Recount by Disappearing Ink

I wrote these songs in the summer and fall of 2020. I suspected they might sound out of date or even paranoid by 2021. Turns out they speak to this moment in ways I couldn’t have predicted.

By late December 2020 I had recorded final backing tracks, and on January 4, 2021, I headed out for three nights at a cabin I’d booked a few weeks earlier at a remote state park in Western Maryland. I took some mics out there, thinking I might record vocals if the acoustics were decent in the cabin. On January 5, I set the mics up and went to bed.

The next day I took a walk in the woods, made lunch, and did some mixing. Just after 3pm, I went outside to see if I could access any cell data and a text came through from my wife: "They've stormed the capitol. Barricades and guns drawn in the Senate."

Shaken, I went inside and recorded the vocals to all three of these songs. Lyrics I’d written months earlier now felt eerily prescient:

- Schemes and ruses, scrapes and bruises/Now we know who kept their powder dry
- Who's really free?/I guess we'll see
- Suspicion showers, violence flowers/And the meekest of us will pick a side/Can’t you see how the troubles are here now?/And the future is no one’s to decide

"Recount" is not only a reference to the presidential election. “Recount” also means to tell a story from your memory about an experience, in this case the bewildering experience of being American in 2020. I wrote these songs in a way that allows for a wide latitude of interpretation. But they are also bound up with this summer's movement against racist police violence, with the pandemic, and with our political collapse. The songs are a recounting, written throughout an incomprehensible year, and sung at a moment of national peril.

Lawrence Lanahan

New album 6/1/23 from Baltimore songwriter/producer Lawrence Lanahan's band Disappearing Ink! On The Charm of Abstraction, Lanahan abandons guitar for mesmerizing synths, intricately programmed beats, imaginative sampling, and occasional rhymes. Even with a new sound, his core songwriting voice--“melodic and lyrical invention,” “chilling chord progressions,” “rare honesty and power"- remains.