drums

The Trampoline Scene

~ tryingartist ~ Leave a comment

So, we’re moving on.

Recordings are becoming a bit more crisp. The playing is improving slowly, especially the drumming. Chords now have numbers after the letters semi-frequently. The lyrics make sense for good proportions of the songs. The singing is moving from a lowly 4/10 to the giddy heights of 5/10.

March 2008, I am 16, and I have just written a love song for my girlfriend. It’s called The Trampoline Song, and it’s quite insipid. I couldn’t really muster any real love. It has one clear reference: we met on a trampoline at a house party, about 7 months before I wrote the song. Apart from that, there is very little true feeling in it, and I think it shows. In my defence, I don’t think this track was ever presented as a love song to that girlfriend. Maybe it was just designed to exist as a little ditty and – oh look! that’s a reference to us! he’s so cute!

This is one of 3 songs that are related to this girlfriend. All Along is another one, and the third will come later. Listening to The Trampoline Scene now makes me feel a bit guilty. Of the 3, it’s the only one that was conceived in positive spirits – the only one that was meant to reflect positively on our relationship. And it just feels a bit false. The cheap jokes in the second verse:

You and I could try to fly,
Although if we did we probably first should say goodbye.
You and I could try to fly,
In fact, no we might die.

I’m just another embarrassed teenager, completely unable to commit to any form of real sincerity. I began with a plan to write a nice song, but felt immediately compelled to write some spanners into it.

I’ll be honest and say that I am still very much a spanner-addict. But now when I write a song, I take out the bit at the beginning with faint sounds of rustling and the metronome.

I guess I might have to mention that this song appears to be influenced by Jack Johnson. I never owned an album by him, but, like everyone else in the world, I did learn how to play Banana Pancakes and Sitting Waiting Wishing on guitar. ‘banana pancakes’, ‘trampoline’ – both from the twee hell of love that is universally relatable, and instantly forgettable.

 

 

In The Corner

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The chronological order of these songs is for some reason becoming increasingly hard at the moment. Once again, I began writing with eager fingers, ready to type the words ‘Middle Era’ in a welcoming fashion, perhaps with fancy formatting like this:

Welcome to The Middle Era.

Instead I’ve spent the last hour desperately trying to muddle my way through this blended 2008-2009 world, relying on my infamously unreliable memory, my dodgy, untrustworthy document ambitiously titled ‘Discography’, and certain musical clues in songs like: How shit is it? And, to what extent does the singer sound like an annoying 15 year old?

My heart and my head both tell me that In The Corner was probably written before most of the last 6 or so songs I posted. But the rest of my body is sitting comfortably, knowing I’ll never have the dedication nor research skill to definitively prove this is the case.

So, In The Corner will sit here awkwardly, camouflaged in its 2nd verse strings and extra percussion, which were almost definitely added months later, thereby causing Mass Chronological Confusion.

Anyway, the song itself:

In The Corner was a big one. One of my most successful pop songs, I thought at the time. It is catchy, no doubt…

When I listen to it, I think of the disgusting blue t-shirt I was wearing as my band played Battle of the Bands. It was our first gig, we brought loads of friends, we won, and I’m pretty sure we played In The Corner as our last song. It’s an extremely happy memory – one of the times where being in a band really does feel like the most fun thing in the world. A memory which is only slightly tainted by how much I dislike the song now.

But I do dislike it. There’s something so annoyingly naive about it. The lyrics all about being friends, the sickly sweet melody, sung sickeningly badly by myself. The acoustic guitar, the bouncy bass line, with the top string clearly out of tune. The drum groove stolen from Easy by Lionel Richie (ok I actually quite like that bit). The Lighthouse Family style strings. The ‘oh oh oh oh oh oh’ bits in the chorus. I imagine my friends in the band thinking fuckin ‘ell not this one again. Being embarrassed at me croaking it out each time. I assume really they were none the wiser. But the whole thing does seem a bit lame. We played this song for a long time in the band. GUYS. WAKE UP. BE A BIT MORE OFFENSIVE FOR CHRIST’S SAKE.

As a side note, I don’t think I’ve mentioned yet that my first collection of my own songs on iTunes was called ‘Invasion’. Haha. Then it later graduated and became ‘Quick, Invasion!’ which is awfully emo. We’re still in the ‘Quick, Invasion!’ phase here. But just think of that phrase and then In The Corner playing in the background. It’s hilariously inappropriate. I spent so long unsure of what I wanted my music to actually sound like. And it’s a million miles away from In The Corner.

What A Shame

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This song slipped through the radar, probably because its more recent version, helpfully entitled ‘What A Shame New’, was created in 2008. The original, however, was written in 2007, and it shows. It shows so much that I can’t understand why I chose to go over it again. And, given that I did go over it again, why did I do so little with it? Actually, come to think of it, did I make it worse?

Yeah, comparing them right now, I think I did.

The newer one is better only in the sense that it has fewer actual mistakes. The singing is marginally better. But the mix is much worse; the earlier one sounds rougher and edgier, like the whole thing is coming out of a shit guitar amp. My voice has an earnest aggression to it which suits the lofi amateurish noise of the recording. The newer one is muddy and bassy, flat, uninspiring, boring.

Both versions have my characteristically nonsensical lyrics from the aged 14-15 era. They’re just terrible, I mean the comical lines:

‘You’re looking at the man in the crowd
Who without a sound
Keeps everyone’s head down.
Maybe it’s his gun’

are kind of stupid but yeah ok maybe it’s a joke song let’s give this guy a chance. But then we get to the bridge:

‘What a shame I could not stay
All alone I’ll be afraid
Why work when you’ve got time?
You should come and see one of mine’

What am I trying to say? As always, just throwing words together at random. It must be the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ fault.

I can’t think of a single biographical thing to say about this song. It summons no memories for me, beyond the fact that I re-recorded some it completely pointlessly. I perhaps remember a vague feeling of hope: ‘yeah… maybe if the drums are played more tightly… and the harmonies are sung better… we could have something…’ And then an inevitable small but numbing disappointment when the song remained the same old dead horse.

It’s amusing because after the last few songs I had begun to think that my past self had turned a corner. I had planned to include in this post the declaration that we had firmly reached the middle era of my music, and that a touch of professionalism would start to creep in from now. Well, the thought is banished.

What a shame.

 

NB: I have run out of space on my Soundcloud (almost 50 songs… and we’ve got nowhere). Songs will now be posted as basic YouTube videos.

NB2: the guitar in What A Shame sounds like the guitar in this:

 

 

Imminent Death And Bubbles

~ tryingartist ~ 1 Comment

An instrumental in two parts: Imminent Death, and Bubbles. The two parts are pretty similar, the chords remaining the same all the way through. It just gets slightly jumpy and echo-y for a while, as I play a guitar solo of sorts, and a blues bass riff. I thought it sounded like bubbles, I added Bubbles to the title, and the track was born.

It’s boring.

There’s a bit of dread there, but not enough to sustain your attention.

There’s a pedal note going through the whole song, which is something I like, but it isn’t enough to sustain your attention.

As in many other of my songs (to this day I am guilty of this), I have layered many tracks together, rather than compose something genuinely engaging on a single track, perhaps to conceal my inability to really ‘play’ ‘any’ ‘of’ ‘the’ ‘instruments’. The song is textured, but ultimately a bit boring. It doesn’t sustain your attention.

I think the song’s tone is infecting my writing. Finding it hard to be. Flowing and. funny.

Here is an example of the opposite of what I do in this and many other tracks:

There are essentially four clearly defined instrument parts, with a subtle pad coming in after the bridge in the middle. They just really work together. The production on each instrument is perfect, and the main synth melody is so catchy you want to hear it every time. The song goes on for almost 7 minutes! But it sustains your attention. Well, for me it does.

 

At 2.47 I do a drum fill which also appears a couple of times in this other song, one which sustains your attention quite effectively:
(2.47 could maybe be called the ‘climax’ of the song, in the same sense that a re-run of American Dad could be deemed ‘the greatest television moment of all time’.)

 

And finally, here’s Super Hans with the formula I was going for when writing Imminent Death And Bubbles: ‘the longer the note, the more dread’.

 

Lacking any real emotional contact with this song, any concrete memories to go along with it, or any real feelings of pride and/or dismay, I sneakily saturated this blog post with high-octane video content. I don’t know if you noticed, but it worked extremely well. This is a gimmick deployed by Buzzfeed, and the rest of the internet world. It is perhaps comparable to the abundance of ‘hooks’ in many of the catchiest pop songs. Features which GRAB and then SUSTAIN your attention.

LOOK BELOW FOR A FEW EXCITING AND SHOCKING EXAMPLES OF THIS:

 

 

Little Green Lane

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Up next is possibly the wettest song I’ve ever written. Well, top 3 at least. It’s drenched with wetness. It wouldn’t be dry if you covered the mp3 in towels, dropped it in the Sahara, and told it to find its way home.

The title, I imagine, was meant to be figurative. Like ‘Little Green Lane’ represents this sort of twee suburb-y existence that the love-torn and anguished hero flees from to seek life anew in the unknown. Unfortunately, because the song is literally dripping wet, it trips and falls into the bottomless pit it hopes to escape from. The song becomes the very nightmare I’m singing about. Everything about it, from the trudging opening chord sequence, to that pleading lead guitar line in the 2nd verse (ok, it is also the best bit of the song, but: wet) to the lyrics (‘I don’t want to spoil your pretty plan’ is grotesquely emo. And I really don’t consider my past self to be an emo in any way. And then the chorus – I’m basically just listing modes of transport. PICK ONE ) – all of these things lack any sort of punch whatsoever. It must be the most insipid dramatic walk-out of all time.

‘Ohhhh noooooo we’re fighting again. Ohhhhhh noooooooooooooooooooo. Ahhhh how annoyyyyyinnnggg. I’m gonna have to go to the train station, goodbye forever.’

‘Well where are you going?’

‘Not quite sure yet. Somewhere very very far awayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy’

‘Wouldn’t the plane be more time efficient? Might also cost less, you know what trains are like these days. Especially if it’s a domestic flight.’

‘You’re probably right yes. Well either way I’m leaving Little Green Lane. I’m off to the plane station. GOODBYE FOREVER’

‘What’s Little Green Lane?’

(wiping a solitary tear from his uncertain eyes, our trembling hero shuffles awkwardly to the door, in a noncommittal sort of way)

Perhaps the most damning thing I can say about this song is that my most significant memories of it involve me trying to listen to it when out and about, and being frustrated that it was too quiet on my iPod. That’s basically it.

 

However, you know, it is a proper song. It goes verse chorus verse chorus in a pleasing way. If Adele sung it it would be passable. And, on a production level, it is a bit of a step up from most of the earlier tracks. The drumming is relatively tight and appropriate. I’m playing piano, which will slowly but surely take over from guitar as the dominant instrument in my music. It has a lead guitar part, which is quite a rarity in the discography (again, wet, but sweet. Or: sweet, therefore wet.) NOTE: I genuinely just noticed the guitar solo before the second verse for the first time since I started writing this. It took me roughly 5 listens. Incredibly appropriate blended solo, or completely ineffectual filler? You decide.

 

‘I’m leaving through the raaaiiiiinnnn.’

Course you are, you wet shit.

‘

The D ‘n’ D Song

~ tryingartist ~ 2 Comments

Another joke song, the ‘D’s stand for ‘Death and Destruction’. I think I found this amusing because the song features happy chords and a xylophone (or is it marimba? I can’t remember, it was a software instrument anyway, played through the laptop keyboard). Can a xylophone sound sad? A lack of research tells me no, no it can’t.

I’ll confess that while making this project I sigh a little whenever I get to a joke song like this. ‘Huhhhhhhhhhhhh’

I keep waiting for that great leap forward in musical prowess. Something to make the readers go ‘oh, he ain’t just a pretty font with mostly banal observations about himself, this guy actually has talent!’ Will we ever get there? Perhaps not, you may not like what I become.

In the meantime, if you love xylophones, easy happy harmonies, and punchlines that are frankly quite offensive when you listen to them again 8 years later, then you will simply love The D ‘n’ D Song.

The instrument parts are reasonably neatly put together, I’ll give it that. I have good memories of this song. At the time the harmonies sounded better than most I had done before, and the drumming is pretty much all in time. But joke songs don’t age well. Well, some do. But although the fact that it’s a joke shields it from some of the disdain I have for my earlier earnest efforts, it also dilutes the emotional pull I feel towards it. I listen and I’m like ‘there I go, being an inconsequential dick again’. At least when I tried to write proper music you can hear that bittersweet desperation of a recorded performance dying valiantly, over and over again. There’s something noble about it. I really am trying. The sarcastic sneer implied by this song ruins that for me. It’s still dying, just not nobly.

 

NB: I just tried for a full 4 minutes to find a sad xylophone piece. I tried everything, from typing ‘sad xylophone’ into YouTube, to typing ‘sad xylophone music’ into YouTube. I found absolutely nothing. This is the best I could find, so I think I’ve proven my point beyond doubt:

NB2: I stand corrected. Apparently it’s a marimba. Can marimbas sound sad? The jury’s out for now

For All My Time

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I’ll begin with a tangent:

At university I read ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion‘, a poem by Yeats, and it had such a big effect on me that most of my lyrics since then have been influenced in some way by it. There’s a good reason for that – Yeats’ poem is one of the best examples of a piece of writing about not knowing what to write:

‘I sought a theme and sought for it in vain… What can I but enumerate old themes’?

To an aspiring young writer, whose thoughts never seem to quite manage the creation of a world famous poem, it’s comforting to read about other people’s dissatisfaction with their own mind. ‘Oh’, I’d think. ‘Yeats also fails to come up with anything occasionally. We have something in common.’ ‘But, oh’, I’d think again. ‘He seems to have turned his own dead-end thinking into yet another brilliant poem. I never seem to do that. Perhaps I should go to the shop and buy a chocolate, maybe stop in at a friend’s room on the way back to eat the chocolate, with a cup of tea, we could chat about our days so far, yes I think I should probably have a break, I’ll return a fresh person with fresh ideas.’

But the poem is about more than just not knowing what to write, obviously. The way Yeats looked back at his life and saw his whole work as just flashes of memory, images and symbols made me think a lot about the way we live life in general. Our experience is recorded in our minds as memories. And the word ‘memory’ tells us how much we lose to the past. The fact that we have a word for things we remember, and everything else that we lived through is just an indistinct blur. Which is not to say that those moments we can’t remember don’t have an effect on the way we grow or who we are or what we like, but when we are old and have finished our life’s work, whatever that might be, we will look back and see a tiny number of memories against the vast number of moments we lived through and forgot. The sum of our experience will seem to be smaller than it was.

So maybe the best thing to do in life is to create memories as often as possible. Even bad memories can become good with enough time. A terrible day when you lost your phone, got drenched in the rain, broke up with your partner, tripped when walking up some stairs, ordered some food and it arrived cold, told a joke and no-one laughed, and ended up in hospital with appendicitis – that day may with enough time be one of your best stories, may be one of the distinct memory blocks that make up your life.

 

Anyway, back to this eminently forgettable piece of music.

For All My Time was written two years before I got to university, and four years before I read that Yeats poem. But its lyrics are similar to the sort of things I would write much later. Well, some of them are. The song suffers from the inconsistency and lack of editing that we’re all used to by now in these early songs, and so what starts quite promisingly as a wistful song about ‘wasted hours’ and things that ‘disappear with time’ begins to be invaded by murmurings of a boring break-up song:

‘Just turn the other cheek,
You’ll be gone in a week’

and the very strange:

‘Hey, I think it’s very rude
For you to ask for more than shelter and food’

For All My Time is also ridiculously long for a country-ish blues-ish song of a reasonable tempo. If it was simply halved, it might have been one of my best songs from its year of composition (2008). It might also have needed some better vocal takes, although even mentioning my terrible singing seems pointless this far in.

 

At 3.57, I attempt a linear drumming fill, with poor to moderate success. Linear drumming is when you don’t hit any drums at the same time. This is, I’m certain, the only moment of linear drumming in my entire output. So soak it in. I’d had a few drum lessons on it in the weeks leading up the recording. Clearly not as many as I needed.

 

 

 

 

Smiling Cos He Made It

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I think I liked this song for ages because it was just after I’d learnt how to play major-7 chords on guitar, one of which begins the track, and I’d decided that was all pretty advanced and special.

Don’t get me wrong, I haven’t developed a problem with major-7 chords, some of my best chords are major-7s, but I have developed a problem with the song.

The verses are fine, especially the second one with its percussion on the ride and hi-hat. Lyrically I quite like it, although I distinctly remember thinking it was more profound than it sounds now. When you’re 16 the subject of social group dynamics and trying to get with girls is pretty intellectually stimulating. Actually I won’t sit here typing on my high horse – I still find those subjects very worthwhile topics of conversation. But the lyrics do come across a bit juvenile now.

Am I constantly underestimating my younger self? I think I might be. Not musically, no. These songs really are quite bad. But I think I was ‘aware’, mentally. I like to think my 16 year old self was adopting a sort of ironically self-referential yet wearily and dismissively distant yet resigned and trapped yet wise and knowing approach to these themes. It’s just so difficult to tell now. The impact of the sound on my ears doesn’t make me think: ‘this guy’s got it going on. He knows what’s what and he isn’t afraid to tell us’.

The title. I still come across this issue almost daily. The word is ‘because’, we’re all aware of that. But the lyrics are definitely ’cause’, which of course is an accepted abbreviated form. But it never looks right to me. I always read it as ’cause’ like ’cause and effect’. My whole life I have used ‘cos’ cos it reads more like a colloquial abbreviated form. Which, again, is ok, many people do that. In texts, in emails, on facebook. But it doesn’t look right in a title. There is the conundrum. I have preserved it nonetheless, for the sake of historical accuracy.
(It strikes me that this whole paragraph is the sort unlikely to make it past the 1st draft of a piece of writing. It’s definitely staying.)

Anyway, that chorus is meant to be a ‘big’ chorus, but it’s too messy for that. Every instrument goes in and out of time in amounts small enough to not sound like obvious mistakes, but large enough to prevent you from enjoying the song. The repeated line ‘he’s smiling cos he made it’ is too simple for the scene the rest of the song sets up. I want some sarcasm, or anguish, or tension, or any sort of emotion besides bland smugness. And then we get that awful bit at the end where I put some ‘character’ into the line by shortening the words to ‘he’s sm-li- c- he made it’, or whatever, and then it gets more bouncy, and I don’t normally take the Lord’s name in vain, but god it just doesn’t work, especially when I try to elaborate a bit on the melody and just sing some random higher notes in a strained uncertain sort of way.

The bridge is a random blues. It’s noteworthy because the blues does feature in a lot of my songs, but it does sound a bit like a fragment of a different song has been squashed in to eat up some seconds. Maybe it was. Anyway, all in all it’s a track that gets worse as it goes on.

Second on the playlist is a remix I did a bit less than a year later. ELECTRONIC MUSIC IS COMING, is the message, and what an important message that is, looking back on everything. Electronic sounds would begin to seep in from that moment onwards, although very gradually at first.

Musically, the remix has the advantage of being a year later, benefitting from slightly more knowledge on my part. It has the disadvantage of being an act of flogging a dead horse. 4/10.

 

 

You’re Not Alone

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A band song, the chords written by the guitarist and bassist, the melody and words written by me. But that’s not important right now. What is important are the lines in the second verse:

‘Now I know that you say you’re right
But let me tell you,
I’ve seen fakers lie better
Than you could tell the truth.

I know what it’s like to be alone
And I’m not going back.’

Everything about those lyrics grates on me, right down to the ‘but let me tell you’. The most immediately annoying thing is obviously the naivety/authenticity issue. Some 15 year old moaning about how he has plumbed the depths of loneliness and despair doesn’t suggest the emotional impact of Juliette waking up to find Romeo dead beside her. Let’s also not forget that the singer sings these lines to someone he is clearly in a serious relationship with now. So the loneliness could be assumed to have happened 2/3 years earlier. The memory he is alluding to might well have been when he lost his mum in the supermarket for ten minutes and was trapped in a dark forest of striding strangers’ legs.

But maybe you’re a postmodern reader and you subscribe to the Death of the Author. Maybe you don’t think the age of the writer makes any difference – it’s the words themselves that matter. Well, I mean first up, there isn’t really anything poetic about those lines is there? But no matter, lyrics don’t have to be abstract or complex, or even rhyme. Take Lorraine Ellison’s chorus:

‘Stay with me baby
Please stay with me baby
Oh, stay with me baby
I can’t go on’

These lyrics make up one of the most powerful choruses of all time, because the music and the vocal performance lifts them. This is the difference between lyrics and poetry – music has the ability to transform phrases we might class as cliché into powerful, profound statements. But I’m not fully, or even at all, convinced that the musical performance of my lyrics in ‘You’re Not Alone’ has done anything except make them just slightly worse.

Then there’s a predictable consistency issue, as with pretty much every song I’ve written about so far. On first listen, it’s easy to be fooled into thinking that ‘You’re Not Alone’ contains a series of well-matched verses that all relate to a central, consolatory message.

In fact, listen again (if you can manage it), and you’ll find that there are three distinct shades to the ‘You’re Not Alone’ message, none of which makes sense together.

  1. (a) Your basic, ‘you’re not alone, I’m here with you’ message. This narrative arc features the song’s best line: ‘Turn the light on inside, you can’t see in the dark’, and it’s basically what you think the song is about if you aren’t concentrating, mainly because of its title.

(b) But even within this first narrative, there is a second strain which succinctly discredits part 1 with a couple of choice phrases:

‘I know that you aren’t used
To this kind of advice
From someone on the street’

Actually coming in the first verse, those lines tell us that the singer is a stranger to the addressee of the song, which is completely at odds with the tone of the rest of the lyrics, in particular with narrative 2:

2. These are the lyrics quoted at the top of this post. They essentially read ‘You are lying. Please don’t leave me.’ Suddenly the situation is reversed in two ways: the characters do know each other very well, and it’s actually the singer who might be alone.

3. Finally, we have a resigned message about consolatory messages in general.

‘Well you’re not what you wanted to be,
But let’s just leave that all behind.
When there’s nothing left to shout for,
People tell you: ‘At least you’ve got your health’

So, it’s a song about a person consoling someone else or being consoled or being dumped or not liking being consoled or consoling in the first place.

We in the band liked this song a lot, once upon a time. We never played it live much because we thought it was too slow/ we couldn’t play it very well. But we’d show it to people. ‘Listen to this, what do you think? It’s a song we wrote about taxis and leading a healthy lifestyle’

RABBITS IN THE RAIN

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My sister’s friend heard me playing guitar once and asked me to write her a song. I said ok give me a minute, and walked off. She laughed, I laughed, we all laughed. 2 days later I came back to her with RABBITS IN THE RAIN. Title in capitals, presumably to add a bit of gravitas to a theme I was worried people might treat with too much levity.

A tragedy in bunny’s clothing, this is a song about the voracious and perverse appetite of consumerism, the desperate struggle of the oppressed against systemic oppressive forces, and rabbits dancing around having a lovely time when it’s a bit wet.

That last part of the theme is covered succinctly but repeatedly in the choruses. I obviously deemed ‘rabbits in the rain’ description enough to translate the complex, multi-layered visions I’m sure I was having at the time. And I was right. Rabbits are so heavily connotative in our society that merely mentioning them over a couple of happy chords is enough to suggest a cute scene, maybe springtime, bucolic splendour, nature running its course, a world untouched by evil. The rain is a slight spanner though. Are they happy in the rain? Is it Bambi Little April Showers, or is it a darkening foreboding storm?

Regardless, we all know what happens in Bambi.

Boom, enter the minor chord, and the verse begins. It starts off harmlessly enough:

‘The rabbit has got his lettuce
And no one will take it from him
You don’t want to fight a rabbit
When it’s got its lettuce’

But in here are the corrosive seeds of greed, the same greed that will lead to Billy the Rabbit stealing from Old Farmer Jack. The same greed that will cause Billy’s death.

What can a rabbit do? His land encroached on by the constantly increasing consumption of humanity, a modern day rabbit is forced to steal in order to survive. Do you think Billy was raised to be a thief? No, Sofia the Rabbit was a rabbit of principle and dignity. But she too had to steal, eventually. And Billy sees no moral dilemma in taking back from those who ruined his last 4 homes, killed half of his friends, and left many more starving. Old Farmer Jack deserves what he’s got coming to him, Billy believes.

Trouble:

‘Old Farmer Jack
Has come out with his gun.
Run, Rabbits, run,
You don’t want Farmer Jack to get you’

And here we get the unstoppable force of the system crashing against those who would attempt to disrupt it. What is a warren of rabbits to a single human with a gun? Lettuce crumbs dropping from their panicked hungry mouths, they scatter. What started off as an act of conscious collective rebellion, a small victory in a world of grinding losses, becomes a free-for-all of selfish chaos, as rabbits clamber over each other to save their own skin. This is how the system wins. It breaks spirits. It reduces oppressed beings to their most basic and dangerous drive: to survive. In this state, even a generous, compassionate, and cute rabbit like Billy begins to display the same pernicious qualities found in the oppressors he so loathes.

Today, Billy doesn’t even get the chance to save himself. Perhaps served on a plate, with a side of the lettuce he had wanted. Maybe just discarded with the disdain Farmer Jack reserves for beings he decides are worth less than himself.

‘The rabbits were so afraid
Nowhere to go
And Billy was taken down
He was too slow’