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about

This one bubbled up following a recent listen to a cover of Fairport Convention’s Crazy Man Michael by Mike Levy on Not All It Seems.  With ‘Stain’ I tried to recreate the similar feel of a traditional folk song ... a straight allegorical morality story told in non-modern language. It is similar in musical tone to James Taylor’s One Morning In May, and lyrically dark like Crazy Man Michael (stabbing, madness, etc..)  My song is about a single mistake that is covered up but leads to compounding social distrust and breakdown.
The general flow of chords and lyrics came pretty quickly, but the last 10% required tweaking over several weeks to make the words sit nicely for singing and yet fully convey the whole story over just four verses.  A little longer than I would have preferred, but there was nothing I could cut without losing the story structure.
So much of my stuff seems to get a Coda where I try and inject some point of difference and a stronger conclusion than just stopping or tailing off.

 

Music video

‘Human Stain’ is the final video for the 30-track “The Flat White Album” (2020), and was made almost three years after that album’s release. ‘Human Stain’, in MY mind at least, had always involved a visual story but for which I had been unable to find sufficiently good, relevant, or high quality images/videos from my usual sources. In desperation I had even checked the expensive stock-image libraries. But the very recent 2023 improvements in AI to generate images from text prompts finally provided a solution ... certainly not perfect, but good enough. The full story is available in the video's Description on YouTube.