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: Up until relatively recently, I had settled into a pretty comfortable routine with regards to making music. I never took it for granted, and I struggled a fair amount with some of the downsides to my methods, but it worked and was relatively easy to maintain. The Comedy Album represents both sides of a profound shift in that process, and as such, it’s interesting to dig into how it represents a turning point (or two). Following the completion of Let It Buffer., which was released in the spring of 2013, I started to write songs in earnest for the follow-up. A few of the songs had already been written before that point, but that’s really just a coincidence of timing. For better or worse, as soon as one album is done, I’m already working on the next one, even though what the next one is often shifts dramatically, especially in the first few months.
By the end of 2013, I had almost all of the songs written. A few would continue to trickle in, and others would get duly booted out of the tentative tracklist, but things were mostly squared away. However, I was having a lot of trouble actually getting things moving and recording them. Early in 2014, I went upstate to visit my friend and former KGW keyboardsman Ryan Smith and his excellent partner Julia, who were living in Troy as Ryan pursued his doctorate in music (it still astonishes me that this is both a real thing and that Ryan was both hearty and foolhardy enough to actually do it). Because Ryan is just that spectacular of a musician, we spent less than three hours in a classroom at his school that had a spectacular old grand piano and he learned and recorded piano parts for five of the songs, which I would further augment with additional arrangements back in New York City. This was a promising start, but besides them and one other track that I had begun recording in 2013 (“Kismet Cute”), I was still far from where I needed to be, recording-wise. Something had to change, and I wasn’t sure what it was.
As it eventually turned out, something had to change for a lot of other reasons, too. I had gone through a pretty epic (though not technically excruciating) breakup, and was living by myself, not doing a whole lot of valuable stuff with my time, not feeling too good about things. I had also, by that point in the spring of 2014, been smoking weed pretty much non-stop for 15 years or so. When I say non-stop, there are some caveats—I never smoked it at work, I didn’t wake up in the night to smoke it or somehow smoke it in my sleep, but beyond that, yeah, it was a relatively constant companion in my life. Because of the way it works chemically, I had long since stopped being somebody who was noticeably intoxicated; in fact, I rarely if ever felt any effects, entheogenic or otherwise, except perhaps a brief stretch of five minutes or so at the beginning of each session. It was a crutch, and an addiction, and it was not doing all that much good. It was potentially doing a lot of harm. So, as a result of a number of factors, one of which was my ex-wife giving up her addictions, I decided to stop. I read some books, threw my gear away, started going to some meetings, and gave it a go. As it turns out, the last song written for The Comedy Album, which is called “Magistermind” as part of my continuing mission to reference Rick Ross on every album I release, turned out to be the last song I wrote as a weed addict.
Somewhat surprisingly, after the initial readjustment period, I started to record songs with very little effort. By the initial mastering deadline in mid-July I had half of the record done. The entire record was recorded and mastered by the end of year. So that was really wonderful; it did seem as though my motivation had been severely hampered by that sweetest of leaves. But a funny thing happened—it had become achingly difficult to write songs. Or rather, to write songs I was happy with. Over time I came to realize that what had really gone away with the weed-fueled lifestyle was a sense of self-satisfaction; I would complete a lyrical couplet, perhaps after scrapping a few variations that I didn’t like, but come back to find later that I didn’t think it was “good enough,” whatever that meant. I do not necessarily have a happy ending to this phase of my life to report upon just yet, but it’s gotten a lot better. So the moral of this story is: Sometimes you have to sacrifice an easy process and find new ways to do things in order to improve your overall health. Not a super succinct or fancy moral, but a useful one nonetheless!
