Transfem Slacker:
I'd written quite a lot of songs before making this album, both by myself and as part of a band,. Recorded a fair deal of them too, mostly by myself, the times I'd tried recording with other people usually just became frustrating honestly. It'd been a while,however, since I decided to sit down and make an /album/ a big cohesive music project and I'd decided I was going to put it out under my own name, no more 'Homemade Snuff Films', 'Million' was dead and I wanted to make something that was myself. I had come to the realisation that most of what people would consider "Trans Women Music" was Hyperpop, which is a fine genre but it's not what I want to do and it's not what I listen to primarily. I also realised that there really were no Trans Slacker Rock bands or artists, there was no trans answer to Pavement or Guided By Voice or The Strokes. I was talking about this to a friend and she said pretty simply "Why not make it yourself?".
I had a pretty great opportunity to record an album. My dad was away for the summer so I had a free apartment to record and sing all I liked, I had all the equipment I needed: Guitar, Bass, Logic, Microphone. It's not like Slacker Rock needs high-end production values anyways. All I needed to do was get started. I started writing and recording the album in early June and I had decided already that I wanted the album out by July 1st, my birthday, which meant I had a lot of work ahead of me. Luckily, my experience writing songs in uni and recording a bajillion guitar demos served me well and the process was actually pretty smooth going, mostly taking a few hours to write and record each song, besides, it was Slacker Rock it's meant to be a pretty quick production.
In university I'd discovered The Strokes, probably from some holiday ad while my dad was watching TV, and I'd quickly fallen in love. To me 'Is This It' is one of the best albums ever made and I spent a lot of time researching how to sound like it, from the production - using guitar amps for vocals and trying to make it sound warm and a little rough the edges, to the composition - the way the guitars are split between lower strings on the left and higher strings on the right, to the way I thought about the song and album lengths - short songs, get in and get out, ~30 mins. After recording the songs the hardest part turned out to be mastering them, I'd never done it before but for this album I really wanted to make something you could put on a CD or Spotify and have it sound like a real effort was put in, not just some home recorded demos.
The original cover art isn't available now because I don't speak to the woman who took that photo anymore, dumb gay friendship group stuff, and because it doesn't really fit the vibe of the album to be honest,I just needed an album cover and she was a photographer who had some pictures taken and was okay with me using them. The current album art was designed by my good friend Rosie (credited as @mementomidi), it's based off the packaging used for estradiol tablets and it's really awesome, I love how the mg's are based on the song length average of the album and the "Guitar + Oral" it's very fun and fits what I was trying to do a lot more than the previous one
1. Lose Lose
This is the song that starts off the album and I guess Rose Orlando as a whole. As soon as I wrote it I knew this had to be the first track, the riff is just too good and fun not to. Lyrically it was based on an issue I'd felt for quite some time (I still do, to be honest) where I'll mess up in some way but no one involved will want to just tell me what I did so I'll try to apologise and explain things, which only serves to make everyone even more upset with me. I can't win.
2. See Thru
This song, like a great deal of Rose Orlando songs, is about relationship issues and the feelings you get when someone you'd had in your life is suddenly gone. I think contrasting the bounciness of Lose Lose with the more somber tone of this track hopefully shows that this album has a lot of different branching versions of what Slacker Rock is instead of getting too repetitive. Fun fact, this song was the last song recorded for the album because I had miscounted the album length and thought it was under 30 minutes.
3. Can't Help It
This is actually the first song I wrote for the album, I was really laying the basis of that mic amp vocal sound and the two different guitar parts. I the bridge section in the song is really good too, really soars. This song's first mention of not sleeping on the album which pops up again a few more times later on, my sleep schedule was pretty terrible at the time from staying up on voice calls with people until the sun came up.
4. Yeah Yeah, Alright
This is the darkest sounding track on the album so far, this albums pretty grungy when I listen back to it to be honest. This song takes on more of a toxic relationship vibe, not really being given the attention you really want and feeling inferior to your partner. I was not in a good relationship at the time. My girlfriend at the time once said she thought one of the songs was about her but she didn't say which and didn't say anything more about it when I asked her, so I guess we'll never know which one she thought it was.
5. You Know What I Think Your Problem Is?
This songs a real slam against myself, talking about the issues I have as a person and how I should just get off my ass and do something. I had just finished uni and my parents were breathing down my neck about how I had to make myself useful, though 2 years later and I've still failed at doing that... In my mind this song is ginger, whatever that means, but imagine the person singing is really ginger, maybe you'll see what I mean, probably not. Anyways I'll finally be moving out soon so hopefully I can finally get out there and do something.
6. Just One Touch
This song was the biggest pain to master, it sounds too different from the rest of the album to master it the same way so I had to do a bunch of trial and error to have it sound dark and heavy while not also sounding like a bucket of mud. I really wanted to make a low, heavy, sleazy club song. I was on that indie sleeve revival train a year before Charli XCX, she totally robbed me.... This song’s also probably the simplest lyrically, I don't think people are usually trying to hear poetry at the club.
7. Close My Eyes Too (Soon)
This song mixes the relationship issues with the sleeping issues, wanting to spend time with someone else but feeling like you close your eyes too soon and miss out on spending as much time as you could with them, FOMO. This song doesn't have a chorus, instead it's got some pretty cool guitar sections, it also leads pretty well into the next song.
8. Send Me to Sleep
This and the previous track leading into each other was a total accident. I wanted the songs to end and the next to start immediately after, sorta like on ‘Bee Thousand’ and ‘Alien Lanes’ by Guided by Voices. It just so happened that this worked super well for these two songs. This one’s a lot of fun, the lead guitars and bass are both super energetic on this.
9. How We Changed
This song I think is the song most explicitly about Trans on the album. It's about finally getting on HRT and how I imagined I'd feel meeting some of the people I knew from high school now. Thankfully I haven't had any encounters like that. Also it's a fun lil punky number, which is always nice to have.
10. Alien
This one’s inspired by 'Aliens Exist' by Blink-182 and 'Batter Up' by Brand new, two very different sounding songs I'm aware. I thought it was interesting having two such different songs both about alien encounters. Mine's a little more toxic yuri than either of those songs though. I really like the build at the end, really good energy there and feels very cathartic to me.
11. Be Right Back
For the last song I wanted something about coming back, saying that I wasn't gonna put out this one album and then give up, that I was going to be back with more no matter what. In it's less meta meaning it's about always coming back to the same person again and again despite knowing it's unhealthy and that you really shouldn't. It also features a sick guitar solo, there's unfortunately not many on this album so I'm glad I made this one count.