INFINITE NORMAL track 9: “the grass is quicksand”

This is one of my personal favorite productions I’ve ever made. Groovy, angry, fun. Musically I’m combining lots of influences here: tool, the knife, afrobeat, swagger-y alt country with autotune thrown in.

Something I’ll call out here is the 30+ second intro that largely doesn’t change much until the drums abruptly kick in. Another example of me wanting to really settle into spaces musically on this album & let the listener really soak it in.

Lyrically the entire song originated from the vocal refrain you hear about halfway through the song: “sorry I don’t make the rules”

At the time I was really into Kafka & bureaucracy & our tendency to talk past each other & not listen, and thinking about this in context of both enshittification of the internet and some difficult conversations I’ve had with family members. The rest of the song evolved from that quite quickly.

There’s an oblique reference to my earlier song “oxycodone”, in which the subject can’t sleep/eat/breathe/see; in this case, the subject is lashing out, reiterating their need for these things as the source of the frustration in the song.

Listen (again) to “the grass is quicksand”, but in the context of the album: https://kidlightbulbs.bandcamp.com/track/the-grass-is-quicksand