I spent a few hours after band practice talking to Derek about the direction these crazy new tunes are headed in and it reminded me of a conversation I had about the same thing a year or so ago.
When T3 first started it was about being a goofy band. Almost all the songs reflected the carefree life I was living at the time. Little by little as the band grew there began to be a division in the songs that were not only nonsense songs and goofy, but a lot of them hold a second and very personal meaning that I don't really talk about. Not many on the first album are like that, but they are there. It might be a line or it might be the song in general, but its the pattern that I've started to develop as I've been writing music. T3 will never be serious and will never be sad, its just not what it is. I've gone against limiting of what it is and what it isn't, but that is the one rule and only rule I've ever held us to, other than keeping things less than vulgar.
When we released Your Music Is Bad And You Should Feel Bad, it comprised of pretty much the first nine songs that we had completed and were satisfied with. During that period of time there were quite a few songs that were worked on, but ultimately never finished. The only ones that ever popped up later from that time period in all honesty were Unemployed and Momma's Boy, even though they didn't really get past the basic rhythm or just lyrically for another 2 years or so. After those songs were done I started to dive deeper into what I was writing and many of the songs that were written at that period of time took a much different tone than originally. Fewer songs were just nonsense songs straight up, and were more that divided meaning that I mentioned before. I describe the YMIBAYSFB as daydreaming of some extraordinary world where anything is possible and does. The most ridiculous things that could be happening are happening, but all are grounded in semi-realistic ideas, places, and things.
I assumed that the next album was going to be more focused on personal yet more realistic experiences that I had been through in my life, as that was the tone that was going on at the time. It was still going to be abstract and funny, but a majority of the songs were more relatable I think as they all dealt with everyday situations to the extreme. You can see this starting to happen in the last two songs that were written for that album in Ken and Unemployed. They were real situations with a goofy twist. You know, stuff like that.
However with lineup changes, the passing of time, and general dissatisfaction with some of the things I had written, a lot of those songs just never materialized or never got past the demo stage and a lot of them never will. At the moment we have roughly 9 demos ready with another 4 or 5 on deck that we'll be working on over the next few months that will dwindle down to the best 11 or 12 tracks for the new album at some point. I made a list of those songs the other day and noticed the pattern is returning but in a more divided way. There are songs that are completely not about anything and there are other songs that have a strong tie to the experiences I've had in the last year. That's the weirdest thing to me really. With the exception of maybe one or two songs so far, all of the new songs were written brand new as of September or October of last year. None of the older ones survived or at least aren't resurfacing right now. Because of the experiences that have made up my life over these past ten or so months have shaped something very different. If you combine that with the fact that we are all collectively much better musicians now and aren't just throwing crap together and calling it a day at the first handful of songs, its shaping up to be a whole different monster this time around.
That is all things considered, we won't know until we record and release the album later this year, but it just makes me think of how far we've come. But as always, I'm not going to say what these songs are about. People can take the meaning however they want. I just know that I enjoy writing songs that have dual and recently sometimes tri-meanings in them. Maybe I'm getting better at this kind of thing?t
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