sweeter, more optimistic and heartful, earnest and major key-laden side of it — / Tails is its unkempt, anarchic twin. Sort of a “good news first” situation.

I started generating the riffs and ditties for these two records at home around the tail end of 2021, with Nina Simone’s “reflect the times” maxim front of mind throughout the process, which ultimately lasted through the dregs of ’23. By the time the concrete on the musical ideas began to harden and the scope of the thing became clear, I spent Fall ’22 in a small medieval Italian town and finished up the lyrics and melodic ideas there. With that distance from the States, I felt that I was able to reflect a certain modern American experience more clearly — one that sees the absurd dystopia under its utopian clothing.

Heads / Tails sits squarely in the intersection of the personal and the political (which I happen to think are mostly the same anyway), leaning more or less in one direction or the other at different times. My notes to self for the songs on Heads / say things like “relish in the moment despite unsavory conditions” and “focus on the ‘characters’ trying to do good in an unjust world”. What I mainly wanted to explore on this side of the collection is the strange and uncanny ways we attempt to connect with each other under the boot of imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy — a collage of confusing experiences to combat the inherent alienation, mediated by technology and advertising and other weird stuff. Some of it is auto-biographical, some fantasy, some purely observational. All of it a portal into my brain, a la Being John Malkovich.

As such, the music itself is a sort of collage of studio- and home-tracked audio, iPhone voice memos, lo-fi cassette clips, digital instruments, and “samples” that I either created or scripted for pals to make on their own. In mixing both Heads / and the forthcoming / Tails myself (a first for me!), I have aimed toward an overall aesthetic vision of these albums as a kind of worn, stitched-together artifact of its time, an example in itself of a “living ruins”.