Perfect Blue tells a disorienting story of self delusion, reality weaving, and over-romanticizing to the edge of our own destruction and misery. This five track EP wastes no time diving deep into our dark desire to be wanted, purely and perfectly. With intentionally oversaturated and distorted orchestration shifted against an exposing reality, we struggle to parse reality from fabrication.
These songs were born in a chapter of my life before my fever broke. Since childhood, I have been a craftsman at distorting matters of the heart to survive the currents of my own oceans. “I see the world through storms I brew… I build a place of Perfect Blue.” I think we are all more powerful than we may know when it comes to writing the narratives we need to be true. These songs come from the deepest parts of my own lived heartache, though at the time I had no perspective to see what I see now: they were depths I had carved out myself, in stories I had spun all alone.
Carson Graham and I recorded in one summer evening in Brooklyn. Nearly all of the vocals and guitar you hear are one take in that studio.”What Gave” was a true single take. I originally wrote that song in the early morning out of a dream at 6:45am, and recorded it right then. I think of that morning as the morning my fever broke. I wanted to capture that same nakedness and exhaustion in the EP. We decided to keep the studio door open to street sounds; we even went so far as to place a microphone in the doorway. We wanted to have control over how present that noise of reality was at any given moment in the experience of the story. Especially at the end, we wanted this to bring a feeling of surrender and clarity.
I am responsible for the kalimba and guitar, and the piano in the final track “What Gave”. Carson is responsible for the rest. His string orchestrations romance, the slide guitar rents. There is no reprieve in this story until the finale. Some who hear this story will recognize their own Perfect Blue. And those who do know what an exhausting story it is to tell. There is nowhere to rest or hide from ourselves when we watch it back.
Produced by Carson Graham, Mixed by Ryan Kelly, Mastered by Oscar Zambrano.
