Kyle Phaneuf

Political:

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 06:28:58 GMT

The original version of this song went on for another four or five minutes! Restraint is important in all forms of art. "Brevity is the soul of wit." I'm pretty sure Joe Pesci or someone said that.

She was not yours to take; She was never up for sale.

To Believe is a Disease From Which I Wish I Suffered:

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 05:10:47 GMT

My music has always had some pretty strong religious elements in them. I can't really account for that. I come from a very non-religious household, where God was never discussed - positively or negatively. I guess the whole concept does interest me, though. Especially religious conflict - battles with faith and doubt - which is something I never got to experience. This track is To Believe is a Disease From Which I Wish I Suffered.

He believes in heaven.

Tired of Livin':

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 05:15:36 GMT

I was listening to a lot of Braid and Sufjan Stevens during the year or so I was writing and recording these songs - as per usual, I suppose. I don't know if that comes across at all. I do share Braid's interest in unconventional song structures and I tried to do a little bit of of Sufjan-style layering with these tracks. This one is Tired of Livin'.

I'm tired of passing each day alone and if it's all the same to you now, I'd just assume be gone.

Everyone Kill Kyle:

Thu, 17 Dec 2009 05:51:19 GMT

The other good piece of advice I received was to lay off the high end. I was a little reluctant to actually do this, being a big fan of treble, but it was the right thing to do. Obviously, it's still a very trebly album, but hopefully it sounds a little less dirty for cutting it a bit, especially in the vocals. Oh, this one's called Everyone Kill Kyle.

I tried so hard to try.

Alexis, Krista, Courtney:

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 05:44:35 GMT

I mentioned earlier that I received some good mixing advice after I posted the demo of I Liked You Before it Was Cool. The first suggestion was to mix the guitars to the extreme left and right, allowing for a cleaner, fuller sound. It was sound advice (get it?), and after trying it out I went back and mixed the whole album that way. This song is called Alexis, Krista, Courtney.

I only miss you when you're miserable.

Modern Romance:

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 05:15:09 GMT

The influence Levi Bailey has had on my music can not be understated. It was his records Ten Fingers: Five Yours, Five Mine and Habits Like Self-Love that inspired me to start writing music in the first place and I've been continuing to emulate his blunt and profane lyrics to this day. To be honest, those emulations have often skirted the line between homage and outright theft.

This is a song with an obvious Bailey influence called Modern Romance. With apologizes to Albert Brooks and the Rapture.

I think you owe me.

Still Waiting:

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 05:47:04 GMT

Like all my albums, in Praise of Frailty has two very distinct sides, in this case each composing of ten tracks. As Side A opens with the similar sounding and similarly titled Still Writing, Side B opens with Still Waiting. It has handclaps!

They always make you wait until you've waited your whole life away.

I Liked You Before It Was Cool:

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 18:03:39 GMT

I posted this song earlier this year as a teaser for the final album. This version is mixed a bit better, following some advice I received from a record producer. I'll talk about that later. For now, enjoy the Side A closer, I Liked You Before it Was Cool. And have a nice weekend while you're at it.

Accosted for being and having been, but I guess I deserve it.

I Hate You, Captain Lindon:

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 15:08:45 GMT

Unlike my last two albums, there aren't any songs on in Praise of Frailty written about films or other people's stories. This song's title is a reference to Lewis Carroll's Bruno & Sylvie, though, which is a book I read last summer. I guess it must have had some kind of affect on me. It's called I Hate You, Captain Lindon.

What came over you?

You Were Supposed to Save My Life:

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 18:29:27 GMT

This is me channeling a little Kurt Cobain, I guess. My favorite Nirvana was always Unplugged in New York anyway. It's a song called You Were Supposed to Save My Life.

I thought we could be better than you or I alone.

These Familiar Roads:

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 17:17:37 GMT

This is the shortest song on the album, and also the shortest song I've ever written at just over thirty seconds long. Sometimes that's all you need to say what you want to say. It's titled These Familiar Roads.

Waiting and wearing your best sweater and a new haircut.

Your Empty Veins:

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 18:07:19 GMT

I wrote this song before vampires became such a big cultural phenomenon, but now it seems like I'm just piggybacking on the zeitgeist. Drat! Anyway, I played this song at a campfire last summer and not only did it make people laugh, I got a few "Yeah!"s at the "This time you won't laugh..." line. Probably the single biggest success of my career. It's called Your Empty Veins.

I will find you when I come back; teeth into flesh.

We Are Also That Which We Lose:

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 18:10:55 GMT

Then final rule was songs must be under two minutes. Obviously, this rule was not always adhered to, although the first several songs I wrote for in Praise of Frailty were between one and two minutes long. This one (which is just over one minute long) is called We Are Also That Which We Lose.

In the eyes of every woman that I meet I look for unexpressed intentions of trying to save me.

Morning, Again:

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 05:54:12 GMT

The second rule I set for myself was that lyrics had to be written as soon as the music was. Usually when I write, lyrics come much later, after I've been fooling around with the chords for some time. With in Praise of Frailty, I didn't want to have lyrics holding up a song from being recorded. This meant lyrics were written very quickly, almost stream of conscious. Often they were simply sounded out from the nonsense words I was singing when I wrote the music. This song is called Morning, Again.

Whatever. It doesn't matter. Just forget it. I never think about it.

Adrien in the Sea:

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 05:06:12 GMT

I began the album with a very specific set of rules in an attempt to avoid the frustration I was experiencing finishing up in Any Other Place. The first rule was that songs had to be recorded as soon as they were written: I didn't want to leave a song sitting around to be tinkered with. What that means is most of these songs were written only minutes before the version you're hearing was recorded. This one is called Adrien in the Sea.

In the sea there's a man: the last that still remembers me.

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 05:05:23 GMT

I started writing the songs that would become in Praise of Frailty during the recording of my last album in Any Other Place. Trying to finish up the recording of that piece, I became frustrated and tried to relieve some stress by writing and recording some very loose songs very quickly. This one is called Cermak / Chinatown.

You told me when we used to be lovers.

Still Writing:

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 05:22:06 GMT

I'm going to try something a bit different this time. Instead of releasing in Praise of Frailty - my fourth album as Kyle Phaneuf - all at once, I'm going to post one song a day, every weekday of December until Christmas. You can download each track individually as they're released or download the whole album altogether at the end, if you prefer. Either way, this is the album opener, Still Writing.

With sincerity in words and competency in chords.

in Praise of Frailty:

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 17:02:07 GMT

Visioneers - An Analysis:

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 07:01:31 GMT

Disclaimer: If you haven't yet seen the Visioneers, you might not want to read this analysis of it. Obviously, there are major spoilers featured ahead, and this film is best experienced without any previous ideas of its contents.

If you have seen Visioneers, I welcome you to read on and add your thoughts. The beauty of this film is what I get out of it may be completely different than what you did.

In 1985, Terry Gilliam prophesied a future that, in the ensuing decades, has only seemed to become more inevitable. The world of Gilliam's Brazil is one where advertising and consumerism have run rampant, and bureaucracy is so deeply imbedded in the culture that doing anything requires going through paperwork to secure the proper paperwork.

In 2008, Jared and Brandon Drake imagined a similar future; one in which America has become a fully corporate state owned and operated by the omnipresent Jeffers Corporation, and bureaucracy has once again trumped logic, rational thought and even humanity itself.

In fact, in the Drakes' Visioneers, the people of the U.S. have fallen so out of touch with their own humanity that they're literally exploding. And one of those most at risk is mid-level Jeffers employee George Washington Winsterhammerman, played with blank-faced desperation by Zach Galifiniakis.

George is showing all the warning signs. He's depressed, binges on junk food, has no interest in sex with his wife and - worst of all - he dreams. But dreams, what the rest of the world sees as a deadly symptom of stress, is in actuality humanity trying to reclaim itself.

This is illustrated by George's brother Julieen. Like George, he used to work for the Jeffers Corporation. "I was a level five," Julieen tells George. "A king. I had it all."

But even in his comfortable, high level office job, he began to have dreams. Specifically, he dreamt of being a pole-vaulter, so he quit his job, moved to South America and found happiness. Just as George is beginning to have dreams of his own, Julieen returns to his brother and asks to live in his pool house in an attempt to assemble a world-class pole-vaulting team.

Julieen's recklessness is infectious, if not to George, than at least to the band of teenagers and twenty-somethings he recruits. But when his pole-vaulters unintentionally become a twenty four seven freewheeling party, even Julieen seems despondent. Watching the kids playing music and volleyball and dancing and shouting, he confesses to George that he feels he's failed his dreams. "These kids don't care about pole-vaulting," he says, without even seeming to realize or care about the fact that he inadvertently began a revolution in his brother's backyard.

Unlike his brother, George doesn't want to follow his dreams, he just wants to get rid of them. So he hires renowned professional friend "Rodge the Codge" to relieve his stress and he goes to the doctor (on his employers' insistence) and takes prescribed medicine to stop the dreams. Instead, his dreams only become more vivid and consistent.

It's clear George used to be satisfied with his mundane life, but somewhere along the way he realized he wasn't happy. His job as a cog in a bureaucratic machine - relaying relayed messages to be relayed even further - is soul-crushing. His wife, Michelle, with whom he eats take-out fried chicken with while watching television before the two segregate into separate rooms to watch separate shows, has nothing to say and no life of her own. She blindly follows the purported wisdom of Sahra - an Oprah-like talk show host who, like all her viewers, is in a desperate bid to find out how to be happy - but she can't admit that the life they've built has nothing of real substance.

Sahra recommends her viewers a book called '1001 Ways to Be Happy,' in which the giddy author lists things that make her happy and may possibly make the readers happy as well. So Michelle buys her family satin robes and suggests increasingly bizarre uses for butter until Sahra and Michelle reach the one thousand and first way to be happy.

"Happiness is being happy!?" Sahra shouts at her guest. "What kind of idiot would write something like that?"

Apparently giving up on happiness for good, Sahra kills herself during her broadcast, and Michelle has every intention of following suit. But when George comes home he finds her sitting on the bed still holding a shotgun. "I put the gun in my mouth and I pulled the trigger," she meekly tells him. "But she didn't tell us to buy shells."

George also has a son, whom the viewer never sees. We hear that he comes home from school and locks himself in his room all day long, and eventually, when George opens the door, he finds the son has escaped via a tied bedsheet-rope out the window. We also know that he orders books about wolves off the internet. What any of this means is never explicitly stated. Is George's sun as unhappy as the rest of his family? Does he, like his uncle, yearn to follow his dreams out of the suburban mediocrity of his home? Or is he, instead, merely rebelling against his family's depression? Does he wish for nothing more than the stability that suburban mediocrity offers? Perhaps he didn't escape to find adventure, but rather to flee from it.

Regardless, both George's professional and personal life leave something to be desired. The only thing that seems to make him happy is the subtle flirting of a supervisor at work, a woman whom he's never seen or met, but who talks to him in a sincere way, unlike anyone else at Jeffers Corporation or in his life as a whole, for that matter. When she forwards forms to George's office, she draws a smiley face on an affixed post-it.

But the Jeffers Corporation is a company that worships at the shrine of efficiency. A scrolling ticker in every office displays how many more "minutes of productivity" are left before the weekend. And to further drive the point home, the ticker announces this information every sixty seconds.

While it's never clear exactly what Jeffers Corp. actually does, the irony between the endless bureaucracy and the emphasis on productivity is obvious. Regardless of whether or not the company gets any work done, the management is obsessed with the concept of constant movement. So when Charisma, George's office crush, isn't meeting her minimum daily productivity, she's quickly fired, taking the one bright spot of George's day away.

Soon George's dreams begin to feature Charisma, and he decides - not unlike his brother - to take the hint and find her. That search leads to a small, rural town, apparently outside the influence of the massive Jeffers Corporation. Charisma has begun working as a waitress in her father's café and she admits she's harbored a mutual affection for George.

It's easy to see why. Under the fluorescent lights and pale green wall color of the Jeffers Corporation, George and Charisma are the only people who treat each other like actual human beings, even if their only conversations are about announcements from upper management. It could be possible that it was Charisma's sincerity that changed George in the first place - that she was the first one, his wife included, who genuinely talked to him.

But George is too shy to make a move, and Charisma sees his wedding ring as a certainty that nothing will ever happen, and they part ways. Then, following a rash of explosions, the president of Jeffers Corp., with the President of the United States seated by his side, announces the mandatory use of emotion-diffusers to rural areas and other "at-risk" people. In an effort to keep people from blowing up, the emotion-diffusers transform citizens into constantly happy but brain-dead followers of authority. When George notices Charisma's area is receiving the emotion-diffusers, he rushes to save her.

Or kill her, it isn't quite clear. Receiving advice from Mr. Jeffers himself (who contacted him because he liked a picture he drew), George is told his existential pain will disappear as soon as he kills what he loves. George seems to be on the fence about which plan of action to take. Either he runs away with Charisma, or he takes Mr. Jeffer's advice and kills her, purportedly putting everything back to normal.

When he meets Charisma, the emotion-diffuser has tuned her and her family into blissed-out robots. Charisma follows George when he takes her on his boat but she treats him like a customer, even after George removes the emotion-diffuser.

Knife in hand, George sneaks up behind her but stops short when he sees she's crying. Why is it tears that stops George from killing Charisma? It could be that it's the first genuine display of emotion in the whole film. Both George and Michelle are depressed, but neither can express it. George merely ignores his wife's advances and Michelle admits she envies people who explode.

But when Charisma cries it's the first time in the film anyone opens up to anyone else. Perhaps finally escaping the effects of the emotion-diffuser, she realizes she's lost even the modest aspects of her life she enjoyed. Her relationship with her father. Her flirtations with George. Her independence from the world around her.

This release of emotion is all it takes for George to make the right decision. Instead of killing Charisma, he kisses her and sleeps with her and wakes up with her in his arms. And then the film ends with a nod to the dreams George has been experiencing throughout. It leaves a lot of ends left untied. Juileen, Michelle, George's son: they're all unaccounted for. But here are two people who have fought the system and won, at least for now, in this minute. What happens tomorrow is anyone's guess, but perhaps the point of the film is ultimately this: It's better to live for a day than die for a lifetime.

Better Off Dead:

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 01:32:27 GMT

'Better Off Dead' isn't a great film by any means, but there's nothing quite like it and there will certainly never be anything like it again. It's a sort of take on the John Hughes formula that stars John Cusack as a high school boy whose girlfriend dumps him, causing him to attempt increasingly inept and embarrassing methods of killing himself. It also stars Booger from 'Revenge of the Nerds' as Cusack's constantly top-hatted best friend and it ends with a climactic ski race. Obviously, it's a film that deserves better than the generic movie art it currently sports. Here's my proposed solution.

Karl Marx: Selected Writings

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 16:16:58 GMT

I have the Oxford 'Karl Marx: Selected Writings' second edition edited by David McLellan. It is an important book with an incredibly iconic subject, and yet it has a terrible cover design. Here is my proposed solution.

Happy Halloween:

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 05:29:15 GMT

My Heart Again:

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 04:19:23 GMT

To Be Happy:

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 15:49:32 GMT

Everything Great:

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 20:55:07 GMT