Menu
Get the Duct Tape was a different kind of album compared to what came before it. It includes Facility of Ill and a raw recording of a verse called Lyrical Exercise which is…well, what it says. Verbal Inferno is also there, but those kinds of tracks are not the main focus of this album.
Also, Get the Duct Tape is the shortest album in A Year of Music, with only 8 tracks.
2020 was the height of Cancel Culture. We had a world ending plague, the greatest political race of all time, brooms standing on their own, and weird metal things showing up around the globe.
OK, forget those last two and tone down the other two.
Many people were shut down simply for having different opinions than the narrative accepted by Twitter and other social media platforms. People mobbed on individuals, shouting them down, going after their employers, and even attacking people violently because they didn’t share the same thoughts.
Basically, massive gaping assholes gained some power and abused the hell out of it.
The song Duct Tape Speech was written because of this horeshittery. It points at one random guy who says a thing, and shows how the mob attacks him. The man stands against them as the horde grows, tying to shut down the person’s ability to speak. They misreport what he says and claim he is saying things he isn’t. They dig into his life and try to prevent others from being able to hear what he actually has to say. They even go after his family over it.
The one thing they don’t do is actually talk to him or argue back.
And that sums up social media for the past few years.
Anyone who has heard the older albums I made during my “Era of Pain” days knows that this all started because of a broken heart. For those who don’t know, here is a quick refresher:
Just before I turned 18, I fell in love with a girl. Though I wanted more, it never happened and the day before my 18th birthday, she quit school without telling me and left my life. I was kind of a mess after that, but I eventually heard from her about a year later. Then things really train wrecked hard. I’m not going to rehash it because these days, I don’t care anymore. But I was stuck on her for about 7 years, like some kind of Grosse Point Blank moment or something.
And this track explores the question of “What if things were different?” and what happens if you did. If things between her and I had gone differently, neither my kids nor her kids would exist. And that’s a problem. To make matters worse, my wife would not be my wife, and to be honest, she’s the hardest working woman I’ve ever known.
The consensus by the end is that things turned out for the best. They happened as they were supposed to.
But while that relationship never started so it could never break up, another one was on the brink of destruction…
Hannah has appeared all over this series. While her moments have been humorous, her occurrence on Get the Duct Tape sees a major moment in our relationship. What starts out as a funny moment quickly goes bad, far worse than any we’ve had before. The stress I was under from moving and dealing with life in general, while trying to create 12 albums in a single year, was all weighing on top of me. And that day, Hannah’s incessant nagging and ridiculousness became too much. I yelled at her and called her names, instructing her to get out and never come back.
Hannah’s reaction shows that unlike previous arguments, this one hurt her. It became a tense moment for us and stood out as a defining moment for us.
Heavily under stress, the song Things On My Mind came into being. It is fueled by the struggle of building a life and keeping it going. We had just bought a house, at a time when the world was trying to fall apart.
To add to that, my job was running me into the ground. Our management team fucked over a lot of people and the company culture had melted into a pool of shit. The job I did had been erased and I was moved into a stressful role that made me hate the job I once loved.
(Note: I eventually quit because of that bullshit. Several other people also left.)
At the same time, my wife was going through issues with her own job. She chose to go back to school to try and jump to another career and get out of her own world of bullshit. With all of that, I was also trying to to find other avenues for additional income, while piling more and more work on top of myself.
And I was seeing a relapse into stressful depression.
Things On My Mind is a snapshot of what goes on in my head on a constant basis. It’s why I get 3 hours of sleep at night and why I try to do so much.