Gold Class - Drum (2017) Lossless

The week we started to write Drum, my relationship ended and I was left alone in a drafty, old house, which belonged to a friend of a friend. I'd been moving around from place to place for eight or nine months at that point, since just after our first album was released. When the band got together that week to write, the first thing that came out was the song 'Get Yours.' written in one jam, just this hurricane of noise. In the house, I sat around with my notebook, the quiet hours cut with news from friends and the TV: the suicides of musicians and writers I'd known and queer kids I hadn't; the systematic abuse of vulnerable people, the constant mockery of anyone on the outs. I knew what the purpose of the album would be when I wrote the repeated line in 'Get Yours': 'There's none left here and all I need.' I wanted it to be a record of defiance, a resistance to the idea of scrambling for a place at a table that wasn t set for you. A sort of a love letter to anyone who not only can't meet the standard but doesn't want to. I wanted it to be a record of rage and ecstasy and endless nights and sex and dumb fun and ventures in solidarity. Not just an album of urgency and longing, but one of abandon and a reclaiming of a self beyond boundaries. But I couldn't avoid what was immediately happening in my life, either, that the end of my relationship had uncovered a lot of the feelings of isolation I experienced growing up. And so it turned out that the album is also personal, and I think is in conversation with queer histories of silence and evasion and transgression, which I was revisiting through the writing of James Baldwin and Cocteau. Childhood imagery kept creeping into the lyrics. Maybe I was trying to come to some peace with the past and to stand up and find some agency in the present. I suppose it was the most defiant thing I could think to do: not to write as some act of catharsis but in an attempt simply to document and claim my existence; that I am here. It seems a worthwhile enough act when our existences are being further and further streamlined, turned into commodities unworthy of protections or acts of humanity, when some weird version of equality and not liberation is now the aim of even the left. I want to be the author of my words. My words are often still at the mercy of my day-to-day, but I can try to locate them in history and to look beyond myself, too. That's what I've tried to do. The politics and the personal experiences were sticky and came out all tangled up. I couldn't detach them. I can't still, maybe because not enough time has passed since making the record, but maybe because those things simply can't be detached. I suspect that last part is nearest to the truth.