IT’S ABOUT LOVE
Released July 27, 2023
Context
How do we build love and maintain humanity while the world is actively ending? How do we define love and in what ways can we develop the vocabulary and expressive ability to communicate this meaning? Are our current systems actively designed to prohibit this expressive process? In a world with so many people and so many ways to connect with them, we can paradoxically feel distant, so how do we build communication and express ourselves? These are big questions, and this album doesn’t really do shit to answer them.Creation Process
These songs were all recorded and finalized between August 2022 and July 2023 in apartments in East Harlem, NY & Hunts Point, Bronx, mostly over school breaks when I had the time to focus. As usual, most were done with guitar & vocal single takes laid down first, and then additional instrumentation added on top. A few tracks use drum loops from Splice as a foundation, and then we’re built up track-by-track from that. This is my first time using drum loops, so that was fun. Many of these songs had draft versions released on “Song Studies” EPs throughout the past year so I could figure out how to make music better. As with every new album I make, I feel like it’s my best work yet. Like most albums, it’s intended to be listened through in its given sequence.Another part of the creation process had to do with coming up with the song titles. See the section below for more on that. Here’s the deal: the bulk of my artistic energy goes into the classroom. What’s left goes into writing and making songs. I’m not going to be playing the silly social media marketing games to try and become more popular. It feels gross as shit, I’m bad at it, and it doesn’t help make my actual art better. The random algorithmic plays from the song titles will just be a hopefully hilarious byproduct of this album creation process.
What’s up with the titles?
In creating this album, I was thinking a lot about how the music landscape has shifted since I started making music as “Natty Ward” back in 2015. Now, the hegemony of streaming platforms like Spotify and their respective algorithms command music access, which ends up being pretty artistically depressing in many ways. Algorithms aren’t inherently a bad thing, but it’s a matter of who’s on the controlling end of them. When capital is in control, it’s gonna be a big yikes. While I’m not against leveraging technology to curate new art for us, there is something dubious and inhuman about how this gatekeeping algorithm is being driven by a massive corporation dependent on seeing its profits go up every fiscal quarter. It makes us question who the true “audience” of our music is. The audience should be the listener, but algorithmic channels are the ones delivering the music to the listener. In theory, art should be able to transcend these pathways. Something truly real and human should optimally be able to break through anything in its way to reach people. However, there are transcendent songs I’ve heard from friends and underground artists that have criminally low play counts on streaming platforms. In a world where play counts represent a whole lot more than they should, that’s pretty shitty. And this is happening for truly great songs by truly transcendent artists—leagues beyond me & my songs!So as I built out the songs on this album, which thematically settle around this idea of how we build love and maintain happiness when the world is actively ending, the backdrop of my overt algorithmic-overlord audience loomed large. If art (as I like to define it) is that which effectively reaches its audience to evoke a desired response, then have I been consistently neglecting this spectral hidden audience throughout my artistic process? I began to view manipulating song titles as one of the more straightforward ways to shamelessly appeal to the powerful Algorithm Audience.
I have often been fascinated by song titles and some well-picked song titles have arguably been my only source of streaming success thus far. For example, my old 2017 Natty Ward track “Muppet Treasure Island” is still my only song that consistently gets streams. Almost all of them are from people mistakenly playing the song, thinking it’s from the movie (it’s not even remotely about the movie). It was even added to a playlist of songs from the movie, which has been driving most of my streams. To whomever made that playlist and mistakenly added me, thank you for my most consistent form of half cent royalties. Also, my 2016 Natty Ward song “Lori Beth Denberg” was able to get the attention of its namesake and now exists as the theme song to her podcast. Without my inappropriate titling, none of this would have happened. Are these songs that great? In the grand scheme, no. But did they somehow sneak around algorithmic search backchannels to reach real people? Yep! So let’s try and tap into that with an entire album track list.
Throughout this process, it was interesting to reflect on the storied history of nontraditional song titling. The biggest examples that comes to mind are the alternative rock/emo/pop punk movements of the 2000s. Many of us might recall those insanely long Panic! At the Disco and Fall Out Boy song titles that grew to represent this era. I remember having to painstakingly code these titles into iTunes from their Limewire-ripped MP3s. This was a compelling time for pop music. Atypical tilting was perhaps a way for these more “alternative” bands to separate themselves from the more mainstream “pop” stylings of the day. Someone would notice something “different” just from scanning the back of the CD case. The titles would often be inside jokes or long statements that had little to nothing to do with the lyrics. One could view this as a possible reaction to more mainstream pop songs named after the repeated lyric in the song. How does one compete with a certified classic pop banger like the appropriately titled “My Humps”? One subtle way could be through unique, almost unhinged titling. Standard titling nomenclature certainly makes a song easier to remember, seek out, and request by branding it with the catchiest line. So by eschewing these traditionally “easy” naming practices, these alternative bands were creating their own subcultures and in-groups within their music. You had to work harder to know what a song was called to request, discuss, or find it (on Limewire or otherwise). As a result, you had to spend more time & mental energy on the music, and it made the music seem more “cool” & outside of the mainstream. There’s more of a challenge now for the listener. There’s more of an active dialogue and actionable process between listener and artist/music. This is pop music trying to be more demanding, unique, and literally “alternative.”
So let’s take this idea and transpose it on to 2023. “Alternative” FM radio stations are long gone (shouts out to West Palm Beach’s 103.1 “The Buzz.” I still miss you). We still have Fantano types (who would probably have DJed a local alternative radio station back in the days of pre-Internet ubiquity), but in general, we have now offloaded our music curation to streaming platform algorithms. So how do we continue this bold alternative song titling tradition with these algorithms in mind? What if song titles were similarly long, but without any semblance of authenticity? That would certainly be representative of the dehumanizing nature of our current musical landscape. Our initial audiences are hardly still people, but rather the algorithms that disseminate art. With art in its best sense existing as an outpouring and channeling of love, how can that spirit be maintained through inhuman algorithmic filtering? Perhaps boldfacedly embracing this inhumanity is the best way to transcend it. Maybe it will work out. We’ll see. At the very least, maybe I’ll get some extra half cents from the clicks of confused people.
Coming up with the song titles was more difficult than I anticipated and ended up taking a while. I didn’t want to do something totally obvious and mainstream, like some Ed Sheeran/Taylor Swift/Drake/etc. song title or TikTok trend. The trick was to have something evergreen enough (not subject to fleeting trends of the month) and with a niche enough audience that people would still listen for at least 30 seconds. The other challenge was not directly writing other artists’ names within the titles. I wasn’t trying to dehumanize specific punkrock subcultural icons—artists I deeply respect—by using their names as algorithm fodder to capitalize on a ridiculous system. For example, I was playing around with straight naming a track “Paul Baribeau” (an antifolk icon who intentionally took his songs off Spotify), but figured that would be incredibly disrespectful to him and all he stands for. So I ended up focusing more on “word soup” titles that would appear in algorithmically generated playlists or titles seen around these platforms. I also figured pure nostalgia plays (like “Tony Hawk Underground,” which had the best soundtrack of all time, and “All That Theme Song”) were fair game at this point. “NPR Tiny Desk” and “Infinite Jest Full Audiobook (Part 1)” are massive enough entities that they can handle it. And “Chapo Trap House - The Hunter Biden Interview” felt a bit borderline, but the podcast is a big enough intellectual property (and doesn’t include individual names) that they could weather the joke, and I just found the title funny enough that I let it rock. When I first pushed these names through DistroKid, the song “TikTok Songs of the Summer” was flagged for potential “keyword flooding” (lol), so I simply added a space between “Tik” and “Tok” and I was good to go. No foul play here, “Tik Tok” is just a Kesha song!
This titling process has been in the works for a while, but now upon its release, it’s perhaps coming at the best time. Social media is actively imploding. Facebook is a corpse by now, Twitter is deliberately destroying itself, everything everywhere on every platform seems like someone trying to sell us something. Our internet consumption paradigm is crumbling, and I’m happy, through this album, to get in a tiny lil poke™ on its way down.
Thanks for listening (and for reading this damn thing). You are cool.
“Algorithmic,” Officially Published Song Titles
1. 528 Hz Psychedelic Reflection Energy
2. Infinite Jest Full Audiobook (Part 1)
3. lofi beats chill music to study, relax, hope, contemplate, lament, yearn, cry, rage to
4. TikTok Songs of the Summer
5. Love in the Time of Algorithms 1: Company lines, waterboarding our once open minds
6. NPR Tiny Desk
7. All That Theme Song
8. Chapo Trap House - The Hunter Biden Interview
9. Love in the Time of Algorithms 2: Blobs on a rock feeling loud through what can reach you
10. 2000s Emo & Pop Punk Bangers
11. Tony Hawk Underground
12. Essential Folk Punk
13. ASMR Meditation Mix
14. Love in the Time of Algorithms 3: IT’S ABOUT LOVE
“Real” Song Titles
1. Cosmic Joke
2. Now we’re speaking different languages
3. i’ve fallen in i’ve fallen in i’ve fallen in i’ve fallen in
4. What about love?
5. Love in the Time of Algorithms 1: Company lines, waterboarding our once open minds
6. Is it COVID, or is it just 2022 malaise?
7. Count your freckles on the wall
8. E-girl Robespierre
9. Love in the Time of Algorithms 2: Blobs on a rock feeling loud through what can reach you
10. Maybe we were trapped in the moment that we needed to level up
11. Misanthropic Days
12. As we find ourselves clawing against the wall
13. Feels like god’s been watching
14. Love in the Time of Algorithms 3: IT’S ABOUT LOVE
Personnel
Natty Ward - music & lyrics, vocals, guitars, bass, keys, beatbox, percussion, production, album cover design
Mimi - Album artwork drawing
Special thanks to Tim, Alex, Stephen, Emily, JJ, Sydney, and Jacob for help with the song titling process.
Gear
MacBook Pro, Logic Pro, Focusrite Scarlett 2i2, AT2035 condenser mic, Breedlove Passport Plus D/CMe HH, Fender Mustang Bass, Casio CDP-S350, drum loops from Splice, various hand percussion instruments, blood/sweat/tears/etc.