WHITE TOMATO: BUMPER CROP

 

It's been almost 10 months since I released "The White Tomato," my first original album in this decade. I've told the story before of how I had pandemic-induced writers block for several years, no motivation to write new music, let alone record and share it. 

When the floodgates finally opened, I experienced a blur of creativity and productivity which resulted in not only the 9-track album, but four new b-sides and a slew of remixes. Then came a holiday song, and a couple of live shows where I got to perform a couple of the new songs for small crowds of friends in both my new home of Sacramento, and my adopted hometown of LA, where I lived for most of my second (gay) childhood. 

Welp, as happy as I was releasing an album on only digital/streaming format, I finally decided I needed to release a definitive physical version of this album along with the bonus material. As much as I would have loved to go with vinyl, CDs are much more affordable and also able to fit much more music onto one disc.

Once my record label (aka me) made the decision to release the CD I thought, well, I need to add a little something new to make it more appealing, and I remembered I had two songs that went unused despite the fact that they had been there from the very beginning, back in 2018 when I recorded all the vocals for what I thought at that time was an album by my alter ego, Mannifred LaCroix. They never really worked and despite multiple lyrics and title changes I just couldn't make them work. But I though what the hay, I'll just mix them and try to zuzh them up as best as I can.

I opened the long dormant files and realized that one of them, "Fairy Girl," I actually had never recorded any more vocals than just the chorus. The only verses recorded were from when I tried to redo it as I was working on what became The White Tomato, at which point it had been rewritten as "Fairy Boy." I thought maybe I could work with that, but no, there was a reason I had never finished it. 

The second song was "Suspension of Disbelief" which started out as a Pet Shop Boys inspired track where I rapped in a vaguely European sounding accent. That was part of Mannifred's Schtick but it never really worked, so over the years it morphed into other songs including "Foreign Affair." Again, there were no real usable lyrics or vocal takes so I was back down to two instrumentals.

Grabbing my very first LA lyrics journal, I perused the rather childlike poems I had written at various bars around West Hollywood, often at the Sunday Beer Bust at The Palms Bar after a night of partying into the wee hours with the original Shitting Glitter crew. Two lyrics immediately stood out to me.

"Heartbreak Kid" was written based on a real thing that was happening to me at the time and I had always kind of liked it but sort of left it as a poem and never really had a musical idea for it. It seemed to pair up pretty well with the track for "Fairy Girl" so I shared it with a guitar player from Argentina I have been working with and he came up with some fun parts. When I tried to import his tracks into the "Fairy Boy" file (which was still named "Carslbad" - it's original title) something went wrong. I ended up creating a whole new track and building it up around the guitar parts, significantly changing the sound and feel until it got to a point I was really excited about. I couldn't believe I was finally excited about this track that had been sitting on my laptop for the better part of a decade.

"Suspension" proved a little more of a challenge. Initially I paired it with lyrics from a piece I had written called "That I Ask You My Friend," which morphed pretty easily with the existing melody line. However, once my guitarist friend sent his amazing work, I once again reworked the entire track, changing sounds an eliminating parts, it begged for another direction. I found it in the same journal, a piece called "Don't Tempt Me." I had actually thought of a melody and backing for that song but had never actually played or recorded it, it only lived in my head. I had to come up with a new melody to make it fit the track, and drastically rewrote parts of it, while still keeping the original intent because it had always meant something to me. Ultimately it also wanted a different voice on it, and I'm working on that right now as I continue to mix and tweak, while all at the same time continuing to work on the follow up album, which I am now calling "We Coulda Had It All" after a line from the song "Don't Wanna Say I Told Ya."

Life works in funny ways. 20 year old me would be mortified that "old" Devin is spending his free time writing and recording new songs and putting them on the internet, pretending that there are people out there listening to it (OK, I do check my streaming stats so I know someone is listening) and even filming music videos to go with them! But the funny thing about "old" Devin is that I don't care about anything other than making these songs and listening to them out in the world. It gives me great pleasure and makes me feel like this world is still a place I want to be in and fight for, despite how jaded and exhausted I may be. Basically, music gives me life, so brace yourselves because I am not stopping any time soon!