The various song ideas for Corpus Dei were written throughout 2020 in what seem like impossibly different contexts: a few days off on tour in Augusta, Georgia in warm southern weather in mid-February; a tiny hotel room in Odessa, Ukraine on the first day of a European tour; a strange 4 months in Riga, Latvia while stranded there in the midst of a pandemic; and a rejuvenating new chapter of my life in Berlin, Germany despite the continued uncertainty about the pandemic. This album feels like a collection of estranged fragments of my life in 2020 – a year that felt like an eternity.
Corpus Dei was the fifth installment of a 6-part music series I released in 2020 centered around the theme of self-destruction. This album specifically is my attempt at mentally processing the lifespan of a human body. Especially as I get older and feel the physical effects of aging, I am becoming more and more fascinated by both the power and the fragility of a human body — the corpus.
The inspiration for music, artwork, song titles, and the overall theme came from a variety of random places. Here are a few.
The initial idea for the song Is This Stuff True was written while I was in quarantine in Riga, Latvia. I spent four months there unexpectedly as my European tour came to a sudden end. It was strange being alone in isolation and in a foreign country, and the sample of a child asking “is this stuff true” perfectly captured the surreal, uncertain, and fragile mood.
That sample was the spark that led to this…
The primary reference for the album cover was a scan of my friend’s hip during surgery. This is also where the idea for text placement on the album cover came from.
Ideas for song titles usually come from books, museums, phrases my friends say, and random things I hear in films and TV shows. One of the songs on the album is called Not Be Built and I took that from something I saw at the upstate New York museum Dia Beacon.
You can listen to Corpus Dei in full right here.
