Three Music Thingz with Miserable chillers
Get outta town, it's another rendition of Three Music Thingz, the blogseries where I ask musicians for three thingz that are essential to their music-making.
Today we have Miserable chillers! Miserable chillers is the musical identity of Miguel Gallego, who just put out an intriguing project called Great American Turn Off.
By his description, it's a mixtape that helped him "get back in touch with a more spontaneous and un-self-conscious mode of creation"—he took this past spring to quickly finish a batch of songs in various states of completion, enlisting the help of collaborators like Dylan Balliet of Spirit Night and friend-of-the-blog Sun Kin to add their various musical pizazzes, then putting the whole thing out solely on his website and YouTube in the manner of Cindy Lee's Diamond Jubilee.
Beyond its utility as an intentional but lowkey way to release music, I really like the format of the mega-YouTube video as it relates to the tunes of Great American Turn Off, which are pleasantly melodic, lush with piano and saxophone, bouncing gently on a suspension system of expressive bass lines. "After The Show" unspools a certain post-gig yearning ("After the show I'm left with the feeling / I'm buried in snow or stuck on the ceiling") over gentle guitar-picking; "Wannabe" has a melancholy, turn-of-the-'80s lounge indulgence that reminds me of Christopher Cross (he of the iconic movie song "Arthur's Theme (Best That You Can Do)."
Gallego's earnest voice and carefully crafted guitar tie everything together, and sending all the songs forth in one blended batch enhances their overall mood, which I'd place somewhere along the lines of "elegant picnic that extends far past its end-time, leaving everyone involved tipsy and sun-toasted." Alternately, I'd love to hear these songs played at high volume in an empty and haunted shopping mall, bouncing off the drained coin-strewn fountain and defunct Orange Julius stand. It's good stuff!
Gallego shared his three music thingz with the blog, which you should read right now...
- Time
Time, lots of it, and all different kinds. The ‘mixtape’ comprises songs I had left incomplete from the past six years. I probably did need all this time to finish them. Most of my songs start with stolen time, maybe fifteen minutes at a piano or guitar when I’m working from home, or cleaning, to see if I can find an idea. Then it sits as a voice memo on my phone for weeks or months or years until it becomes unfamiliar and I can rediscover it and get excited by it, maybe on a Saturday afternoon when my partner’s working at the fish market and I’m trying to record some music. I need a lot of time thinking about the lyrics, even more time avoiding thinking about them, a lot of time not being able to work on music and wanting to, a lot of time free to make music and wanting to do anything else.
I did most of the work on this record this spring, finding old songs and revising, re-recording, thinking about why they were left unfinished, which usually meant reflecting on time. I don’t think I understood exactly what I fell out of love with the songs at the time I had abandoned them, but hindsight offered some clarity--that I was trying to do too much, say something I don’t mean, trying be the kind of musician I think I ought to be rather than the one I am. I needed time to strip back the pretense, to get a better handle on who I am and what it is I do. - Peers
Releasing music and sharing it with the world is always an odd experience—I put all this energy into promoting it on social media, cold emailing bloggers, making ‘content’ to share, etc—ostensibly to reach other people who might enjoy and connect with it. But I’m not sure I’ll ever feel more understood than I do by my peers, bandmates and collaborators, and the people within my own music community whom I admire. The only new music I really listen to is the music those people make. I feel most inspired seeing bands like Turbo World, Kolb, Starla Online perform, who all, in their own way, realize something I long to in my own music.
I wanted to celebrate that understanding with this set of songs, so I asked people with whom I make and talk about music, to sing different songs. Samuel Lang Budin, who plays bass in the live band, sings “Easter,”– a song about grief I wrote, recorded, and abandoned in 2020–giving it new life with his vulnerable, tender reading. Dylan Balliet of Spirit Night sings “Done Dancing” with a palpable, almost nervous, yearning that really sharpens the song’s desire for God to show up to the party once and a while. Kabir Kumar, of Sun Kin and Guppy, gives “After The Show” an effortlessness that compliments its mystery. To hear someone sing my own song better than I ever could is to feel truly understood. - Experience
I am not the kind of songwriter who can tap into the flow of my feelings and express them in song. It’s taken me a while to not see that as a fault. Trying to finish this set of songs, some of which had been lingering around my hard drive for over six years, I wound up reflecting a bit on my process and where the songs end up coming from. A lot of it is collaged—found text, memories, images, and ideas. The best I can do as a songwriter is to discover some connections between the disparate encounters of daily life.
The opening track, “Journeying with Julian” began as a children’s song in response to a sweet video of a baby octopus swimming in the water I saw last summer while visiting friends in California. (Sweet things make anyone want to sing.) The title is borrowed from a book on Julian of Norwich that I found, months later, at one of the book sales of the late Television frontman Tom Verlaine’s collection. He was a voracious used book collector and reportedly the scourge of The Strand’s outdoor dollar shelves. I found this one amidst the astrology and vegetarian cook books. A few weeks ago, when I was scrambling to finish the last couple of songs for the record, I flipped through it looking for phrases that would match the cadence of the melody. I had been, coincidentally, thinking about a friend of mine named Julian who had been having a hard time. It all converged there and the lyrics came together pretty quickly—a song of reassurance to Julian via Julian of Norwich. My partner, Kate Ehrenberg, sings it really sweetly.
I think I have to soak it up, everything that happens to me and around me, and hold on to the things that stick with me, without being too preoccupied with how exactly it will turn into art. Yesterday I was biking home from a doctor’s appointment and rode through two open fire hydrants—what a great experience, the fearful anticipation just before and the joy after, feeling a bit more cool and a bit more free. I thought, “oh, I should incorporate this into a song somehow.” I’m sure it will come out one way or another. Every kind of thing will be well.
Thank you Miguel!! Listen to Great American Turn Off, avail only on YouTube and the Miserable chillers website.
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