Pop Art After Midnight: The Stories Behind the Songs
This was such a fun album to produce.
Pop Art After Midnight lives in this whole retro world inspired by Pop Art, Studio 54, 90s club culture, fashion, sex, nightlife, John Waters, and a retrospective of being gay in the early 90s before the alphabet mafia started colonizing the LGB community to its nonsense today.
A lot of this album came from looking backward.
The songs are drawn from journal entries, old writings, poems and real-life experiences, then pulled apart, rewritten, reworked and produced into this weird little world with HiGH VOLTAGE HOMOS and Reverend Graye.
Some of them are emotional. Some are observational. Some are ridiculous. Some are filthy.
Basically, a fairly accurate archive. 😂
Tell Me, Tell Me
When the asswipe of a partner confesses, gets caught cheating, or both.
It’s that moment when they finally say the thing out loud and you’re sitting there thinking:
“Yeah, I already fucking knew.”
There’s anger in it, but there’s also that strange relief when the thing you’ve been sensing finally gets confirmed.
Sometimes you don’t need the truth because you don’t know.
You need them to finally say it because you already do.
Factory Floor
Super gay early 90s nightlife.
This one feels like Studio 54 meets Warhol and John Waters inside a modern Fellini film, with the occasional little Fulci twitch.
Getting dressed up was an event.
Dancing was an event.
Being seen was an event.
Going home with somebody could also be an event. 😂
There was this whole ritual around nightlife back then. Clothes, makeup, bodies, music, dancing, sex, attention, competition and trying to make sure you weren’t the one who missed whatever everyone would be talking about tomorrow.
The repetition in the song is part of that. Night after night after night. Eventually even fabulous becomes a loop.
Pop Art After Midnight
After-hours glamour, artifice, excess, fabulous people, expensive-looking nonsense and what happens when the dim lights make everything look just a little better than it probably is.
All The Love
The third single released from the album and definitely one of my favz.
It’s absolutely not a genre or vocal style I would normally sing, so I was waaaay out of my element.
There were definitely moments of: “What the fuck am I doing here?”
But I’m seriously stoked with where the final production landed. Sometimes being uncomfortable is exactly where something interesting happens.
Cheap Lipstick Saints
An original tribute I wrote for John Waters and that whole wild era of unapologetically bizarre art.
Seeing his films in the early 90s was an absolute shocker for me, but they opened up an entirely different world of film and art. Ugly could be beautiful. Bad taste could be intentional. The outsider could be the star.
I really wish I’d had the privilege of being exposed to work like that while I was in high school majoring in visual arts. I eventually reworked the song and gave it a whole new musical life.
Still filthy. Just differently filthy. 😂
Better Things To Do
This one is about self-agency and self-stewardship. It weirdly gives me a little Eurovision somewhere in there too. 😂
The heart of it is basically:
Well, that happened.
That super sucked. But I don’t need to let it live inside me anymore.
File closed.
Next . . .
The Room Between
The lyrics are deceptively simple, but oof, I struggled HARD with this one.
How do you write about the masks we wear every day while asking somebody else to remove theirs? Knowing you wear one too. Knowing there’s this strange space between the mask and the actual person. It’s about acknowledging somebody and saying: “I see you, and I actually want to see you.”
Unless they’re a psychopath. Then perhaps stay the fuck out of The Room Between. 😂
You Took My Soul Dancing
It is fabulously over-the-top and I make absolutely no apologies. LMAO. It comes from those real-life nights when you meet the BEST dance partner on the floor and suddenly the rest of the club disappears for a while.
You dance. You lose your mind together. For a few hours, nothing else really matters. And then morning eventually ruins everything.
Blue Shadows
A more modern look at what has happened as gay culture moved online. Everybody is looking for love on an app while potentially missing the person standing two feet away because we’re glued to our screens.
This was originally written for Reverend Graye as a solo track, but it just wasn’t cutting it there. Once it became part of the HiGH VOLTAGE HOMOS / Reverend Graye collaboration, it finally found where it belonged.
Sexy Time
I think we can figure this one out. Booty call. 😂
Gonna Be A Whore
Gay twink. 90s. Downtown Toronto fetish scene. Lizard Lounge. Boots.
I’ll leave you with that for now. 😂🔥
So that’s Pop Art After Midnight.
Part memory archive. Part dancefloor. Part ridiculousness. Part art project.
And apparently quite a lot of evidence that I had a very busy youth.
😂🖤
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