Originals | Crommunist

0 Seems So Sad to Say

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A disturbing number of love songs follow this basic theme: “You make me feel like shit and you betray my trust, but I love you so I’m going to put up with it”. To me, that sounds like the unhealthiest possible way to be in love with someone. Love, to me, is a mutual and constructive thing, where two (or more) people are committed to making each other’s lives better. Sure, people make mistakes and sometimes it is necessary to forgive them, but at some point you have to really ask whether the person who’s cheating on you for their fourth or fifth time actually loves you. And you have to start asking some questions about yourself as well, I’d say.

So I put a twist on this “you betray me but I love you” trope and added to it, turning it into “you betray me, and I love you, but I’m still leaving”. Because it’s possible to love someone enough to know that they’re no good for you, and the best thing you can do is get your distance. And that’s what this song is about.

0 Love at First Touch

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I’ve never really been a believer in “love at first sight”, The concept never made sense to me: if love is about a shared connection between people, how could just looking at someone make you fall in love with them? I can understand being instantaneously attracted to someone, but we already have a word for that: lust. Or maybe even infatuation. But love? That seems to cheapen the concept to me.

I was in love with someone who was very tactile: she loved to be touched. Cuddled, hugged, massaged, whatever – as long as I was touching her, she was happy. I’m not a particularly affectionate guy by nature; it’s just not something that comes to me instinctually. This was, of course, a source of frequent conflict for the two of us. When I get upset, I need to be left alone until I calm down; when she got upset she wanted to be physically comforted. Treating each other according to what we’d want was a problem – I felt smothered, and she felt abandoned. It was a tricky situation to figure out.

Once I got more accustomed to it, I gained a deeper appreciation for how much physical touch can express. It can be supportive, it can be sexual, it can be playful – it can be almost anything. I learned to appreciate it when it was present, and even miss it when it was absent. After a while, I became almost as touchy-feely and gross as a normal, healthy person.

So I tried to put some of those thoughts and experiences into this song: … Continue Reading

0 The Way We Spend Our Nights

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I recently became single. How/why it happened isn’t a particularly interesting story, but suffice it to say that as breakups go, it was very civilized. And so now I’m single again, and trying to figure out what that means for a 31 year-old guy with essentially no free time and no particular interest in rushing into another relationship.

Unlike the last time I was single, however, Tinder is now a thing. For those of you who somehow don’t know, Tinder is an app for your phone where you upload a few photos and a short profile, and other users either swipe right if they think they’d like to meet you, or left if they don’t. If two people swipe right on each other, it’s a “match”, and they can message each other to arrange a date. It’s basically online dating in the Candy Crush era: superficial, simple, addictive, but ultimately mostly just a distraction.

I wrote a song about Tinder, and online dating in general. Very little of it is based on personal experience (I’m an OKCupid man myself), although it’s not exactly fiction – maybe think of it as “inspired by a true story”. Not my story, but certainly the story of hundreds if not thousands of people who signed up for a good time and ended up getting way more than they bargained for.

2 Suspicious Woman

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The fundamental component of love is trust. That’s what I think, anyway. If you can’t rely on someone, if they can’t be held to their word, then what kind of love could be possible? Love requires us to be our most vulnerable selves, and that requires enough trust to know that the other person won’t exploit that vulnerability.

I wrote this song while I was in the midst of writing another song (that I ended up recording, hating, and burying). It had an old-style blues feel to it, and so I started with a blues-like line “Oh woman, why you do me like you do?” There are a lot of blues songs about infidelity, but most follow the “please forgive me for cheating” or “I know you’ve been cheating” script. I decided to do something a little different, and explore the idea of being a faithful partner who was nonetheless suspected of cheating. … Continue Reading

1 Unmade

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At the beginning of the month, my girlfriend Jessica moved into my apartment. This is the culmination of many months of her partially living at my apartment. A lot of this arrangement is purely pragmatic – since she was spending 3-4 nights a week at my place anyway, it made enough sense for her to just fill in that gap. Also, we’ve put in enough time and effort and gone through enough bumps and bruises that a lot of the anxieties I had about sharing space with her have been addressed. There were fewer and fewer reasons not to try living together, and a lot of reasons why we both felt it would be a great idea (to her credit, she arrived at that conclusion months before I did). Plus a lot of her stuff is nicer than mine.

Jessica works nights, meaning that about half of the week she sleeps during the day. Over the past few months, there were a number of instances where she would sleep at my place during the day (I live in a really quiet neighbourhood – for a while she lived across the street from a train yard) and then have to take off for work or errands. On days when I thought it was likely she’d be there, I tried to get into the habit of making the bed (which is a habit I picked up from her – I hardly ever do it when it’s just me). Sometimes, not often, but sometimes, I’d come home from work to find the bed unmade because she’d been sleeping in it – a circumstance that always made me smile. I liked that she felt comfortable and at home at my place. … Continue Reading

0 Liquid Sunshine

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Most things in life can be changed with effort – whether that’s the concerted effort of a passionate group of people, or the determined effort of an individual. But there remain some things that are beyond the scope of our powers to change. Assuming that we have the wisdom to discern the difference, there’s only one logical approach to things we truly cannot change, and that’s to try and find the positive within them.

This song is about that:

0 Remember How to Smile

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I re-recorded a version of “Remember How to Smile” (early demo and explanation available here) with MIDI drums and better string mixing.

Lyrics: … Continue Reading

1 ‘Cherryblossom’ on Youtube

April 3, 2014
by Crommunist
· Media · Music · music videos · Originals

I thought it would be fun to create a music ‘video’ for my song ‘Cherryblossom’. The pictures were all taken by me at various points during the year. Vancouver is crazy beautiful, and I hope that you can see, through the images, why I was so inspired to write this song.

0 Cherryblossom

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There are a lot of things to love about the city of Vancouver. There’s never any smog, it doesn’t get very cold, there are mountains, we’re right on the ocean, people are attractive and friendly, politics tends to be left-leaning, and there are a lot of different kinds of people living here. It’s a pretty sweet deal.

But hands down, without hesitation, my absolute favourite thing about Vancouver happens around this time of year. Winters here are rainy, grey, and not terribly exciting. But as we approach April, the city transforms into a goddamn fairy wonderland.

Trees all over the city turn pink and redolent with cherry blossoms. These trees are planted all over the city. For a three-week period, pockets of pink explode into fragrant bloom. This, for example, is my street: … Continue Reading

0 Voice In My Head (music video)

This is a ‘music video’ of sorts that I shot for my song Voice In My Head.

I am reasonably certain that I can cross “film-maker” off of my list of potential side careers. I shot this in my apartment using the webcam from my laptop. I figured it was better than a static image for the full 5 minutes the song plays for.

If there are any of you who possess actual talent at shooting film, I’m definitely interested in having some actual non-terrible videos done.