Pet Projects
Plus an interview with Daxma
If you stuck around for the footnotes in last week’s newsletter, it’ll be no surprise to you that this week’s guest on Lamniformes Radio is Jessica T. of the band Daxma. If you didn’t read the footnotes… Surprise! The guest on this week’s episode of Lamniformes Radio is violinist and vocalist Jessica T. of the Californian doom metal band Daxma. Daxma just released their second full length album Unmarked Boxes. I’ve been a fan since the band pitched me their first full length album The Head Which Becomes The Skull back in 2016 when I was working at Invisible Oranges. I liked that album a lot, although I made a point to suggest that the band’s ambition slightly outpaced their execution. I’m proud to say that Daxma’s execution has closed that gap. This new album is great. If you like your heavy metal slow, mournful, and beautiful, this one’s for you. I had a great time talking to Jessica about her late-blooming metal fandom, her time as a classical musician, and the growth of Daxma over the last half decade.
Speaking of classical music - I left my day job in early November. It’s a whole story, so I won’t get into it here. Point is, I’m now in the position of never turning down a gig if it comes my way. And yet, by the end of the month I had done just that. My parents’ upstairs neighbor had reached out to me asking if I were available to take care of their dog during the Thanksgiving weekend. I had to decline. Not out of disinterest, I’ve met that dog and it is adorable. I had to say no because I was already booked to take care of my friend’s cat during the same period of time. The cat is currently staring daggers into my back, waiting for me to either leave or prove myself unable to get to her food before she does.
I am not a pet owner. I’ve never even considered myself to be an animal person. My parents and I cycled through a few different types of rodents while I was growing up1 but cats and dogs were never in the picture. One encounter too many with an aggressive dog in the neighborhood and a slightly-too-young viewing of the trailer for American Werewolf in Paris convinced me that dogs were to be avoided at all times. Cats were at best something to chuckle at on the internet and at worst a source of scratches and sneezes if endured for too long in person.
It wasn’t until after college when I moved in with a friend and his show grade border collie that my position on dogs softened. Since then I’ve had many opportunities to rethink my childhood aversion to our furry friends. I learned how to get along with cats by mirroring their air of disinterest until they decide to chill with me on their own terms. Dogs require a more varied approach, some are immediately down to clown when my rough outline enters the room, others require a Tekken-esque combination of body language adjustments and well timed head scratches to win over.
Learning to get over my youthful anxieties has led to a much improved quality of life overall.2 I love hanging out with my friend’s dogs and I enjoy looking at my friend’s cats from a distance. I’ve even begun harboring fantasies of taking care of an English Bulldog who I’d name after Iron Maiden’s mascot Eddie. Wouldn’t you just love to thump the plump side of a bulldog named Eddie?
Living out this fantasy is still some years away, what with the size of New York apartments and my aforementioned employment status. So instead I’ve had to make do with dog-sitting gigs and the animal-rich world of social media.
Not to stumble directly into the “who rescued who” cliche, but those dog sitting gigs have been a real life saver since the start of the Covid era. The first came at the breaking point of my last apartment’s status quo, when months of working from home and protest attendance had driven us to unsustainable mania. Taking a week off to care for an animal shaped like a breakfast sausage and capable only of unconditional love was a balm.
Any dog owner reading this already knows this, but living with an animal is a great way of getting over yourself. Making sure that this semi-conscious tube of muscles and teeth doesn’t get into trouble requires you to be completely present in the moment. The best part is that this mindfulness is reciprocated by the dog. The two of you learn to pay attention to each other, and very quickly become co-conspirators in the act of getting through the day. She hung out on the couch with me when I watched multiple episodes of Watchmen in a row on her owners mounted TV, and I comforted her when the neighborhood’s reckless teens got too cavalier with their firework usage.
The second dog-sitting gig came much later, just after Ida swept through New York. This pup was significantly more anxious and far less physically sturdy. Learning how to placate a bundle of limbs dressed in cookies’n’cream coloring required me to live on the dog’s schedule, and to humble my own plans to make sure she was staying chill. Eventually we developed enough chemistry to play catch with a tennis ball and relax together while I watched a sub-par entry in the Fast & Furious franchise.
The most important thing that this second dog sitting experience taught me is that pet owners have a significant advantage over the general public when it comes to songwriting. From what I understand you’re supposed to talk to animals when you’re hanging out with them, they appreciate the gesture and can pick up your vibe despite the language barrier. They will happily absorb your mouth sounds without being able to reply in any meaningful linguistic way. A dog cannot tell you that what you just said made no sense because nothing you say “makes sense” to them, strictly speaking. This may not make them good conversationalists in the traditional sense, but it makes them great songwriting partners.
If you’ve never written a song before you might have some misconceptions about how it’s done. Maybe you’re picturing someone at a piano covered in coffee stained sheet music banging away until they’ve built their masterpiece from scratch. Or maybe an artist having some notable experience and being struck by a bolt of inspiration before producing their hit single seemingly out of thin air. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that these versions of the process never happen, but they are outliers. The bread-and-butter of songwriting is much more mundane in my experience. A fragment of a melody gets stuck in my head, I start singing it out loud and over time it accrues new phrases until it feels like a real thing. When I find myself humming something good, or at the very least distinct, I always open up my iPhone voice memos and capture the idea no matter how rough. Sometimes I’ll have a few notes about the arrangement to go with it, but more often than not these memos exist as half formed melodies until I flesh them out at the piano.
The problem with this method is that I have to be comfortable looking really weird in public to do it consistently. If I’m even slightly self conscious about what I’m singing, some ideas stop growing before they even reach my vocal cords. Its only recently that I’ve accepted the momentary awkwardness of pulling out my phone and excusing myself to mumble “na-na-na-naaa” into it while in polite company. Fear of looking weird or being impolite will kill more songs than your own taste ever could.
That said, your taste can kill a LOT of ideas. For a long time I would routinely shut down potential songs if I didn’t think that I could make them into something great. Why waste time on a demo if it wasn’t a potential masterpiece? It turns out that this is an awful way to make art. A silly finished song is worth more to you than a potential opus languishing in your iCloud. Without learning how to finish any kind of song, even a stupid one, how could you possible learn the skills to finish a great one? Get over yourself and do the work.
One way of avoiding this self-critical paralysis is working with another person. Ideally a co-writer will offer the chance to hear things in your rough ideas that you can’t hear yourself. The improve comedy axiom of “yes, and…” can help coax something new and exciting out of an idea that maybe you were too self-conscious to develop on your own. But of course this presumes that your co-writer isn’t suffering from their own self doubt and perfectionism. As much as I love to advocate for collaboration and working together in this newsletter, the reality is that humans are messy and complicated. There’s no guarantee that your co-worker will be any more encouraging to you than you are to yourself. In which case: get a cat.
Pets make terrific co-writers. They make fantastic listeners who won’t dismiss any of your ideas as “stock”. A dog will happily stare at you as you work over a two bar phrase until you’ve found the right combination of syllables and then join in the celebrating once you’ve struck gold. Even if they can’t suggest any ideas of their own, pets will offer up inspiration just by being themselves. One dog’s strange habit of beeping instead of barking inspired me to rewrite the lyrics of “Stay Schemin’” and sing them to her any time she got too rambunctious (“stay beeping/doggie’s trying to get at treats”). Or in the case this current cat sitting gig: “here she comes to kill once more/Penny comes declaring war.” Pets don’t care if the songs you’re singing are any good yet, they’re grateful enough that you’re singing at all, and they provide the right balance of solitude and inspiration to get you singing in the first place.
I started reflecting on the music of pet ownership after I started following Hiroki Takahashi on Instagram. Known on the platform by the username “hirokisan79”, Takahashi has built a following by scoring the strange sounds and behavior of animals. This is a variation on the genre of taking “non-musical” sounds, like TV dialog or Cardi B social media rants,3 and setting them to music. Takahashi’s work strikes me as especially tricky because animals don’t speak in full sentences and never incorporate musical phrasing into their speech expect by accident. Part of the fun of his compositions is that they twist themselves into all sorts of strange shapes to match the rhythm and changing pitch of their source material and frequently end on hilarious anti-climaxes.
Some of my favorite one his videos are duets with notoriously noisy Siberian Huskies. Huskies are especially funny because they’re just melodic enough that their songs nearly fit into blues ballads and opera arias but frequently veer into out and out screaming right when the music has settled in.
His work with cats is also very funny but works in a slightly different register. Cats seem to force him into more daring harmonic movements, or to highlight the discrepancy between how the cat sees itself (as a cold blooded killer and ruler of the household) and their adorable reality.
What keeps me coming back to the page is the humor, sure, but also the musical inventiveness that Takahashi displays with each video. He seems to be able to hear music in places where you’d least expect it, turning some of the strangest noises I’ve heard a dog make into a Tom Waits deep cut, or using a cat’s food bowl petulance as a metronome. Part of the humor is that the music is often quite good, and doesn’t feel like it should come from such silly origins. But of course that’s just how music works. It is everywhere if we choose to hear it.
This may seem like a weird occasion to announce this, but I’ve decided to open up this Substack for paid subscriptions. As I said at the start of the letter I am currently unemployed. Moreover, I’d like to keep writing these newsletters and your support would mean a lot to me. I can’t promise anything concrete in terms of perks at the moment, but maybe once I’ve developed a steady routine I can revisit that subject. In either case, more words next week.
Quick power ranking: 1. Guinea Pigs 2. Gerbils 3. Hamsters. Hamsters are psychos.
This sentence works as a neat summary of the majority of my blog posts.
Personally I’ve never loved these, they veer too close to the ‘Ben Folds 5 doing acoustic covers of rap songs’-style cultural gawking that was so popular when I was in high school. Cardi B’s social media posts already sound musical because, surprise, she’s a musician who’s using social media to build her brand. Her ability to make mundane phrases catchy is a big part of her appeal to begin with. Setting her speaking voice to jazz piano seems like missing the point.