The Process and the Product

AFI and Blaqk Audio have a very different writing process. How does that impact the finished product, the album that comes out of it? How do the differing creative processes influence the notable contrast in the feel and the sound, resulting in either the emotional, overwrought, performative poetry of AFI or the direct, confessional, unabashed Blaqk Audio? (To say nothing of the deliberate rawness of XTRMST, which I cannot speak to at the moment, but you can read a good Jade interview here and a good Davey interview here; listen to tracks here. The XTRMST album was written mostly during Burials, but recorded much differently, with each track’s vocal being the first recording.)

Greater Than 84

The first time I listened to this song with my serial-killer-collage-level-crazy ears on, I became obsessed with finding out what significant event had happened in Davey’s life in 1985. So I began digging through Mendocino County news, and greater California news, and generally poured my finely honed research skills into finding out what might have impacted Davey when he was 10 years old.

Yes. I did this. With the crazed fangirl devotion I thought I outgrew a decade ago. It wasn’t until weeks (and a theory about Davey’s fascination with CA wildfires and people who set them–which kind of bears out under his fixation on arson in Pop Kids) later that I realized it was a reference to Orwell’s 1984: the future’s here, it’s 1985. Davey’s way of saying that he’s writing about his own dystopian future; that the worst he could imagine and the worst he could have feared is here, and he’s worried now that it’s immutable, that this is how it will be forever.