As the cliché goes, the journey is increasingly becoming the destination for Jerry Paper, whose prolific output (i.e. an album every year or two dating back to 2012) has begun to revolve around the scenic route leading to the desired change that so often occupies our full attention. With INBETWEEZER, Paper fully embraces that sense of in-betweenness as they reflect on life changes both major (such as enrolling in grad school to become a therapist) and minor (the new frontiers proudly offered by the Smucker’s company), with that sense of perpetual movement aided by characteristically trickster instrumentals shifting between synth-based pop and something a little more psychedelic.
“So much of this record is my getting lost in my own curiosity, playing around and surprising myself,” Paper says of the new songs, which, to my knowledge, have nothing to do with Rivers Cuomo and everything to do with slotting honking horn solos into tight post-punk compositions. As they note elsewhere in their track-by-track breakdown of INBETWEEZER, the project was all about learning how “playing around to make use of what you’ve got can lead to more interesting results—and a more enjoyable creative process—than trying to ‘execute your vision.’”
With that joyously derailed vision available to the public today courtesy of Stones Throw Records, stream INBETWEEZER in full and read on for Paper’s backstory on each of the LP’s 10 tracks.
1. “Brown Thumb”
It will come as no shock that I wrote this song when I was feeling bummed out about being a really bad gardener (even though I really enjoy trying to do it), and then somehow it ended up being a metaphor for feeling your way through the self-doubt that finds its way into the creative process.
Recording the saxophone on this was super fun. Marta [Tiesenga] came in and honked for us and then mid-honk I got this thought that I should’ve asked for baritone clarinet instead of saxophone. Rather than scrap Marta’s beautiful playing and try to find a baritone clarinet, I figured we should try slowing it down on a tape machine. It started to feel real underwater and [engineer/co-producer Sami Perez] and I were quite happy with it, so we added some MS-20 bubble sounds and called it a day. It’s a good example that playing around to make use of what you’ve got can lead to more interesting results—and a more enjoyable creative process—than trying to “execute your vision.”
2. “Scenic Route”
I wrote this one pretty soon after I finished Free Time, and tried out many different versions of it at home before I brought it into Wiggle World (where I recorded this record with Sami). It’s a raw one, one of those aspirational songs where I’m telling myself something that I understand conceptually before I truly believe it; all caught up in some bullshit, lost in the abyss, and trying to get myself to slow down and be in my sensory world in the present. I feel like we really captured that lost feeling, particularly in that section after the second chorus where I’m singing, “Sometimes I feel so lost,” and Sami went virtuoso-style on the delay; at that moment it feels like the song truly gets lost in itself. I’ve been thinking lately about that lost feeling, and how the only way out of it for me is to get lost in my own curiosity. So much of this record is my getting lost in my own curiosity, playing around and surprising myself, so this song feels really central to the record to me.
3. “Front Ear (My Bread)”
Another one about feeling lost and aimless, trying to figure out how to shake my shit up and get my life moving. In this song I’m deciding to make a small change, exemplified by putting some jam on my bread rather than try to jump immediately into a huge change. It’s about learning to follow my front ear and listen toward my life, rather than my idea of what my life is supposed to be. It’s about following the part of me that knows where my pleasure is, but feels too scared or shameful to go toward it.
4. “Moonstruck”
This one I wrote right after I got home from a six-week tour where we only really had two days off. It was a harsh dose of touring, but honestly one of the most transformative of my life because I was more present than I’d ever been on tour—less in the “numbing” zone and more in the “feeling understanding” zone. I was also really loving all my bandmates, and the last couple weeks of tour were really fun despite exhaustion. We had two particularly enjoyable experiences that stuck vividly in my mind around the full moon (and a cartoonishly large bag of psilocybin mushrooms) in Tucson (nude in a pool) and Marfa (swinging a big knife), so this little rocker just popped out of me pretty much right when I got home. This song is contextually interesting for me because immediately when I got home from tour I knew something big in my life had to change (which eventually led me to grad school and the life-expansion of becoming a therapist), so this is kind of a meditation on joy even while the earth is shifting beneath you.
5. “New Year’s Day”
I wrote this song after spending a bit of time processing an episode of depression I was riding out around New Year’s. I keep trying to write something to describe the experience, but I don’t really know how to do it better than: when the transcendent and the pathetic meet. For me, robo-rock felt like a good venue for that; the elevation and joy of fun rockin’ and the extra-human-or-sub-human nature of machines imitating a rock band.
6. “Everything Angel”
This is a song about transition. It’s a song about making big decisions, but those decisions already having been made deep inside of me before my conscious mind ever turned its attention in that direction. In many ways it’s a counterpart to the song “Front Ear (My Bread)” because in that song, the big decision is made but the conscious mind has to ease itself into acknowledgement of the change by taking small steps, and in this song the bigness of the change is being embraced. The change in this case is the decision to go to graduate school to pursue a degree in clinical psychology, with the ultimate goal to start practicing as a therapist.
When I was in my early twenties I told myself that my only skill was music, so I had to figure out how to make it work as a career. I spent the past almost-decade actualizing that, without seeing that I’d closed so many doors for my understanding of myself. So this song is about knowing that my life can expand beyond what I told myself it was when I was younger, and that unknowing is the stance to take toward any big journey. Everything is always changing all the time, and a person’s job is not to take charge of that change but to attune themself to it and listen to it. There’s always movement; in many ways that’s what this whole album is about. In that movement life is punctuated by moments of rebirth, and rebirth always comes with a process of reckoning with loss and gain.
The title comes from the name of my hard drives where all my music is: I have one named “Everything” that’s full of music I’ve made over the last several years, and another that I’m working on filling up called “Angel.” This song is me acknowledging that my relationship with music will change as I bring another practice into my life, and how that change will be good and also is unknown and different from however I’ve been engaging with music through my twenties. This album was made after I freed my mind from the constraints of capitalism being invariably linked to my art practice, so it’s an example of that change in action.
7. “In Betwee”
This song, also, is about change and movement. We can take the world in discrete chunks, and it makes communication easier for sure, but the world is truly a gestalt and it is all in constant movement. (Who was it that said “being is becoming”? Hegel? Kant? Groucho Marx? Whoever it was, they were on to something.) This one is honestly about the exact same thing as the last song—big decision to expand my career beyond trying to hustle my songs for cash into eternity as the music industry landscape changes and further slips away from my values—but from a different angle. Change is about loss and gain and can feel heavy and big, but experimentation and playfulness is a perfectly appropriate way to meet that change. This is a song about slitting the throat of your idea of what your life is supposed to be and dancing with reality in all its fluidity.
8. “Trixter Sez”
What can I say? I was having fun! And I was thinking of the Jungian archetype of the trickster god a lot at the time. The trickster is a bridge, a bringer of change, and I can’t help but think the only kind of god with a good sense of humor.
9. “A Song on the Tip of My Mind”
I have a lot of song ideas—like, a lot. I have so many little things that I pop out and then bloom into something abstract or small rather than something “song-like.” This is one of those that just seemed to fit on the record. It uses a lot of what I think of as the “raised eyebrow” chord, a chord I love very much that makes me think of curiosity and openness!
10. “Powder Pink Powder Green”
This song is about my partner, Grace. We’ve been together almost straight since we were 17 (minus a little bump there 12 years ago; see my album Feels Emotions and the EP The Now Sound for Today’s Lovers if you wanna taste my early-twenties confusion) and have gone through so much growth and change together. When I was younger I always thought, “I wish we didn’t meet so young, there are so many experiences I wish I had,” but the older I get the more gratitude I have that I get to spend as much of my life with her as possible. She’s the best partner; kind, curious, funny, generous, analytical, and open to our lifelong change as people swept by the current of time, as unmappable as it may be.
So in many ways this is a song of gratitude both to her and to the random chance that brought us together when we were so young. It might seem funny to end an album about change with a song about the most stable thing in my life, but it’s actually perfect (fight me on it) because long-term relationships are about being open to change within the container of your love. Love is openness to difference; it’s distinct from simple “care” in that the one who loves must accept their lack of control of the other person. You have to accept someone as they are to love them! Anyway, a love song to cap things off. Plus I was really happy with that digital-ghost vocal line (courtesy of my friend Romy Lightman) in the chorus when we cracked that piece of the puzzle.
