yvynyl

premiere: Slow Talker - Mannequin

Leah Korbin wrote to me a couple weeks ago with her luminous, lovely first single with some thoughts on what powered the process of building forgiveness through her sounds.

Howdy Mark,

My name is Leah. My boyfriend Josh Stuebe and I work at a recording studio in Van Nuys, CA called Fonogenic Studios, which is in a side-building of a nail polish factory called Orly and across the street from Budweiser. Our boss uses the studio as more of a playground for his experiments (he’s a magician as well as producer), which means we’ve gotten a fair amount of downtime the past few years.

For the album I picked songs I had written between 2012 - when I left college in Nashville - to 2015, which was my second year living in Los Angeles. Each song represents a very personal experience for me.

“Mannequin” was written during one of the most painful years of my life. My mom was diagnosed with cancer and the following month we discovered that my dad was cheating on her. I wrote it to cope with the possibility of my family falling apart by trying to empathize with the woman my father was cheating with. Los Angeles is across the country from where my parents live, so there was little I could do to help the situation. I felt powerless to comfort my mother and confused about what was actually happening because both sides had their own narratives of what the truth was. I harbored a lot of resentment towards the “other woman,” as she uprooted our lives and seemed more like a home-wrecking emotional blockade rather than a real person. Writing this song helped me to humanize someone whose story I didn’t know and begin to forgive her through my own narrative.

For context, I wasn’t a kid who grew up in a terrible household and turned to music because I had nowhere else to go. I had a wonderful childhood. My folks have always been supportive regarding my music ever since I picked up the violin at the age of five. It was their creative support that gave me an outlet when I needed to escape.

I’m an only child so I got all of my parent’s attention, which was a lot of pressure for someone who hated to be the center of attention. When my parents’ marriage began to strain I started to feel the burden of acting as a mediator between them. I turned to songwriting as a way to make sense of my world. Songwriting helped me understand how to be more patient, perceptive and forgiving of my parent’s issues - among other things - and gave me the strength to be there for them when they needed me. Although songwriting is a great tool, nothing could prepare me for the loss of my dad to another woman, the end of my parents’ marriage, and the possible death of my mother to cancer. Not to mention there was obviously a lot of stress building up to this point. It took awhile to get out of my funk and start writing again, but, once I did, I began to heal.

Thank you!

Leah

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Kid Icarus - Bad Timing Now

Over the weekend, I got this touching letter about love from Eric Schlittler:

Hello Mark,

My name is Eric and I wanted to share a little about my latest tape and myself with you and your readers.

“Another black day is dawning. Just you and your broken heart; the feeling everything is falling apart.”

As I sang the lyrics to this song, I had little idea what a self-fulfilling prophecy they would turn out to be. It’s early Winter, 2013. I’m singing a song I wrote for my band Kid Icarus in my friend Nate’s home studio in Scranton, PA. I’ve sang a lot of Kid Icarus songs in various living rooms, basements, bars and private homes in Pennsylvania since I began recording under the Kid Icarus moniker around 1996. The music I make would probably be considered by most to be a strain of lo-fi indie rock. Inspired by the high school sounds of Sonic Youth, Sebadoh, Guided by Voices and Pavement; along with a million obscure 7"s and The Velvet Underground (of course). Have there been other music projects that have called themselves Kid Icarus? Sure, but I would like to think I might be the first to use it. What started as a solo recording project slowly evolved into a band organically over time. With lots of good friends joining me on my quixotic quest and bringing unique contributions, which only helped to make each release its own.

There has never a big breakthrough success for Kid Icarus. A little critical acclaim, an offer to make another record and the sheer force of will; has been enough to keep the project and the band going all these years. It’s partially our own fault; we’ve done little in the way of touring. Instead, I decided to put our efforts and finances towards making the best music possible on a shoestring budget, pressing small runs on CD, vinyl or tape and sending them all over creation. It was and is the economics of a dream.

Shortly after those aforementioned 2013 sessions that would birth and an all but almost totally ignored split 12" with our good friends, Cold Coffee, came the diagnosis. My wife, Cassie was diagnosed with cancer. My best friend since 1994 and wife since 2009, Cassie often lent her voice, art, support, critical ear and even one of her own songs to Kid Icarus. In the early days, it was mostly just she & I mucking around on my cassette 4 track or boom box, singing made up songs about vegetable girls, turtle soup and other unmentionables.

As the Summer of 2013 crept upon us, the dark cloud of sickness loomed large with so many appointments, treatments, preventative measures and surgeries. A distraction from the darkness came in the form of an offer from my friend Matt from Hope for the Tape Deck. An offer to compile a Kid Icarus rarities anthology for his newly minted tape label. The evenings were now filled with attic excavations, digging through mountains of CD-Rs filled with demos, the humming of my old 4 track and lots of great memories of days and people, now long gone. The Summer wore into Fall and the mountain of newly reclaimed tunes was whittled into what approximated a single volume anthology of highlights.

It’s now Winter 2014 and my box of tapes have just arrived from the label. I called it, Dig Archaeology - 13 Years of Lost Songs. The tapes looked great; replete with old school faux Columbia Records style “Nice Price” cassette trappings (courtesy of Cassie) and a picture of her & I on the front. A picture taken some 10 years earlier, an old publicity photo for a public that never seemed too interested. As I opened the tape to inspect the interior art, I noticed a ghostly photo of her lined up perfectly to where the tape rests on the inside of the j-card. There she was staring back at me: standing in the hallway of our old apartment from so long ago. I had a moment of realization that she truly has and has always been my muse. Now, there is much to look forward to. My wife is now cancer free and we are both free of those dark Summer days.

Take Care,

Eric

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