Guitar virtuoso Mike Huguenor has a lot of credits to his name, including the bands Hard Girls and Shinobu plus playing in Jeff Rosenstock’s band. Now he’s releasing an instrumental album called Surfing the Web With the Alien, which presents 10 tracks of guitar-centric instrumental post-punk. Huguenor was nice enough to do a track-by-track of the meaning behind each track on the album.
1. Oils of Orange
This album began with the bassline for “Oils of Orange.” I always felt like that bassline was tugging me forward into somewhere new. Appropriately, it’s the first song I wrote in the genre of 🎸new guitar pop🎸, which I think of as a new way the guitar can reenter the conversation of pop music. For the music video, I really wanted to make an homage to Gal Costa, who has been a huge influence on my music.
As a fan of many Abso Lutely shows, it was an incredible honor to work with Jonathan Kramer (editor on the Eric Andre Show, as well as Tim and Eric’s Purple Boys campaign), who directed the video and brought in an unbelievably fun and talented crew of fellow Abso Lutely alum, director of photography Trevor Ames (director of photography on Poundhouse), and assistant producer Heather Capps (editor on Nathan For You). Just a joy to work with them on it. And a great video!
2. What Do I Do Now?
This is one of the few songs that I wrote for another artist—Then they passed on it. When that happened, I thought, “What do I do now?” And there it was. It was an experience that felt very much like my path as a solo musician: Once everyone else goes a different way, I keep making music. Musically, this song was very inspired by J-pop and city pop, the sound of something light and vulnerable in a big and busy world. In my head, the verse melodies were meant to be sung by a feminine voice, someone like Yuki or Aiko. For fans of bedroom pop: the acoustic parts were literally recorded in my bedroom.
3.Etnies Engagement Ring
I loved skateboarding as a kid. Some of my first heroes were people like Geoff Rowley and Jamie Thomas, people who’s version of art revealed itself either in impossibly poetic motion or else in broken bones. I wanted to do something that felt that vital and engaged in the moment. The only problem was I wasn’t very good at skating. So music became my skateboarding. “Etnies Engagement Ring” is inspired by imagining two skaters in love, one surprising the other with the sickest trick of all: an Etnies-brand engagement ring. This is the kind of love everyone deserves, I think. For a while, I thought this might be one of the album’s singles, and I wrote a ridiculous treatment for a music video involving skateboard trauma and Wet Willy hugging Flameboy at a funeral. The world wasn’t ready.
4. The Barmecide’s Feast
Working on this record really pushed me to try and find different chord progressions and approach songs from fresh angles. Sometimes, however, it felt like trying to create something out of nothing. In those moments, I thought of Schacabac, from One Thousand and One Nights (aka the Arabian Nights). Schacabac is a beggar in Baghdad who is one day invited into a prince’s home and offered a wonderful banquet. But as the plates arrive at the table, Schacabac sees they’re all empty. The prince pretends to relish his pretend meal (he’s like, “ooh, yum, swordfish!” while pretending to drop tasty morsels into his mouth) while poor Schacabac continues to starve. It’s all for the prince’s amusement, and Schacabac needs to play along in order for the prince to enjoy his fun. So, he digs deep and pretends to enjoy it, rewarded with a real feast afterward.
Creating a record alone from only one instrument and trying to conjure parts into what sounds like a full band playing along with me when there was in fact no such band, I could often imagine how Schacabac must have felt pretending to enjoy his pretend meal. But then there is the magical turn at the end. In Schacabac’s case, the meal becomes real after all the pretending. And in the case of “the Barmecide’s Feast,” I got a song I ended up really enjoying in the end, one that comes from a fresh angle.
5. Snap the Blue Pencil!
For almost half of the 20th century, Portugal was under a dictatorship. One of the many ways the dictatorship flexed its control was through the “blue pencil.” Anything that the state deemed illegal to say or think was crossed out with the “blue pencil,” controlling people’s thoughts by controlling what could be expressed. Today, we live in an era where fascism is very real again. American Republicans want to make it illegal to be transgender or to use your voice to oppose genocide. They want to make it illegal for women to divorce their husbands or to have autonomy over their own bodies. Alternatively, they want to make it legal for children to work overnight shifts, and for officers to whisk you off to a foreign prison simply because they don’t like you, or because you immigrated legally from a country they don’t like. This is the reality of America today, and the desires of the American Republican party. Whether they are Portuguese or American or from any country at all, dictators all have their own version of the blue pencil. Stand up, and snap the blue pencil!
6. Jaywalking Around the World
When you spend a lot of your life on tour, you spend a lot of time jaywalking. There’s only so much time between soundcheck and doors, and you can’t always wait for a light to turn green when you have to eat. This made me want to write a jam for pedestrians on the go. Something that sounds big and lush, like life in a city, but also small and personal, like a lone pedestrian seizing an opportune moment to get a little closer to where they’re going. Musically, this one was inspired by New Order and Madonna, two artists who definitely understand city music. For the music video, I’m thankful to have had a second opportunity to work with Jonathan Kramer and Heather Capps, who came back up to the Bay Area to film at my practice space. This time, I wrote a treatment inspired by Scorsese’s Casino (or at least the opening credits of it), and we had a lot of fun spending two days filming it all in industrial north San Jose.
7. Kokoro no Itami
The pain that belongs to your heart. That’s “kokoro no itami.” As Americans, we’d probably just translate this Japanese phrase as “heartache,” but to me it’s the possessive part that’s interesting. How this pain isn’t your heart hurting, but is pain owned and kept by the heart. Not “heartache,” but “the heart’s ache.” I’ve felt it. Sometimes, on tour you feel completely adrift, like it’s just you and your heartbeat—plus whatever pain your heart is keeping inside each of those beats. In those moments, I hear “Kokoro no Itami.”
8. [Ominous Rattling Intensifies]
I think of this song as post-punk Mega Man hardcore. Video game music has always been an influence on me, and maybe that’s most audible here. There’s a bit of Castlevania, some Final Fantasy fight music. These are all games about defending the world. When I was a kid, these games felt like the future. Back then, the future felt like a good thing. But today the future is increasingly being defined and limited by the imaginations of selfish men. Rather than elicit hope and happiness, their inventions (from Boston Dynamics, to Palantir, to Tesla) all seem to emit a general ominous rattling. “[Ominous Rattling Intensifies]” is a fight song for a world in need of fighting back.
9. Smoke Rain
After the fight comes the healing rain. Smoke rises off the smoldering embers and burnt husks of the battle, curling upward between the descending raindrops. Or maybe that’s all just the daydream of someone looking out the window on a rainy day … “Smoke Rain” was recorded in drop C, with the A string tuned down to G, to get those big, heavy power chords. In the second verse, the drums try to imitate the polyrhythmic pattern of rain droplets falling off a roof, how multiple streams overlap, then recede down to a single constant drip.
10. Flemish Giant
Like my last solo album, this album ends with an animal song. I think animals maybe understand the world better than we do. My last record ended with a song about a carnivore (“Sea Wolf”), but this time we get an herbivore, the ridiculously sized rabbit the “Flemish Giant.” Both songs begin with the sound of the animal’s paws as they make their way through the world. The main melody has a somewhat metallic quality to it because I couldn’t find my guitar slide the day I recorded it and so used a microphone as a slide instead. Sometimes, the best option is the one you’ve got.
Follow Huguenor on Instagram and Twitter for future updates.
Photo Credit: 0752am
