I’ve been releasing music just for my bandcamp subscribers for 7 years now. Last week I posted about the 5th Indoctrination Kit I made for them, The Beast and Mr Knock. This time I’m looking back to the year before that and the 4th Indoctrination Kit, Hyperbole.
The deal I have with my lovely* bandcamp subscribers is this: You get all my music, usually earlier than everyone else, plus an exclusive EP every year that’s just for you guys.
Over covid, with lockdowns and the world going mad, I was stuck at home in my studio even more than usual and those EPs ended up pretty much album length. That’s certainly what happened with Hyperbole, the 4th subscribers ‘EP’.
The cover is from a homemade video I made for the song ‘Faceless Men’. The whole EP is 8 songs long and clocks in at about 35 minutes. If it was punk, you’d call that an album, right?
It has songs about aliens, crap politicians, weird creatures that come and get you when you’re not looking, mental turmoil, and odd men in gas masks hiding in an underground bunker. Classic pop songs.
Faceless Men
The first song from it was Faceless Men for which I made an actual music video with me singing at the camera and doing a bit of acting in a gas mask and stuff. This song is a little bit more metal than some of my stuff. Not full on metal, but I turned the guitars up and put some actual RIFFS in the middle bit.
Like The Beast and Mr Knock and a couple of other projects, my Hyperbole EP was inspired in part by pictures sent to me by my bandcamp subscribers. Pictures I had asked for that is. Not the kind of pictures you just started thinking about.
Cool, weird or creepy or strange pictures that could inspire songs. Faceless Men was inspired by a picture of odd men in gas masks sitting around a dinner table. Barbed Wire Webs was inspired by a picture of a spider, but also a picture of a sort of retro scifi tower in the middle of a field. We Look Up To The Sky was inspired by a proper actual picture from a proper actual talented photographer named Graham who sent me a picture of what looked very much like a stonehenge style standing stone lit up in yellow light. That isn’t what it actually is, but that’s what it sort of looked like.
As I say, it’s one of several songwriting techniques I’ve used to find new ideas for songs. Look at the picture, then start free writing based on the first thing that comes into your head. Usually for me, what I’m trying to do is get myself into the mind of some fictional character so I can figure out what they’re thinking or feeling and write a song from there.
So these bandcamp subscribers are actually useful sometimes.
Hyperbole
Hyperbole was the title track from my 4th Subscribers EP. It was inspired by hearing a politician mispronounce the word ‘hyperbole’ twice in quick succession. That wouldn’t be too bad a thing, but in between someone else pronounced it correctly.
Now, I know, I know that criticizing someone for mispronouncing a word is not fair. Usually that means they discovered the word by reading and that’s definitely a good thing.
But this was Nadhim Zahawi who used taxpayer’s money to heat his stables – his stables! – and had to resign after his own tax affairs turned out to be potentially dodgy.
I dislike the man and am glad he is no longer a politician.
So this is very unusual political subject matter for me, but still a fun song, eh?
If you’d like to hear all of Hyperbole, read the various lies in the Indoctrination Guide, and generally support my music you can find out more here.
*Are they all lovely? No. No, they’re not. But you’ve to be polite, right?