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Shorthand was our first decent song. It all started because David found a preset on his amp with a step filter and decided to write a song around it. It reminded him of the guitar sound from Map of the Problematique by Muse. He remembers, “This song took me ages to write because I was really fussy about the structure. It did have a good chorus though.”
This song continued the tradition of smooshing together all the riffs recorded on David’s phone into one song. The verse riff was actually one of the first riffs David ever wrote, from even before Kickstand Sinatra. There’s a REALLY old recording of David playing that riff on his old old old phone, probably from 2016. The structure of the song was changed a lot, and it used to have a countdown section before the second chorus inspired by an old Naked Giants song. Don’t remember which one it was right now, but maybe I will later.
We wanted it to be the opener for our EP and it used to open our shows. It was our most high-energy song yet, and we all thought it was our best. It was at the time! Nobody’s really sure what the lyrics are about, though. David was really proud of them back when they were written, but they don’t really mean anything.
This was the first song we felt comfortable sharing with people. Our friends started to actually notice the stuff we were making, even if wasn’t that great. We shared the demo around to a lot of people at our high school, and ended up with a little bit of recognition for it. Now, Ryan says, “It’s definitely still a solid song. I wouldn’t be comfortable playing it in our shows now, but it would be a fun little Easter egg to bring back now and again.”
We recorded this song at the Boise Hive and planned to release it as our first single. Obviously, that didn’t end up happening. Here are some pictures of that recording session though:
Check out the video on this page of David playing the verse riff of the song sometime back in 2017. That’s in our original practice space, aka Ryan’s room. This video is from before the song existed.
[Verse 1]
You got the building blocks of something you don’t know in your hand
Screw it up and he’ll sue you, strip away the promised land
(Air, water, dirt and sand)
The afterlife holds no bearing on what you will ignore
Rearrange the continents to make life less of a bore
(Airplanes, cars, boats and shores)
[Chorus]
I don’t know just what the newsstands are hiding from us all
Hold me tightly as we fall sideways into a wall
Anybody can see that we need a second chance
A defaced domino that’s lost its way in the sand
[Verse 2]
All the inner workings of the earth turn mine
All this bloated mass of paper balanced on a dime
(We are running out of time)
Only satellites know where the little ants go
Trudging their way through the miles of snow
(Freezing rain, hail, oh no)
[Ending]
We were written in…shorthand.
Here is an old performance of the song. This was probably from around the time we played the talent show.
Our first ever studio recording! This is Shorthand, recorded live at the Boise Hive (if we remember correctly, it took around 9 takes) in Studio 3. It was engineered and mixed by our friend Chance. Thanks Chance!
(If this doesn’t load for you, reload the page. Idk why it does that lol)
We played this song for the first time at our high school talent show. You can find that video on this site too, if you really want to. It was a pretty solid performance for the time, all things considered, but we did screw up the first verse a little bit. You can see in that video when we all look back at Ryan in confusion. Fun fact: we didn’t have vocal monitors for that show, so Keegan and David couldn’t hear their voices at all. It’s a miracle they were in tune.
It was also played at our first two shows as the opener. It’s a solid opening song, but beyond that doesn’t add enough to our set and doesn’t fit with our current vibe. So it likely won’t be played again, unless people REALLY want us to for some reason.