Strangers by Regna Racer
At some point in the past five to six years I decided that it was best to explain as little as possible when it came to my music because I guess I thought it would let the thing stand on its own. That doesn’t feel right for this release, so forgive me.
At the beginning of April in 2020, my wife and I had a son. The birth didn’t go as planned and there were some scary medical complications that unfolded for months afterward. Everyone’s healthy now, thank god.
When my son was about four weeks old, I remember my wife and I sang the song “Strangers” by the Kinks to him while he wriggled around. The next day my wife woke up with a fever because of an infection. She spent three nights in the hospital, and because of COVID restrictions, only I could visit her. I drove back and forth with snacks and books and I kept putting “Strangers” on when I pulled into the hospital parking garage because it helped me to not meltdown, I think.
The music here is a formal and thematic response to having a kid, to having the whole process be harder and scarier than I could have ever expected, falling to be a good partner, trying to be a better partner and failing at that too, and learning how to find a path forward. It's also about laughing at a toddler who has learned how to "play songs" for people on their ukulele and also the ukulele has a "This Machine Kills Fascists" sticker on it but don't worry it came from the Guthrie center and not some ghoul on Amazon.
Almost every instrument was played quietly during nap time, or straight into headphones. You can hear my kid--who is as I write this over a year and a half old--scream and screech in places, once as a nine month old, and another time as a two month old. One of the tracks was written by a computer program I made in a hospital waiting room that used a hymnal as a dataset to generate melody and harmony. Another was recorded at five a.m. on a Tuesday because I was exhausted and couldn’t sleep and didn’t want to go to work yet.
Everyone has huge swathes of their life that feel like too much work to talk about. This music is about some of those parts of my life as I have lived them with my family.
Tracklist
| 1. | Strangers I | 4:37 |
| 2. | A Little Bit of Silence So You Lean in to the Monitor | 2:06 |
| 3. | I Woke Up Earlier and Earlier Every Morning for a Month | 5:53 |
| 4. | From a Hospital Waiting Room | 6:04 |
| 5. | Strangers II | 22:49 |
Credits
Mastered by Michael Latella at Culture Vacuum Recording
Screeches and squawks by E.E. Sullivan-Peters
All other sounds by Taylor Sullivan-Peters
Thanks for literally every single thing you do, Kristine Sullivan-Peters. I love you.
