letter 022: when tomorrow comes, we'll be nothing but a fading feeling
dear junk mail club,
hope you are all doing good :) my new song when tomorrow comes, we’ll be nothing but a fading feeling is out today. another long ass title. i’m sorry. that’s the ricky eat acid, american pleasure club, emo band titling influence still carrying on strong. this is the fourth single off my upcoming album, Somewhere On A Hillside, which comes out july 28th :) you can watch the new music video below.
for the longest time i’d wanted to drive a postal truck for a video. we’d looked into the options for years — renting one from a hollywood movie car company, seeing if i could convince the local postman to let us get a few shots, and scouring government vehicle websites for trucks for sale. i’d even thought about getting a summer job at the postal service, becoming the ultimate postcard boy, completing the circle. i’d get access to all the uniforms, too. the idea of it i think is cooler than if i actually were to do it, but i still think about it here and there. the truck we ended up working with was a 1960s ice cream truck that we redecorated with postcards from around the world, envelopes, and other little easter eggs i left just for me.
making this song was one of the longest start to finishes on this album. the original project file goes back to one of the first times my friend kali aka “superfan” and i hung out. i cannot remember if this was the same night, but i do remember us cooking a few times when he came over, and i want to say that night we made a vegan pasta.
we were making some odd banjo-ey acoustic guitar song and kali had recorded some demo vocals over it. that instrumental was a bit stale, so i remember trying to 180 the song into another direction by adding some abrasive bass and chopping up his voice. kali makes the most wonderful music that feels so raw and human. so naturally, i went for the opposite of that. of course. obviously. as you should. but that’s how this song’s initial version originated. the progression from banjo song, to vocals, to the electronic stuff is sequenced below and is a good showing of how my process of making a song typically goes. i’ll have an idea at the start, and then i’ll just continually remix it until i find something cool within there.
banjo-ey guitar idea:
initial kali vocal and bass idea:
electronic drum idea when i tried to start changing the direction:
you can hear it coming together here at the end of night 1:
eventually, i couldn’t figure out what to do and sent it my friend lucian and he got it to this version which gave us the core sound of the song. still hurts to listen, but it’s within there:
i don’t love talking too much about the meaning behind a song. that’s for you to attach. it took me quite a while to wrestle the lyrics for this one. who and what i was writing about evolved throughout completing it. and even through now, months after, it’s cool to see how when i reread the lyrics, they’ve taken on an entirely new meaning. it’s always funny when i’ll write a song about myself being sad for example, and some of you will message me and say, “oh my gosh i love this song, me and my girlfriend fell in love to this.” that’s one the reasons why music is so beast. yes, i use “beast” unironically, guys. “boss” is also up there for me. it’s like how no one knows anything the cocteau twins ever says, but we all just love the way the melodies and songs feel regardless. i heard in an interview that she collects words or phrases that she likes from dictionaries of different languages and then strings them together to write songs. she doesn’t even know what the songs mean. boss.
i will admit many of the shots for this video were done in a somewhat sketchy manner. thank you to the owner, ice cream ian, who was very trusting and fun, telling us many stories of the truck and its past life along the way. past lives include videos with lil yachty, selena gomez, and more. i’m carrying the torch. whether i was looking back or not, i drove the truck in every shot. there was no way to hide it. in some of the drone shots, however, it was my foot on the gas, but ice cream ian’s hands on the wheel. a team effort indeed. making all the videos for this album has been a learning process and a definite challenge. in the past it had been the same core crew of friends from high school working with me on every video, but we’ve all moved to various cities and such, so this rollout has been all new friends and faces, trusting me and being so open to making the ideas happen. a massive thank you to all of those whose names scroll in the credits. many of the ideas i’ve had for years, like the postal truck in this one or the mailbox bounce house. countless ones still haven’t made it out yet, and i’ll keep those tucked away until if i ever get the right opportunity.
yours,
garry
bonus section because we made this as a joke when we got bored editing, but it’s too good not to share lol here you go.