"I'll Die One Day" and the video

“I’ll Die One Day” was born out of several things that happened over two-ish years up until late 2010. The title preceded the song itself, but directly informed it. I had endured a (first) mental breakdown two years earlier, and throughout that had handled poorly what I could control. In an incredibly humid North Carlton bedroom in the depths of December the bones of the song came together over a few hours, although the bassline final version of both the lyrics and percussion would come a few years later (it has taken this long for the song and the album to be completed).

Initially, the lyrics and the music were a poor attempt at emulating Gorillaz (and it didn’t take many tweaks to move it away from that territory). I’m a sucker for anything Damon Albarn does and Plastic Beach had been played constantly throughout a dour year (and I’d just seen them live with my Mum earlier that month).

Those first lyrics were still informed by the title - which itself only existed in the Logic session file name - it isn’t mentioned word-for-word in the song - but it wasn’t until they were reworked maybe three or four years later in a way that I felt reflected the title as I wanted.

At that time, as a bewildered 22-year old I felt my life was a humiliating series of failed, awkward social exchanges, and leaving of parties in disgrace (a perennially updated feature-length blooper reel). I had no idea what I was doing professionally, and all the while being on the way to not producing or mastering my first two albums in any way that I should have. It was and is the same tattered, stained string of mistakes made and that I make over and over again. Since then I’ve had sustained better periods, but invariably those are bookended by lapses, as if jumping between worldlines.

Over time I would more often literally walk away from these exchanges and say to myself “well, I’ll die one day” as a grim reassurance of better (???) things to come (there was nothing pre-emptive about it, but the trick was that the line gave it a sense of inevitability, however fleeting). I was self aware and self deprecating enough to say it with a small (maybe wry) smile, at least in my mind, and a great deal of facetiousness. But over time - in the year or so afterwards, and again in recent years as it regained relevance when it came time to work on it in the studio - those jokes had worn thin, and the core meaning behind it had grown and sapped away that smile.

The video I made came from early attempts to put together a new visual component for my live set. Since a December 22, 2015 show at Public Bar, I’d disgraced the Ingmar Bergman film Persona with my own rude cut to accompany my haphazard live arrangement. The last time I’d played without visuals had been a couple of weeks earlier, on December 9 at The Grace Darling. That night I was genuinely sick (not the faux-sick I have been at every show since) and barely scraped through a set (including the first time I played Wander), bathed in unflattering daylight savings time lighting and with my blush propulsion system turned up to 11.

As fate (or whatever) would have it, the last time I would use the Persona cut would come at the same venue as its debut - now known as The Last Chance Rock and Roll Bar - on November 28, and the first time I would play without them would be at The Grace Darling in recent weeks. This wasn’t intentional, but rather due to a wildly unforeseen projector malfunction, very nearly three years to the day after that shocker on the same stage. For all the comfort that the visuals can bring to how I feel the set appears, that most recent show felt to be one of my better performances, particularly after I had put in a rusty shocker at Last Chance.

That most recent show had been pinned down as the last time I would use Persona, to be replaced with a patchwork of creative commons and public domain footage from the Prelinger Archives. Parts of that became the “I’ll Die One Day: video for a few reasons. I has been intent on releasing the song late in 2017 either way, and after cracking the shits about the state of Sissysocks in general late last year, amid a broader mental breakdown of sorts more recently, decided it was time to put it out while the rest of the album was being finished.

Bit by bit I began collating a video more purposefully for the song. The found footage that makes up the video is all very deliberately placed, and all very deliberately selected from a fuckload of videos I viewed that form a resource I couldn’t believe I hadn’t tapped into more by now. While I continue to jump from chemical stability to lapses, the world feels like it does the same. It’s just a simple part of growing up, but it’s strange and unsettling to shed any notion that some particularly awful chapters in your own and broader human history belong in the past.