Quarantine Me
by Eric Slick
I began working on my sophomore LP Wiseacre in January 2018. There was no initial aesthetic direction or conceptual arc to root down my process. The idea was to write as many songs as humanly possible and then whittle them down in a concise fashion. As time wore on, I realized that the album was shaping up to be more autobiographical than anything I had ever done. My previous works were dark and muddy, almost like ashcan paintings from my hometown of Philadelphia. They didn’t necessarily have a function, or even a purpose of existence. My peers never pointed that out, but my wife Natalie did. She would often ask, “What is the meaning of these lyrics? Why are you positioning the chords in this way?” I realized that it was time to say goodbye to abstraction and start welcoming the truth through vulnerability. It was a slog, but her criticisms were invaluable. All the while, my songwriting was getting more reliable because of it.
My music has previously been diagnosed as “un-stream-worthy” by people in the industry. Meaning, that my songs aren’t meant to be heard in third-wave coffee shops across America. I would send my records to labels in the hopes of external validation, blindsiding executives with cold emails. Perhaps I am delusional, but I thought my music had always been accessible. I was wrong. I remember sitting down with an A&R at a Very Popular And Influential Label That Shall Not Be Named, and he pointed out that “male indie-folk still crushes in streaming.” He pointed to various metrics, clinical charts, and graphs that came straight from a PowerPoint presentation. It was a disheartening experience. Should I try to make an accessible album? What does that even mean for someone whose favorite artists are Scott Walker, Bjork, and Captain Beefheart?
Wiseacre is the most pop-leaning record I’ve ever made, but it didn’t intentionally happen that way. I listened to a lot of late ’70s new wave music while writing because, well, that’s what I was gravitating towards naturally. When I finished the record in October of 2019, I rushed out another sad blitz of hammering my record to labels. I went through my virtual Rolodex and lamented my doe-eyed naiveté in vain:
hey Insert Label A&R Here, this is eric slick. here’s my new record, if you want to hear it.
if not, totally fine. hope to hear from you soon.
I look back at these correspondences and cringe. I seek this external validation because I had an emotionally abusive music teacher who destroyed my fledgling desire to become a songwriter. Perhaps I write songs in spite of his abuse. It was torturous, and it still is to this day.
At the beginning of 2020, my manager Rusty and I devised a multi-pronged approach of reaching out to industry people and booking agents. If they heard Wiseacre, they might dig it because we know it’s a solid and excellent record in our hearts. People responded and said, “Yeah, this is cool. We can look at putting it out in 2021, maybe 2022.”
Ah, the death knell for any creative person. To make art is one thing; to live with it for an extended period is another. You begin to doubt all the things you love about it, and you start to self-loathe in a way I could only describe as “Larry David-ian.” I felt that I should shelve the record and move on with my life. Then, a tornado hit my town at the beginning of March. To see a natural disaster destroy my neighbors’ houses made my internal egotisms seem pointless. And then, COVID-19 hit about two weeks later. Everything mattered, and nothing mattered. I believed that my record was nearly as insignificant as the dirt underneath my fingernails.
Rusty and I talked in April, and we decided that we would put out the record this year. Initially, I was a little disappointed that there would be no fanfare, no tour, no label, no radio campaign, no PR person, nada. There’s that pesky egoic perspective again. It’s a dead end. I decided to soften my stance a little, and then it all started to take a different shape. I saw the merit in self-releasing it. Let’s face it. I am a weird person. I don’t fit into a mold, and I never have. Why should I start now? I’m not releasing it into a vacuum. Even if a handful of people care, I’ll be satisfied. I wrote nearly 70 songs for Wiseacre, and a lot of it was absolute garbage.
However, this is the growth I had always longed for in my life. I learned how to be judicious by way of being less precious. I grew up and chose to believe in myself, and that has so much intrinsic value. The album has everything to do with me and nothing to do with me. Letting it go is the way forward. I tip my hat to this period of isolation and express my whole-hearted gratitude.
Eric Slick is a multi-instrumentalist and composer from Philadelphia. He currently drums with Dr. Dog and Natalie Prass. He also makes solo records. His new album is called Wiseacre. You can find him on Instagram as @strangeamerica if you like gratuitous photos of vanity license plates.
