These songs are about desire, freedom, and “desiring freedom.” There’s a fundamental assumption within psychoanalysis: desire is a lack, a want for something we don’t have, that will never be “filled.” I subscribe to a different view of desire, one postulated by Gilles Deleuze some decades after Freud: desire is something we produce. Desire is what we do. It’s a Something, not a lack of something. There is no “filling.”

Those who try to trap desire for consumers, those who push that “lack” concept onto the public for monetary gain, prolong this misunderstanding. Working on a cruise ship, a Desire-Capturing Machine, I see so many people presented with everything they want in their leisure time, only to leave wanting more, disinterested in what they once craved, which confuses and upsets them. (I experience this same thing in the food and sleep department; I always want more of both, and when presented with an excess, I turn my head, wanting the opposite.)

This is a relatively new kind of burnout, an excess of positives and positivity. There’s a stifling, stymieing inertia that covers us even in circles where everything is permitted. I live with this, as I’m sure you sometimes do, reader.

Regarding freedom, this is a desire expressed by so many people, and it drives me nuts. It sounds like an odd thing to complain about, but it’s all because the majority of people who dogmatically list “freedom” as something good-in-itself, as something they want, 1. Don’t want it for all people, and 2. Don’t actually want it. They tend to love rules, creeds, codes of ethics, uniforms with codes, etc. It’s a very bogus value, one not properly examined by those who spout it.

“Enjoy…Like a Pro!” is a slogan I saw on a brand of bottled water at a 7-11. It showed a bunch of pro athletes drinking it, giving context for that weird-ass sentence. In my head, it read as if there were a heightened, professional way to “enjoy.” I didn’t like that one bit.

Byung Chul-Han was a big influence on a lot of the writing here, particularly his book The Burnout Society. Check out his stuff. I like it; every book is short. These songs are lo-fi in a very desperate way; it’s a matter of actual limitation. Whereas on my upcoming record (a VERY hi-fi affair, sounding like night to day compared to this) I yell a lot, I had to remain pretty hushed due to close quarters.

“Don’t Worry, Be Happy 2” is a nice overview of these ideas, sung from the perspective of a Giver, a Provider, a Company, a Desire-Capturing Machine, endlessly aiming to please, only to be undermined and frustrated by the listless indifference of their clientele. Why can’t you be happy? A broken circuit.