Kleenex Girl Wonder just released 13th LP The Comedy Album. Graham Smith, who’s been making pan-genre pop rock in bedrooms, studios, forests and everywhere in between under the KGW name with various people since 1994, joins MAGNET as guest editor this week. Climb inside his skull as he figures out what it’s all about, whatever “it” may be.
Smith: I often wonder what motivates people—young people, mainly, but I suppose the young at heart regardless of physical age—to get involved in a hobby as unusual as music-making in 2016. On the one hand, the barriers to entry are pretty minimal; most people already have the tools they would need to make music in their homes, and the only secret ingredients they need to add are time, practice and patience. On the other hand, due to this selfsame availability, the allure must be somewhat diminished compared to what it was in the previous century. And that’s before you even consider the financials.
When I started making music, which was right around 1994 (it gets a little hazy; in my own opinion, I had made completely unlistenable music for a few years before that, but from that perspective I continued for a few years after that, too, so I use the formation of the Kleenex Girl Wonder band-brand as my official start date), it was really exciting to think that I could just sit in the room adjacent to my bedroom and make something that was technically the same as the stuff that I was hearing on my compact-disc machine. Of course, this was only possible because I listened to a lot of really unprofessional music, but hey, it worked for me, so why couldn’t I make something that worked for others too, right? The one-two punch of Guided By Voices (who popped into my purview right around Vampire On Titus/Propeller) and Ween (circa Pure Guava) sealed the deal. So, after a brief detour that involved me scraping “I [HEART SYMBOL] THE POPE” on a nearly perfect stranger’s car hood with a Rapidograph pen and compulsorily paying for a refinishing, I bought a four-track and got to “work.”
Of course, it wasn’t just the fact that I liked these two bands’ music that convinced me to give it a go myself. Equally (if not more) important was the fact that my friends, and even a bunch of people I didn’t know, also liked it (and the bands themselves, as “personalities,” something I also aspired to have one day). That meant that there was a “market” for this strange creative outlet, or at least a market for convincing people that I was creatively outletting. Looking back, it’s surprising that I needed written proof of the artists’ home recording bona fides in order to be inspired by them. For instance, I knew that Trent Reznor recorded a lot of his music at home, too, but it just sounded too “good” (I use that term eschewing the benefits of retrospect) to have that special DIY tang. Plus it would be a few years before I could afford, I don’t know, a huge sampler and a bag of haunted pulsating intestines hooked up to an amplifier or whatever he used to get that pristinely gruesome Nine Inch Nails sound. So to a certain extent, accessibility and social approval were what drove me, plain and simple.
Nowadays, it’s actually kind of surprising how little terrible homespun music you encounter. It takes a lot of effort to make, or even find, second-rate amateurish nonsense (submissions welcomed!). So there is not as much of an esoteric advantage to knowing that you can buy, for example, a cassette four-track, some sort of effects pedal, a Yamaha family keyboard you name “Hank” and three gigantic chord organs from the classifieds section of your local newspaper, and then alchemize, out of these everyday ingredients and your copious free time, a musical artifact. Everybody knows (roughly) how to do it, and everybody can do it.
So as I said, I wonder why do people even bother? Would I start recording music at home if I were 14, terminally concerned (and correct) that I was not cool, and full of emotions (or at least assonant gibberish) yearning to breathe free? Or would I choose the carefree glamour of life as a Vine star, jumping into hot tubs filled with Sriracha and pulling goofy faces? I really do not know, any more than I know what sort of content is actually popular on the Vine website. I do know that I can’t stop, since I’ve built up this frothy head of steam. It doesn’t hurt that Ween is one of my favorite bands still playing, despite (or perhaps because of) how far they’ve come since Pure Guava.
I guess I ultimately chose to pursue this rigorous creative discipline because: a) it seemed fun to have a skill to focus on and improve over time; b) I desperately needed something to do with my aforementioned copious free time; and c) the musical-industrial climate suggested that with a bit of moxie and a few disused pensioners’ organs (preferably unhaunted, but I couldn’t afford to be picky), I could produce something out of essentially nothing and sell it for money. I am proud to report I technically achieved these barely-even-modest goals.
