Still Looking Alive

Read the 2006 post on Look Alive.

Listen to the demo:


Listen to the record version:


Prepare yourselves (plural, generous):

I'm about to blog about my own blog.

It's gonna get ALL META UP IN HERE.

Okay, got that out of my system.

I don't even know what's meta anymore.  Is that meta? Ironic? Or is it just egotistical as shit.

Whatever.

Anyway, I digress.  Or regress.  Or undress.

I've enjoyed writing about the Paper Arrows tunes on In the Morning a ton and feel like it helped me flesh out the content of our new website.  So I've decided to go back and write a bit about our first record, Look Alive.

This presents several challenges.

The material was written in '05/'06, recorded in '06/'07, and released in '08.  It spans a very difficult period for me:  losing a marriage and breaking up with a band that was to that point the best creative thing of which I'd been a part.  Half the album was written before it all went down, and the other half was written very purposefully about loss while it was going down...

The funny thing is, at our Paper Arrows session at I.V. Labs on Saturday, this was the album we talked about the most... recording in an attic in the winter, no idea what we were doing, what it would become... in a lot of ways, Look Alive the album and specifically Look Alive the song has informed Paper Arrows through its entire run: we established a creative trust very early on and really have managed to keep egos almost completely out of it.  We rarely record with any sort of "rules."  We work very quickly and mostly fearlessly.  All these things, which were on exhibit prominently at Saturday's session, were there from the very beginning.

So when I started thinking about revisiting this material for blog purposes, I went back and read my post from 2006 (almost exactly 5 years ago) on Look Alive and was surprised to find it captured everything perfectly.  And I listened to the home demo and the recording and... I was really really touched by it.  I could see the connection from the very first thing we did as a group to the most recent.

Clarity is a rare thing in life, but sometimes, some very few times, the way truly is clear.

And it does really all come down to you.

jbg