2021 demos by souptheman

This was really a time. I was severely emotionally damaged and I'm not quite sure why. Maybe it was that I'd fallen in love with this girl who lived kind of far away a few months before. We'd spent a couple of nights together and that had been the only intimacy or truth or beauty in my life. The rest was drugs and a kind of spiritual heaviness all over. Suicide was genuinely on my heart constantly. It was my last year of school, I'd started drinking a lot, it had been Covid for a year by then. I really had no hope for myself other than salvation through music. I wanted it all off my chest because it was too heavy to keep it close. I was going to uni that September and I was dreading it. I lived on a solipsistic path filled with weed and booze and music and close friendships. My friends were soul close. A girl who was spiritual and artistically stimulating and a guy who was my drug brother, partners on the Journey. Those acid trips in the woods and MDMA night by the railways tracks smoking cigarettes touched a colour of my soul I've never since dared to explore. Musically, 'Whole Lotta Red' had just come out and it was all about raw authenticity and the creation of a landscape that you could throw yourself into. Every night I'd get fucked and listen to what I had so far. It's all in chronological order, and spans the start of the year - a white wine world of weed and Weezer, to the end, a misty place of righteous resignation and complete confusion. This album at its best is listened to from a sensitive and non-sober place. 18 years old, at once fully grasping the moment I was living through, and completely petrified of future change. There's some really beautiful music here, at least to me the most honest and unfiltered pop music can get. Nothing pretentious - this was my mind. I was living and the music lived through me. In 2021 I was at once a student of 'New Testament studies' at my school, a student of psychedelia and spirituality, a disciple of John Lennon and a Jungian hero on a journey toward Truth - as well as a warehouse worker shifting toilet seats out of lorries. This music is that time, and I promise i'm not nearly as self-important as this paragraph implies. But I'm a fan of music, and I know the wheat from the chaff. If I hear this album late at night, drunk, high or lost, I get it. It still hits. Maybe it might for someone else. Peace and love, and I encourage anyone reading this to document everything for themselves. Live as you want to, as much as you can, and know that you are an artist if you dare to be. Thanks for listening, and good luck.

- august 2023, drunk