Lawrence Arabia gives us a track-by-track insight into his new solo album, Absolute Truth, which drops today.
Photo: Supplied
This is part of a regular series which sees local artists break down the stories behind their music. For more, click here.
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A Lake
Just about everything I could possibly say about this song, I wrote over at The Pantograph Punch. What else can I say? The original demo was a little too “shagadelic” for my liking, but mercifully we managed to dial that back for the final version.
Sweet Dissatisfaction
This is one of my growing catalogue of songs written about hangovers while hungover. On the whole, I manage to keep my drinking at a pleasingly mature level of moderation, but I've got the tendency to go a bit far maybe once or twice or thrice annually. As a young introvert in Christchurch, getting blotto was a wonderful way to mask my insecurities and inability to confront my problems, and I occasionally slip back into that mode, which now results in nauseating consequences. Outside of the humbling spells in the bathroom and general sense of existential foreboding (“considering becoming Christian”) that the hangover brings, the one real blessing is that your creative filter tends to disappear and you become lucid and spontaneous. Words and melodies come freely and the inner critic leaves them alone.
The Old Dancefloor
The night before a hangover, a drunk couple snipes at each other.
I Waste My Time
Thematically this one's kind of a sequel to Apple Pie Bed – my girlfriend motivating me out of depression and abject laziness, this time through the potent force of shame. She hates this song and even now tries to shame me by saying it sounds like Gotye's Somebody That I Used To Know.
Brain Gym
Brain Gym was just the title I gave this song when I opened up a Garageband file to start demo-ing it. It's kind of meaningless in a way, but it sort of fits in with the self-improvement themes of the song, and I never found a better title. I'm happy with this song. It's gentle and elegant.
O Heathcote
New Zealand, and probably the whole western world to be honest, is currently stricken with this form of decadent greed and shallowness which is slowly manifesting itself in everyone I know. I hope it's just a product of my current stage of life, but I fear it's a bit of a contemporary disease whereby everyone feels increasingly disempowered politically and simultaneously covetous of the comfort of material goods which their friends are advertising to them for free via social media. This is an ad hoc theory I'm just considering right now by the way, so it's about as well thought out as the average angry Facebook rant. Anyway, this song's kind of about this – about fighting all of my urges to abandon idealism and descend into mediocre bourgeois middle age.
Another Century
Lots of this record was written in the few months after my daughter Isobel was born. It's not a record of children's songs or a record about parenting or about any kind of profound epiphanies that I had post-fatherhood, but its atmosphere is pervaded by the positivity of new life. At least in the immediate few months after becoming a dad, any of my feelings of angst that I'd usually have about feeling aimless or uninspired totally dissipated because they seemed petty and juvenile, and thus I went through a period of occasionally just enjoying the luxury of having a spare moment to myself for writing a song. One of the first moments I took was when Isobel was only a couple of days old, on a beautiful sunny afternoon in the Birthcare hospital, when I wrote this.
The Palest Of Them All
This is a song I wrote celebrating the magnificent lives of bored suburban goth teenagers, a sub-culture about whom I know precisely nothing.
Mask Of Maturity
Another love song that's mainly about myself.
What Became Of That Angry Young Man?
Like Brain Gym, I started with a title for this before commencing any work on the song itself. I suppose it's about another side of the things I'm talking about in O Heathcote – the abandonment of idealism – though in this case it seems like the idealist is also a drunken idiot, and maybe an obsession with single origin cold brew coffee was, on reflection, a more sensible route than a lifetime of alcoholism.
Absolute Truth is available via Bandcamp.