“Phil” is a love song on the Square album. It’s about that feeling that your whole life led to the meeting of the person you’ve fallen in love with. I heard a few times through the years that people played the song at their wedding. That’s incredibly flattering. Tragic thing is, my relationship with the person who inspired that song lasted a year. Maybe less. I have faith that the marriages launched by weddings soundtracked by “Phil” have been much more successful.
Over the years, I’ve experimented with non-4/4 time signatures many times. “Phil” is an early example. I believe the first was the song “To Say The Very Least” from the Vertex album, which (like “Phil”) is in 3/4 time. I remember making the beat for “...Very Least” quite clearly. I had a guitar loop that I liked and then - for the life of me - I couldn’t get any drums to work with it. I was befuddled. I kept working at it until I had something that sorta worked. Then I hit a wall again when I tried to write lyrics to the beat. I felt like I was losing my mind. Even at this point, I didn’t understand that I was working in a different time signature. I couldn’t break out of the way I was used to writing bars and nothing worked. I kept trying to force 4/4 lines over 3/4 measures and it sounded terrible. I’ll give myself a bit of credit in that I didn’t give in to the awkwardness. I didn’t force it. I kept editing my lines until they *kinda* flowed. The final result is clunky but not entirely awful.
Many rappers - including some all-time greats - have fallen prey to the 3/4 trap. There are a few famous/classic hip hop songs in 3/4 in which Hall-Of-Fame-level rappers sound terrible. I won’t bother naming names. In the rare cases where someone cracks it, the results are pretty thrilling.
[One of the rappers on this song is in the pocket, one is not]
Like I did with “To Say The Very Least”, I fumbled my way through “Phil”. If I were to do it over again today, I would program the drums differently and I would have an easier time with the writing. I do remember sitting with the beat for “Phil”, understanding that the time signature was different and working out a flow beforehand. I still had a hard time with it but I was determined to make it work because I loved the guitar sample so much. Yes, it’s a sample. It comes from folk record from the Philippines, hence the name “Phil”. After making the beat, I wrote the name ‘Phil’ on the disk to remind myself it was the beat with the sample from the Philippines record.
After “Phil”, I stayed away from the non-4/4 time signatures for a while. I came back to it with the song “Whispers Of The Waves” on the 20 Odd Years album, which is in 6/8. I mostly despise that album but I think I ripped my verses on “Whispers Of The Waves” pretty good. Funny thing is, the late Gord Downie (with whom I wrote and recorded the song) had to talk me into it. My original plan for that song was to flip the usual approach to working with a guest singer. Rather than having rapped verses and a sung chorus, I wanted to have sung verses and a rapped chorus. That’s how the original demo of the song sounded. But Gord talked me into writing verses and I’m glad he did. That song turned out well and it’s one of the few songs from that dark period from between the mid-2000s and the mid-2010s that I can still live with.
Side note: the song “Up Against The Ropes”, which is included in the No Children album is also in 3/4.
As was the case for “Heather Nights”, “Phil” was later re-recorded and a video was shot for it. Utterly un-called for. The plan was for the second version to be released as a single but something went wrong. I still don’t know what happened. I got test presses for a “Phil” 7” single but then the actual press never proceeded. So that makes those test presses the rarest item in my entire catalog. I have one copy. I don’t know what happened to the others. I figure there must have been at least two more.
The video for “Phil” brings up an extremely negative and painful memory. The director wanted to use photos from my childhood. I figured that if we were going to do that, we might as well make those photos as meaningful as possible. One of the photos I pulled for the shoot was one of me - as a toddler - with Ted. Let me explain who Ted is.
When I was a baby, I was given a teddy bear. I think I remember hearing that my uncle Mike gave it to me. I named him Ted. Over the years, I became strongly attached to Ted. No joke - I slept with him until I was 14 or 15 years old. As an adolescent, I kept that fact secret. The thought of my parents or anyone else knowing was embarrassing but I loved Ted.
One day, I came home from school and I couldn’t find Ted. He was always on my bed. It made no sense that he could be anywhere else. I thought maybe my little sister wanted to play with him. I looked in her room and then all over the house and couldn’t find him. I was absolutely distraught but was afraid to show my feelings to my mother (because of the embarrassment). I asked her where he was and she said she didn’t know. Many years later, my mom admitted that she threw Ted in the garbage. I was heartbroken and furious but - again - I didn’t let her know that.
Fast-forward another few years and I found a single image of Ted - that photo of me as a toddler, clutching him. That photo became very, very important to me. It was all I had left of Ted.
I’m so mad at myself now for choosing to include that photo in the pile for the “Phil” video shoot. I should have just kept it safe. Goddamnit. A week or so before the shoot, I had to get the photos together and send them off to the director and art department as they planned each shot for the shoot. I had all the photos in a big manila envelope. My then-manager was to deliver the photos. The day I handed the envelope over to her, I said - in all the grave seriousness I could conjure - “I’m holding you responsible for these. I know you will hand them off to someone else but YOU’RE responsible. The contents of this envelope is EXTREMELY important to me. Please keep close track of this envelope.” She lost to fucking envelope. The only photo I had of Ted is gone. I haven’t seen him in over 20 years now. I know it’s silly but it still pains me deeply. And I’m still furious that those photos were lost. The photo with Ted was the most important but all of those photos were precious. Fucking hell.
When I was working on King Of Drums, I wanted to make a song with a time-signature change in it - 4/4 to 3/4 and back again. The result is “Part 12”, which is a song I know a lot of people like. The change worked out well. It’s cool. But after the release of King Of Drums, I started tinkering with a more sophisticated way to do the change - a way that incorporates some more tricky math. I tried it out a couple of times in my drum break mixes for my secret Instagram account. When I perfected what I was going for, I decided I wanted to try it on the new album. I also wanted to give myself the challenge of rapping over the change. I executed the idea in a new song called “Endless Counter-Attack”. Technically speaking, it’s probably the most difficult thing I’ve ever done but I pulled it off and I can’t wait for you to hear it. As far as I know, it’s never been done in a hip hop song before.
Speaking of the new album - it’s basically done. I have a rough mix. I hope to do a final mix before the end of this week. One of my earliest goals for this new album was to make it shorter than King Of Drums. I was aiming for something around 35 minutes. When I first laid out the material a few days ago, I was shocked to see that it was LONGER than King Of Drums! So I cut a bunch of stuff. The new album is now just over 40 minutes long. The plan - as it stands - is to bundle up most of the material I cut for a teaser that I will release before the album. The rest goes on the pile with the beats I cut before I started writing. I’ll re-visit that stuff later this year. I figure there’s enough there for a whole other album. We’ll see.
Also on the topic of new music - my friend and beat-maker extraordinaire, Meaty Ogre, has a new album called Escape From Grenades. It’s out now and it includes a song called “Savage Attack” that I’m featured on - I do cuts and raps. Check it out. The whole album is bonkers.
That’s it for now. I guess we’ll get into the song “Blood Of A Young Wolf” next.
Until then.