"Watershed" cassette on white with 5-panel artwork and complete lyrics! Only 150 copies available.
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about
We all live in our own reality.
.
We tell ourselves stories about ourselves, about why our lives have or don’t have meaning. About what’s going on in the world around us and about our relationship to others.
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What does it mean to believe in the story you tell yourself so much that you are willing impose it on those around you?
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What does it mean to believe in the story you tell yourself so much so that you are willing to kill people, or to die, to validate that story?
.
I was writing this song, “Make Believe,” in January of 2021. It was the first song I wrote that would make it onto my record, and I was so unsure about what I was doing. What was the story I was telling myself, about myself?
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I was struggling with my own reality in a sea of other people’s realities, each of them louder and more confident than mine.
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I’m a teacher, a programmer, a musician, a dad, husband, son.... I was, and am, working through the dissonance of having myriad relationships to the external world. Even though my livelihood is wrapped up in being a musician - teaching electronic music, making music apps, etc - I had been avoiding the most foundational part of my “musician” self for at least a decade. Why was that? Was it out of fear of that dissonance, of creating more vulnerability and instability in my relationship to the world and to my community?
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The song started out exploring one thing and contorted into something more complex and dark, because we were in the middle of an insurrection, and I couldn’t look away from the madness. I starting pulling words from the testimony I was hearing, twisting and combining them into a different prism of reality.
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How is my reality any more real than the reality of another?
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Anyway, this is a dark one. I love it for its raw-ness, for its texture, for being unafraid for its own life enough to explode into a new reality.
lyrics
make believe a river borne of a thousand streams: a make believe identity.
make believe a canyon hollowed beneath your feet. always dig in, never retreat.
i know where i stand.
make believe devotion’s a bullet in the chest.
make believe a bulletproof vest.
with the water rising, suspended disbelief
dragging soiled wake between your knees.
i know where you stand.
..
dive under a chair.
shut behind a door.
hear a primal shout
“we will never back down!”
a riot shield. hiding in fear these final hours.
whispering in my phone
“nancy, where are you?”
credits
from Watershed,
released July 15, 2022
bk - voice, keyboard, sax, drum programming, electric and acoustic guitar, bass, drums.
Over the past two decades, Ben Kamen has created music for a variety of formats and genres — from chamber music to multi-
channel sound installations to folk and post-rock. Originally from Ohio, Kamen has lived in Olympia since 2006, where he teaches electronic music composition at The Evergreen State College and develops musical instrument apps, including the drum machine “Patterning.”...more
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