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You Don't Love Me

by chris portka

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about

I've literally listened to this song hundreds of times; I enjoy the calm, warm, enveloping blanket of depression it weaves... like an attempt to sound as childlike as possible, crawling further and further back to the original cocoon: the womb.

The buried words touch on archetypes of folk music - love, yearning, desire, lessons to learn, loneliness, truth, being fucked up, the maybe-ness of everything in life - but all smashed together haphazardly like a kid coloring outside the lines of a coloring book - an impressionist painting created with sound.

Most everything on it was recorded in one take, without much planning in order to keep things spontaneous yet relaxed and to try the surrealism technique "automatic writing" but applied to song creation (a kind of unconscious song creation). I merely want to present a loose, vague idea of a song. If you could somehow tighten up the nuts and bolts of the music's structure and straighten the timing and tempo out, you would hear a rather simple indie folk song. But at the heart of it all, I want to scream "I'm not normal."

So an in-time, structured song is not what you hear. For the entire first half of the song, the soundscape is on the verge of collapse - everything refuses to coalesce and focus. I like to think of this as impressionism - and I wish it were an entire musical genre in its own right (although psychedelic, shoegaze, or raw / hypnotic blues share elements with this approach).

I love the idea of abstract simplicity. But how can abstract be simple? How do you explain a square or a circle without also explaining the entire universe? You're left with the unconscious mirage of knowing what something is without being able to specify the totality of a thing (even when the specifics are all present and there for you to see). Simply: the song presents an unconscious thing striving to be conscious - like the evolution of all living things.

lyrics

You don't love me i'm only a drug
You don't love me
You don't love me i'm only a drug

I've been stoned
I've been alone
With no one to talk to

Maybe true
Or
Not true
But maybe also

I've been missing the truth
How do I make somebody love me?

Let's go back to school
Back to school

credits

released January 1, 2021

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all rights reserved

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chris portka Oakland, California

i'm chris portka. i write, perform, and produce music. i also play live shows. good luck with everything.

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