Marmalade - The Why

Content warning - this is some dark stuff. Horrible boundaries, emotional and psychological abuse, and descriptions of psychosis within. If you haven’t yet, I’d go give the entire album a listen through - (streaming)[https://dashboard.dittomusic.com/releases/view/1121879/details] or on (Bandcamp)[https://fusterclucker.bandcamp.com/album/marmalade] before reading this.

The story of Marmalade started in late February and early March of 2018. The last two years before that had been hell for everyone, but especially me. I’d gone from being homeless for the middle part of 2016 to living in a house I called the Shithole - so named because I had a roommate that was as fetid as the excrement the house was named after, and because you could never tell what time it was when you looked at the oven - one or the other of the LCD parts of the numbers wouldn’t display … unless you pressed on the plastic, then the cockroach covering it would skitter and you could tell the time. In between those two those two living situations, I’d lived with an absolute monster of a human being who insisted I needed to get high because I clearly had mental health problems, and then snapped at me when I asked that she not cook food 10 feet away from my bed in the living room when I needed to get up and take care of other people the next day. As far as how I both ended up living outside in Forest Park in NW Portland, OR and how I got out of the woods there involved a pair of people with almost identical mental health issues and my own mental health problems - in other words, it’s a story to ask me in person if you ever meet me to.

I spent every day from election night 2015 onward refreshing (Metafilter)[https://metafilter.com] to reading the latest politics news, and so fucking angry that a fascist clown car had taken over the government. I’d gone to a few marches, but me and crowds was not a good combo at the time - I had severe stuff around panic, and some stuff around feeling cornered even when I wasn’t. I hadn’t snapped, but I knew those triggers were there so I didn’t want to expose myself to that potential (don’t worry, I got help for that + the undiagnosed PTSD after I wrote this monstrosity).

So … I internalized it, letting my rage that I was watching an abusive cycle I’d just gotten out of - twice - be inflicted on us as a nation by a sociopathic manbaby just sit. It wasn’t a wonder I was smoking so much weed. Then, my number one stoner friend turned out to be a super problematic dude, and out he had to go from my life for my mental health.

Stoners, when smoking alone, rarely stay stoners in my opinion. They tend to sort their shit out, the way people do, and then drop the ganja after a certain time. I’d dropped the problematic in December of 2017, and by late February, I just couldn’t continue self medicating with pot in my room in the Shithole, so I quit. Within the first two weeks, I had the rough framework of all of the songs and lyrics, I’d formatted my Linux Mint machine to run the kxstudio distro that no longer exists, and had begun writing nonstop. Over the next few months, the rough recordings for all of the tracks would be laid down. I’d pick the problem friend back up and with him, the ganja (again, a story for in person if you’re ever cursed with the horrible luck to make that happen) which slowed me down, but didn’t stop me - after I got it out of my system, I wanted to make it out in the world.

Opening Night, the Wall of Cogs, and Outside were all the contextualization of the story - who Marmalde is, the forces that both constrained and enabled him, and the rest of us outside the halls of power watching as he smeared feces all over our institutions. The Power of Faith was my one attempt at comedy on the album, and in retrospect it’s just weird. I mean, the whole thing is weird, but that part is particularly strange.

As I delved deeper into the process of refining the parts, the synth sounds, the song structures and lyrics, it began to occur to me that although Marmalade was a caricature of Drumpf, he was also the darkness in me. Discordia was both about his management style and the way my ex boss ran her business as far as managing people (and many other ex bosses besides her). Mein Schmerz and Nightmares were almost directly a byproduct of experiencing psychosis towards the end of my time while homeless - Mein Schmerz about the paranoia of being alone in the woods, while Nightmares more directly about the experience of watching things that you know are solid and real be bent around and change in front of your eyes by your brain, simply trying to process trauma.

Fallout in particular was my screaming at the helplessness of being in poverty, the rage that came with it. When you’re so poor you’re eating beef liver and heart because they’re cheaper than cheap chicken, and you have to ration sauerkraut and meat … you get angry at the societal forces that put you there. Even moreso when you’re watching some obese tangerine skinned idiot threaten to nuke a hurricane. Add some unresolved anger from my previous ex, some from my family, and years of listening to metal … well something like Fallout was the result.

The Torchbearer and Lowdown Showdown in contrast, were prayers. They were prayers for salvation, for justice for everyone who had been wronged by Lord Commander Marmalade and for justice for me for all the wrongs I’d felt had been done without accountability to the people who did them*. They were redemption - not for Marmalade, but for the rest of us.

The process continued on. A van drove into the Shithole, forcing me to put all my stuff in storage. I moved into an apartment with the problematic friend, only to have a second psychotic break, pack my stuff back into storage, moved to Arizona, got actual mental help and sorted out my life in a huge way. I met Katherine, who would be the secretary’s voice on Fallout, and fell in love - truly in love - for the first time in years. And for that entire time, I was working on the tunes - playing them on guitar, refining them in my mind. Eventually, Katherine and I flew to Oregon in August 2020 - you know, when COVID was ravaging the land), got all my stuff, and then got to work because I knew the album needed to be finished before the Idiot In Chief left office, which by then I was certain he would based on how bad COVID had been mishandled. I knew nothing about mixing and mastering an album - it shows in the final result - but I got it “done” a week before my birthday, and released it as a birthday present to myself.

Now, going back almost 2 years later and thinking about it … it feels so distant and so very viscerally real at the same time. I sympathize with the anger I felt, but also realize now that the majority of it was misplaced and had I just gotten a good therapist who could actually help me process my emotional trash, I probably wouldn’t have needed to resort to writing an album that was a parade of genres. At the same time, that exact pain and the whole process brought me here.

I have a few people to thank. Antogmusic from Fiverr for the incredible piano on Architect of the Past, (Rich)[https://intoapathy.bandcamp.com/album/oceans-of-sorrow] (Staats)[https://richstaats.bandcamp.com/album/the-void] for his awesome guitar work on the same piece as well as letting me record using his super nice tube amps on Fallout. Katherine for supporting me through the whole process and helping me break the feedback loops and cycles that required that kind of screwed up story for catharsis. And Richard Hajarazadeh for feedback, jokes, and sanity through the beginning of the writing process.