Outside Brain (belated thoughts)

I know Outside Brain is old news by now that Some Other Band has handed us a whole new album, but I've been gathering thoughts about it for a while and finally thought I'd put them down someplace. meanwhile I'm avoiding spoilery spaces as I'll be giving TWITD the BOOK treatment and treating myself to one new song a day to enjoy and reflect on, and after I'm done here it's time to start! anyhow :)

when I saw there would be a song called Outside Brain I immediately assumed I knew what it would be about. I use the term Outside Brain myself and somehow just thought, yeah, OK, I get it. I got the file in the middle of a family trip and listened to it on my headphones in a hotel bathroom, which was a ... choice, I guess, but I was super excited. and then it just didn't click. I didn't have time for it to click, I had to go be someplace else. and it didn't even mesh at all with my preconceived notions, so I was left with a kind of 'huh? ok...' before I had to run off for familial obligations. I guess you don't really need to know all of this, but it's why all I could really say about it off the bat was that I needed more time on it.

now I have had more time and I am really coming to appreciate its spot in the pantheon of 2020s-era TMBG. it may still not be in my top spot anytime soon (not to knock it, it's just hard to get past Sleep's Older Sister for me at this point), but I feel like I get what it's at-- a sort of companion piece to The Glamour Of Rock or a bookend paired with Brontosaurus.

I adore The Glamour Of Rock as a hymn to the hustle. wanting to make music is all well and good but it's the day to day slog, the endless cycles of busses and hotels and laundromats and grocery trips and gas and the sort of drudgery of things that just NEED TO GET DONE or else the whole thing falls apart, and if you've gone on and made it you've got people for that, for sure, but TMBG has never been that band and (I wish them very well but let's be honest) will never be that band.

Outside Brain (imo) represents the more intense and terrifying side of the same coin: the push to publish and publicize, to promote, to fight against the entropy of public attention, the fight that gets them in enough eyeballs and earholes to keep the whole project aloft. constantly having to explain yourself to the "finer folk" who get to choose what to promote to their own crop of audience, to constantly be asked why people should listen, why people should care, to answer the same questions over and over and over and over, because if the effort isn't put in, the project dies. "from a mine shaft," of long labor crafting music, "to a crawlspace," of that narrow band through which is funneled all media that ever gets heard, much less makes money, "across a bed of nails and broken glass," it is a grueling slog, "from a jump scare," of SUDDENLY WE HAVE TO GO DO THIS, "to a catwalk," where they have to make it look easy and effortless and cool, "on a tightrope over burning ash," on that most precarious thing keeping them from crashing and burning with 99% of every other band on earth. "against the grain," it is NOT easy work, "Outside Brain," needs to face all these horrific externalities.

Someone needs to call up the trophy store and see what things are going for (constantly see what opportunities for recognition and promotion are out there), even if most of the time they're going to be told their project doesn't fit-- but they should be sure to leave all their information anyway! I love how the grammatical wonkiness in the second verse reflects the lazy way some of these places are run -- they didn't even bother to edit the "blurb" they were given but just tossed it somewhere verbatim where it looks super weird.

And after all of this effort one blown out fuse while trying to prep for a concert of promotion could just be the straw that breaks the camel's back.

I also mentioned looking at this song as sort of a counterpoint or companion piece to Brontosaurus, Linnell's instant classic ode to perpetual imposter syndrome-- where that song deals with the question of whether the ARTISTRY ITSELF of the music is enough to warrant attention and keep the band going, this one, as I described above, deals with whether Flans' own business sense, salesmanship and hustle is enough to do the same. it reminded me of the quote from someone, somewhere, that if Linnell and Flans had never met, Linnell still would have spent this whole time writing music, but nobody would ever have heard it. I know it's a TMBG cliché at this point, but Flans is the Outside Brain to Linnell's Inside Brain, and both of them are still keenly aware what a tightrope it is they're managing to walk.