Human Potential is the solo project of Andrew Becker, a man who wears many hats. In addition to Human Potential, Becker is also a drummer for Dischord Records’ project Medications and Brooklyn band Screens. He’s also award-winning for his work in directing documentary films.
After five albums working almost entirely alone for Human Potential, Becker made a decision for the sixth release, I Write Wedding Songs, to actually reach out to a producer, his friend L. Skell. The two of them, working together in Becker’s home in Los Angeles, took one of Becker’s sketches and traded it back and forth, each putting their own spin on the song, with the result bing “Clear Notes for a New National Anthem,” which Human Potential are debuting today.
“‘Clear Notes For A New National Anthem’ resulted from an attempt to turn my normal songwriting process on its head,” Becker explains. “I had convinced my friend, L. Skell (songwriter behind the album, Eldridge Skell’s The Rude Staircase’s “Sookie Jump”) to come up from Central America, where he had been living, and help produce the new batch of songs I was working on. Every previous album had been made, more or less, in complete solitude, with no outside input, so Skell’s presence was a disruption to my normal process, in and of itself.
“For a while, I had been working on a sketch that germinated out of some jams that I made with another friend, Breck Brunson (former singer in my old band, Screens). I had taken some stuff we had recorded, added a few more parts, and tried to structure a song out of it. But, it wasn’t clicking. So, one day, Skell and I decided to try something completely new. We decided we were going to work on this song, but employ some very rigid parameters while doing so. First, we would take turns working on the song by ourselves for exactly one hour, recording, editing or doing whatever we wanted to the song. At the end of that hour, we would turn the song over to the other person but not reveal what had just been done. And we did that for an entire day.
“It turned out to be a really interesting way to work and allowed me to reframe the song. And because Skell heard the song in a completely different way than I had been hearing it for so long, his ideas would spark new directions, different ways of approaching melodies or structural turns that I had never considered. It also allowed me to liberate myself from the idea of writing a specific song and became about just laying down whatever interesting idea popped into my head, regardless of whether it necessarily was cogent or germane to the song at hand.
“At the end of the day, we were left with a pile of ideas. Some were discarded, and the ones that were left were used to remodel the song into something that really didn’t resemble the initial idea at all. As a final touch, I had Breck add some ethereal background vocals and harmonies, which helped bring the song full-circle. Ultimately, the process really breathed new life into a song that I had considered somewhat moribund and transformed it into something fresh.”
The resulting track is a gorgeously lush track with a slick, synth-pop veneer, and yet somehow with jagged edges, too. This is D.I.Y. dream pop at its finest. Check out the track below.
I Write Wedding Songs is out November 15, and you can preorder it from Bandcamp. Follow Human Potential on Facebook and Instagram for future updates.
Photo courtesy of Daniel Roland Tierney
