18. Feed Your Head
Devyn White, Mia Rose, Julian Schenker, & Burke Hutchinson - 2023 NYTF
A projection of Gabrielle functions as a kind of spirit guide through Vincent’s psyche. From there on out, each moment in the trip sequence needed to get progressively stranger. Logic loosening its grip, images bleeding into each other. I wanted Theo and Johanna to be the first figures Vincent encounters. Familiar faces, but unreliable ones. They needed to tell her the truth while also burying it in nonsense.
This song was originally written for an Alice in Wonderland inspired show I was writing called Phoenix. It would’ve been sung by two characters named Harley and Smith. They were extremely strung out “keepers of the history.” They sat on a couch in an isolated room watching movies and recording the events down. (It was odd.). They were the Blue Caterpillar equivalent. (Tell me you can’t hear this coming out of the mouth of a hookah-smoking bug.) So when I needed something odd and mystical I reached into the trunk and found this piece. The florid language and drugged-out vibe made it the perfect vehicle for disguising honesty. They repeat a lyric from Good Damage. This time it’s sung fractured:
“Life comes, life goes. It has highs and lows. Not rhythmic or in rhyme… but uncontrollable prose.”
It’s already in her subconscious. It’s staying there annd being fed back to her. And somehow, she still isn’t listening.
The piano part turned into the most virtuosic writing in the entire score. Rapid-fire 64th-note sextuplets sprint up and down the keyboard, tangled with rhythms that feel more like drumming than accompaniment…all of it living at a mezzo-piano dynamic. I genuinely pity the pianist who has to learn it someday. Somewhere, in a practice room, a metronome will be clicking mercilessly while my name is being cursed.
Jeff’s acoustic guitar in the second verse pushed the song into an almost Latin groove. That was never the original plan…but it unlocked something super cool. The song suddenly swayed instead of floated. It felt seductive. Dangerous. Exactly the kind of thing that would make the truth easier to swallow and easier to ignore.