Presenting: The White Tomato
Before we begin, you need to know a couple of things, most importantly, that I have an alter ego named Mannifred LaCroix. Manni, as he is affectionately known, pops up from time to time for reasons I don't fully understand. Long ago, he wrote and recorded an album of songs while on a camping trip, and while he worked on them quite some time, it never did see the light of day (save for one music video called "General Delivery.") Back in 2018 when I was recording my previous album "Art Damage" Mannifred was simultaneously recording an EP titled "International Agent." He nearly finished that EP but again, it was never made available.
People who know me may recall that in 2020 during the clusterfuck known as the Covid-19 "lockdowns" I started doing some livestreaming. I was having quite a bit of fun transforming from a musician who had been performing live primarily, often several nights a week, into an online entertainer. It gave me a chance to show more of my personality and be silly with skits and guests. But like most of us, I grew fatigued by the ongoing pandemic, and in light of the civil unrest and unravelling of society, I found it impossible to create new songs. Instead, I set about doing some archival projects so I could preserve music I had been involved in making that I wanted to be brought over into the new age. So I put together my "Recollection: 2010-2020" album. Then, following the death of my collaborator Amy Crosby, I worked with other members of our former band Shitting Glitter to release a posthumous album of previously unfinished and/or unreleased songs.
I had one burst of creative energy right at the end of completing the Shitting Glitter project, which was released as "Damn Skippy Baby" in September, 2023. The very next month, as Mannifred LaCroix, I wrote and recorded a 5-song EP, "Denizens of Doomland," that I released quietly on Bandcamp.
With that, and after a gap of a couple years when I had completely stopped performing live after moving to a new city, I finally started thinking about performing again, and I began practicing these songs as well as Mannifred's older songs. I was even going to start livestreaming again as Mannifred and see how far I could take that character. Eventually, this led back to trying to finish the "International Agent" EP that Mannifred had recorded in 2018.
I dusted off three songs from that EP, but then began to write new songs, and soon I realized I was finally working on a new Devin Tait project! Now that you know the backstory, here is a track-by-track commentary on each song on the album.
1. Hit it Again - This was one of the last songs that I wrote for the album, which was still back when it was going to be "International Agent." I wanted something with a short, punchy title and I was just playing with words and landed upon "Hit it Again." I was thinking of it in terms of being an opener for the album and it came about extremely quickly. I wrote and recorded it, and re-recorded the vocals a few times and then I sent it to be mixed. When I played it in the car for Dylan, he said he didn't think it sounded "finished." So I overreacted, completely started over again, changing some of the chords and a couple of lyrics, and then reimagined it as a full band song, with saxophone, guitar and live bass. I found some amazing collaborators and ended up with a song that I am immensely proud of and may be my favorite to date.
2. Civil Twilight - I stumbled upon the wikipedia page for Civil Twilight one day and made a mental note that it would make a nice title for a Mannifred song and/or EP title. So when I decided to finish "International Agent" in 2023 and beyond, the title jumped back out to me and I came up with the concept and lyrics very quickly. The demo ended up not changing much for what I thought would be the finished album version. As I was putting together the promotion and marketing plans for "The White Tomato," I commissioned several remixes of key tracks. When I heard the Bilal Studio mix of this song, I was blown away. It sounded more like a hit than anything I've ever recorded, at least to my ears, so I made a last-minute change and made the remix the album version. I released the original version as a b-side on the single, so that people can hear the evolution.
3. The Spy Who Loved Me - One of the major changes and reasons I haven't played live in the past few years is that before we left LA, I sold almost all of my musical equipment and used the proceeds to purchase a new keyboard/workstation that I still haven't quite mastered. While experimenting with its presets, I came up with this instrumental riff that was really cool, and I kind of sang along nonsense syllables and after the part which is now the titular lyric, I would always junp up and down, fist pumping, pretending I had legions of fans jumping up and down around me! So, in other words, I kinda felt like this song could be a hit. At the time, I was very much working on the International Agent EP or album idea, and realized I needed to replace a couple of tracks ("Suspension of Disbelief" and "Fairy Boy") because they weren't working no matter what I did. I needed a new song, and I thought maybe I could turn that keyboard jam into something. I wanted to bolster the theme so I decided to call it "The Spy Who Loved Me," make that the line at the crescendo of the chorus, and then build everything up around that. Thankfully, it worked!
4. Duchess of Despair - This is the first song that was original to the "International Agent" EP, and I recorded "final" vocals for it back in 2018/19. Around 2024 I started reworking it a little, really keeping the main idea and sound but originally it was kind of the same electronic drum beat and sounds all the way through. I had been messing around with playing it on my piano and I liked how it sounded with minimal instrumentation so I decided to start sparse and build up to the larger sound, ultimately ending with the "choir" effect. Frederico Medeiros, who played the guitar on "Hit it Again," added a new dimension with his guitar work here. If you know me and the bands I love, you may be able to tell who the inspiration is musically on this one.
5. Indigo Cassinova - Another song that was originally written and recorded for Manni, this one didn't change too much all the way through the process until the very end. It had been finished almost to my satisfaction way back when, so it was the first or second song that I sent to Craig Levy at Little Pioneer Cider House to mix and master. I was always a tad worried because I did use a lot of the preset sounds and drum patterns in Logic to create this song and it always remained fairly sparse. Like Civil Twilight, I ended up having the song remixed and preferred the version that Dimas Pradana did. It was inspired by one of my favorite bands, Voice of the Beehive, and their song "Adonis Blue" and is an ode to and intentional misspelling of Italian legend Giacomo Casanova.
6. Bug Someone Else - This was going to be the opening track of "International Agent" and I had never finished it because I hadn't found a female vocalist to do the other vocal lines. At the beginning of the process of really creating what would becoming "The White Tomato" I decided I wanted to collaborate with my friend Nicki Tedesco, who is a bassist, vocalist and songwriter who produces her own music as well as amazing live streams and shows both online and in real life. I decided to ask her if she would play the bass on this song, because I kind of liked the bassline I had written but didn't like the clunky synth bass sound I had originally used. And while she was recording the bass, I realized she should sing the other vocal line - so it just all worked out very well!
7. Denizen X - This song previously appeared on the "Denizens of Doomland" EP by Mannifred LaCroix that I mentioned. I didn't change it too much, but I re-recorded the vocals and made a couple tweaks to the instrumentation, since I had time. The instrumental track actually started out as a demo for Shitting Glitter when Amy and I were working on some new stuff around 2018 or so, and I always liked it and wished I could find a use for it. When I decided to write and record "Denizens of Doomland" in one week or whatever it was, I knew I'd have to use some stuff I already had laying around, so I quickly wrote lyrics to this and recorded vocals over the instrumental track and that was that! It came together in a couple of hours.
8. ROSEGOLD/WINTERGREEN - When I was initially working on "International Agent" I knew I wanted an instrumental track that would sound like a spy movie soundtrack, but I hadn't actually written anything until years later when I decided to revisit and finish the project. It was similar to the track "Welcome to Doomland" on the Mannifred EP in that I literally just took a few minutes, five or so, to come up with the bulk of the song. With almost no tweaking I decided it was done and forgot about it for months while I recorded everything else. Then finally near the end of the process, when I got the second version of "Hit it Again" with the beautiful saxophone work by Hugo Lee, I knew I had to incorporate that again on another track - for consistency, if nothing else! It was a pretty natural idea to include Saxophone here, and we worked together on what the lines would be, and Hugo did some phenomenal improvising as well. The title is meant to sound like a codename for a top secret operation, or a password of some sort.
9. Don't Die - Once again, around the time when I decided to get rid of two of the original songs on "International Agent," I knew I'd need some new songs to complete it, and I envisioned "Don't Die" as the closing track. The original instrumental was completed very quickly and was all electronic and pretty dark sounding. I got to a point where I considered it finished, and decided I wanted to mix the song as well, which I then struggled with. Eventually, I decided to have Frederico, who had already recorded the amazing guitar parts for "Hit it Again" and "Duchess of Despair," to add some guitar to this for some organic texture. Once he sent back his work, I heard the song going in a new direction, so I remixed it and built it back up a little more around his guitar parts. There are some deeply personal lyrics here but there are also some that tell a story inspired by Twin Peaks, specifically season three (known as "The Return"). Real Peaks Freaks will probably pick up on it immediately.
BONUS - Gertrude - I can't remember exactly when this song came about but I'm pretty sure I always intended it to be the b-side for whatever the first single would be. This song is sort of just something I did to have a completely different flavor from the album, and is my attempt to be more goth or witch house. I experimented with some concepts of different horror stories, including the famous Shirley Jackson short "The Lottery" as well as one from my own childhood imagination (the legend of ol' "Gertie" Gertrude).
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