"Pillow Talk", track-by-track by Party Nails
“Same Old Song” - For a while, I called this “Through The Trees”, because that image of looking through the trees for my childhood self was the impetus for writing the song. I could feel the feeling I was trying to write down the whole time, and the only way to stop living in the feeling was to write it down, accurately. This was in a period of lockdown where my psyche was interacting with my idea of “home” a lot. “Dirty Water” and “Bull In A China Shop” and “Someway Somehow” also came out of this writing period. As I chipped away at what was then called “Through The Trees”, it became clearer and clearer that I was talking to my younger self. I wasn’t angry with her, or sad with her, or warning her of anything. I was just documenting our co-existence. I had the lines “I’ve been drinking, I’ve been thinking, I’ve been crying, I’ve been dreaming, I’ve been fiending, I’m so tired” in a songwriting notebook for a long time, waiting for a home. They were the perfect post-chorus. My touring drummer Anna Crane plays drums on it, which really elevates the energy for me.
2. “First Responder” - This was written as a country song! Without naming names, I was so tired of dropping everything to soothe someone who seemed to always have an emergency. I felt like my loyalty was being taken advantage of. I felt like I needed to take a stand for my own peace. And I wanted there to be a bit of humor in the songwriting as well. I shared it with Ben Greenspan and he instantly had this idea for a Linn drum vibe, which blew my mind. I had some synth patches I really liked which I added to the second verse after we got the bass part in, and I could tell we needed a guitar solo so I wrote that too, but the production hadn’t gelled yet. I thought it could use a Moroder-style pulsing bass or mid-range synth. I played with that idea and ended up also creating an arpeggiated synth part that kind of played off the static pulse. I wanted to have Vixen, a new friend at the time and a truly virtuosic guitar player, replay the guitar solo. She got it, and the harmony of it, in less than 5 minutes. She also plays a gentle, but biting, palm mute throughout the song that I think elevates the listening experience a lot.
3. “D.R.A.M.A.” - I started writing with and producing for Emma Kern during the pandemic, and this song was one of the first we made together. Her vision for fun and silly is insatiable and really brings out a side of my production that was simmering at the surface waiting for a canvas. I wanted to include this on my album as a moment of levity. It’s just a P Bass, 707 drum samples and a synth.
4. “Movie Scene” - I wrote this with a loop pedal and my electric guitar. It’s a vignette of a time in my early teens, when my friends and I would go this little movie theater together and make the ordeal the center of our lives: getting pizza, seeing our crushes, putting on glitter, borrowing each other’s clothes, the music we’d play to get ready. The indie rock vibe of my first demos didn’t really jive with how it actually felt to be there, though. Being in your teens and experiencing new things with your friends that you love more than anything else is one of the highest highs I’ve ever felt, and I wanted the music to reflect that. I was working for Noise Engineering, a boutique synthesizer company, testing their plugin synths and effects, and the general sound of their instruments is a little unhinged, exciting, left-of-center. So I produced the song with synths and distortion and breakbeats instead of guitars and live drums, like I’d initially pictured it. Once I realized it was supposed to be an electronic song, the pieces fell into place pretty quickly.
5. “Bull In A China Shop” - I wrote this on guitar, then made a synth and drums demo to share with Anna Crane, who added her drum flourishes. Then Ben Greenspan and I spent some time with it together—this is all over Zoom. The bridge was actually the chorus at first, and what is now the chorus is a line from the bridge. I created a new snare drum sound and added bass guitar. It was a slow moving ship. I shared it with my friend Luke Smith (Coast Modern, Wet World), who instantly heard subdivisions in the chorus that I’d never thought to emphasize. By giving those the attention they needed, the arrangement had a new clarity. The final special sauce was having the guitar/synth solo replayed by Vixen, a masterful guitarist I’d met in the LA scene earlier in the year. The songwriting itself is about the powerful effect of a bad actor in your life, be that another person or yourself. “Bull In A China Shop” was originally released as a single in May of 2023.
6. “Trigger Warning” - This is probably the oldest song on the album. Fans who have been with me for a long time may recall hearing earlier versions of this on livestreams and Patreon. I wrote and recorded it in tandem, chipping away at sound design and arrangement slowly. I never wanted to collaborate with anyone else on this one, it felt wrong to. It’s 707 drums and a lot of Juno 60 synthesizer. It’s about living inside domestic abuse, from the abused’s perspective. When you’re in that kind of situation, you want to rescue the person causing you harm. The only thing holding you together is your own light, a sort of ironic self-awareness that you are strong enough for the both of you. I wanted the perspective to feel like it could be either in the present or the past tense, so the listener can feel soothed and empowered regardless of where they stand in their own story.
7. “Dirty Water” - Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by all of the bad things in the world. Reading the news can feel like a nightmare. And sometimes dreams can feel a little off, and cease to be a refuge from your waking life. The pain, stressors and tragedy of the world, mixed with our own experience of being stuck inside our bodies and heads: I wanted to honor that in a song. A list of the things, as how I might interpret them in a dream: dirty water, systems failing, take me home…just the human wish to be home, cozy and safe. Every one of us holds this spectrum of experiences inside of us.
8. “Someway Somehow” - There are some relationships—that with your child, a lifelong friend, your soulmate—that feel like they have always been. Like a tree starting as a seed, the process of growing into the soil and into a small sapling feels inevitable and dependent on the care we give it. Often this care is simply allowing it to become what it truly is. Writing this song felt like finding a fossil: I moved a rock and there it was, a complete image I could pick up and hold. Even the vocal harmonies were always there. Building out the textures between the quiet first half and the loud bridge was the meat of the production work. Between writing this song and wrapping production, I played it out a lot. Lots of local LA shows. It was clearly a rock song sandwiched with tenderness. But how to achieve that on a record? Tension. Rubber bridge guitar, e-bow, pitched vocals that sound like strings, layered dry distortions in various octaves, wobbly piano sustains.
9. “Do U Know How?” - This song was initially written for a sync brief for a movie. Anna Crane sent me some drum parts that I wrote the guitar and vocal parts to. I built around that until it felt like a song, then sent it back to Crane to add flourishes to. It was quick and dirty. They didn’t pick it for the movie, but I really liked what we’d done and was always thinking about where it could live.
10. “Puppet” is the last song I wrote for the album. I was enjoying writing with a fingerstyle blues guitar part, rather than with a track or just strums. This riff developed as I played it more and added a melody on top. I really liked the guitar/vocal demo I made after I wrapped the writing, and I considered sticking to a guitar/vocal arrangement for the record, but I was attached to the theoretical drum part I was hearing in my head. I had Anna Crane come to my studio to record drum parts, and when she played me the part she’d come up with for “Puppet” I was so excited.