It's probably about time I put up Sixes stuff. I guess I just felt odd about it because I have so much I want to say about this band but really don't have the time or energy for it over the internet.
This cassette demo was really a major step for me in my life. Although I look back on it with a bit of lyrical embarrassment the songs "333" and "Worse" were songs about problems I had never talked about with anyone ever in my life. I had to open up and put myself out there on a level I really wasn't sure I was ready for in a lot of ways. I don't know what compelled me to do it honestly; I always felt a severe admiration for people who were able to talk about seriously personal subjects with their music. It just seemed like a natural step for me in my life and the accompaniment of powerful music felt right. I remember jamming in the garage at a house Travis (guitar) and Tanar (drums) and I used to live in and realizing I had to explain the lyrics to them to defeat any sort of suspicions of melodrama. I opened up to them and told them about problems I really had no other ways of dealing with (See my post of Owen Hart for more information on how Timm really compelled me to keep going with the band because it was my only form of release). Through many ups and downs Sixes still continues and has really helped me. Sometimes I feel completely unable to put myself out there especially when heckled on such serious subjects as rape, drug abuse, and physical abuse and other times I feel so completely empowered by being able to yell about these things. I can never tell how I'm going to feel until we actually play.
In terms of the band itself I was asked by Tanar to join. He was jamming with Travis and McKenzie and they had tried out three singers before me. The music was much more metal influenced than I had expected but I really had a lot written I was eager to sing about. The lyrics to the first three songs on this demo I wrote in High School sometime around 2005. The songs were depressive and sometimes defeated sounding but that is most of what I read and enjoyed in my teenage years. The songs were just collecting dust in my notebook so I put them to use. We then wrote "Worst" and I put lyrics to it almost on the spot (it's an easy subject for me to write about because I have so much anger surrounding the subject).
"Apocrypha" was a title I stole from the name of an X-Files episode. Essentially anything apocryphal in a religious text is something of questionable authenticity. This meshed perfectly with the underlying theme of the first song which is really just a criticism of 20th century thought; basically just bringing to light that we justify our killing of other people and animals based on not just a religious text but on a society built off of those beliefs which are subconsciously ingrained in our thought. We are trapped in the mindset that we take command of our lives and have justification for taking advantage of everything around us. A very rapacious and advantageous primate indeed. I was also a big physical anthropology buff. I read countless texts and wanted to go to College to be an anthropologist. What I learned from these books were not just "age of science" 'truths' but ways of understanding human life that put a lot of my existential crises to rest.
"333" was a song I wrote when I was severely depressed. The second half of the song are lines from a poem I wrote about my mom and my life. The line "No one understands me better than those who have abused me" is still true today.
"At Home" was a song I wrote when my political thinking was beginning to take root. I was always upset about the fact that I was forced to go to school and work and criticized when I tried to be creative about it. I was sick and tired of having my imagination subdued by things I found no importance in. I was reading a lot of Thoreau, Cleaver, and Newton (Huey P) at the time and was really inspired by what they had to say. There is a line I didn't record but always sing live over the opening of the song which is "our society and our economy value human labor only insofar as it cannot be replaced". I hated having things forced down my throat and hated even more feeling so completely uncomfortable in institutions like school and work. Keep in mind I wrote this when I was like 17 but, albeit naive in some ways, I still feel very compelled by the underlying message. If you read the lyrical explications below the songs you'll get a little more of my two cents at the time.
Well there you have it, the Sixes demo. I was still coming into my own with the vocals, they get better on the 7" which I'll put up soon and better still with the comp track. The image on the insert and the quote are from Fyodor Dostoevsky's "Notes from the Underground", one of my favorite books when I was in High School.
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