Touched by emotion would be something one would not expect from an album titled Shitty Hits. Katie Von Schleicher knows far too well the complexities and density of writing songs that touch others hearts. Wrapped into the eleven track album is a world of sentiment that sonically burns with each melodic sway. From the opening trance of “The Image” to the swirling lullaby of “Soon,” Schleicher set out to write an album that was for her more than anyone else. Released via Ba Da Bing Records on July 28th, Shitty Hits is anything but its namesake.
The heavy scenery outlined by Schleicher’s lyrics is colored by the meticulous details of the music. “Mary” is soft and croons with shy melodies, gently pushing Schleicher forward and into the spotlight, and she steals the show. “Life’s A lie” has a classic rock feel, warped with bouncy pianos and a more driving melody. It’s another diverse approach for the singer, crafting an identity that is able to write in a plethora of spaces and drive home memorable orchestrations. “Hold” is one such example, emphasizing a pivotal dynamic to the record that is laced with warmth.
New Noise Magazine is pleased to be presenting Katie Von Schleicher’s rich track by track of Shitty Hits. An incredible amount of depth is embedded into every song. Katie Von Schleicher is self aware of her writing, which makes streaming the record while reading open up the narrative of this fantastic creation.
“The Image”
This song’s working title for a long time was Shitty Hits, it was the song that helped generate the album title and what propelled the rest of the material to fall in line. I named it “The Image” later, for a book called The Image: A Guide to Pseudoevents in America. There are parallel emotions between how I feel just being human, about how difficult perspective can be to maintain, and the emotional effect of the book, which also makes me feel a bit helpless. Much like the rest of the album, I think the music is pretty triumphant in comparison to the lyrical content. The chorus was an ear worm I’d been trying to fight off for a few years and finally gave into. I play drums on this song, I love playing some rudimentary drums through a pedal or two. Fun fact: the band didn’t really like this one or think it was finished, but I heard it all in my head, the way it sounds recorded, and it’s a rare case of not letting folks influence my decision making. I did have a bit of arrangement help from friend Jared Samuel (Invisible Familiars) on this, he’s a fantastic sounding board and purveyor of tiny fixes.
“Midsummer”
I felt this one could go either way as we approached recording it. I liked it, but the song’s form was pretty straightforward. The sessions began in Maryland, and then I filled in about 2/3 of each song later on my own in New York. In Maryland we did the song very subdued, the guys were hearing it as a Lennon ballad-type thing, and we left this space in the beginning of the second verse for a solo, on a whim. Back in New York, I was a bit confounded about how that’d make it exciting, but I recorded a solo. It was weird, but it wasn’t doing it for me. When I approached vocals I tried improvising lyrics at the same time. The song is named after a poem of the same title by William Bronk, which was replicated in this novel 10:04 by Ben Lerner. The lyrics became quickly about a certain occurrence last summer that I was processing. When I got to the solo section, I just sang the lines that are on the record, a new melody over top of the solo, lyrics that came just as quickly, and it solved my problem. Why don’t people sing more over top of solos? It felt like magic, all of a sudden there was a lot more momentum to the song, and I love it more for that.
“Paranoia”
This was my first recording opportunity to layer meticulous vocals, and I loved every minute of it. I wrote “Paranoia” on the piano but I was listening to a lot of Brian Eno, and I heard this song being perhaps even more bizarre than it turned out. To me, the piano line between the “paranoia can’t”s makes the tune. That was my grandparents’ piano through a bunch of pedals onto cassette tape.
“Soon”
Another one that had us all stumped. I wrote it while driving, which is strange because it has so many chord changes. I wrote the saxophone lines last of all. I really have no idea what would have happened there without it. It’s funny, the best things come when you make space for them. The song is about a relationship that’s broken, although that fact is unspoken between its participants.
“Nothing”
I like this one because it came out exactly as I heard it in my head. It’s more natural for me to over-write something, and this one is so deliberately under-written, it makes me happy. That left space for a ton of sound, and since the song is about an over-saturation of feeling that leaves you numb, we have filled it to the brim.
“Mary”
This is the last song I wrote for the album, and we recorded it just before mixing as well. I love Adam’s simple guitar playing on it, he fostered this song being on the album and helped me see it through. It’s got this dry room sound, we did it live together, which may seem antithetical to the rest of the process behind Shitty Hits, but I think it’s a warm and anchoring way to open up side two, if you’re into vinyl. I love using women’s names in songs, I think it gives them an extra tenderness. We could go into the psychology of that forever…
“Life’s A Lie”
There’s no better example of the lyrics and the music being parallel messages than this one. It’s a total electric piano song and the chords immediately reminded me of 70s Todd Rundgren. I made the music first, and the lyrics surprised me, as I imagine they might other people. In a lot of ways, mirrored through relationships with the self and others, this album is about the process of making an album for me, its difficulty. So “Life’s A Lie” invokes imposter syndrome, something I feel from time to time, a real absurd plague on creativity and love. It’s like saying “I could love you, but I have to get past me first.”
“Isolator”
This song is about some characteristics I share with my mother. Musically, I’m really proud of how much editing went into the arrangement. It’s two and a half minutes but a bit of a ride. I get the feeling that I’m lost somewhere two thirds into it, and I only know where I am again when I’m dropped at the end. I wrote this on the same car ride as Soon, so they’re tied. Except this one’s about… my mother.
“Hold”
This is a demo I made on my phone (2017, baby!!!). I couldn’t improve it, or I didn’t want to. Continuing with the spirit of “improvisation,” which is a real funny term to invoke considering how written all of my music is, I like to demo songs by having a very bare structure to them, and just filling it out after I’ve hit record. This had the verse, but the strange chromatic bridge between verses was just something I did, and then immediately sang over. Hold is totally informed by my love for Randy Newman, a basic chord structure with some lush dissonance. Can’t wait to sing it live, considering I’ve never actually played it before. It’s about someone protecting themselves by lying, an extremely cowardly notion in my opinion, but I still love them desperately. Oh well.
“Going Down”
There’s a trajectory to this album, and “Going Down” is my “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.” Anger is a beautiful emotion when channeled into creative enterprise. The opening of the song is from the demo. Another fun fact: there are drag racing sounds in the intro and the second verse, from an album that Roy Montgomery, my excellent label mate and a legendary New Zealand bizarro-hyper-literate-rocker, sent to me. We talk about cars sometimes, I like them but he knows them. Thanks, Roy.
“Sell It Back”
As of this writing, this is the most popular single we’ve released. Yet, in a showing of how none of us really know anything about anything, it was almost cut from the record. The label didn’t like it, and I was worried, too. But like I said, this album has a trajectory, and Sell It Back is the closer, it says what I need to say. I wrote it very early on, and in terms of production it’s very undercooked. It’s taught me something about subtlety, because we could have taken it further. But it’s intimate, and I mean every word.
Photo by Bao Ngo
