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PACKRAT

by Eric Daino

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Packrat 01:53
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Packrat II 01:36
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about

Much of this album was written during 2016 or thereafter reflecting on events from that year. That was a crazy year for me. I played over 200 shows and that really kicked my ass. My band The Holophonics had already been touring quite a lot, but I wanted to tour MORRRREEEEE so I released my first solo album "Eric DTX" in April and immediately went on tour for the rest of the year. The title track was the only song from this album I played on solo tours that year. Finished and played out live for over 2 years before being released on a studio recording. I pretty much never do that. I'm a "record now, play shows later" kinda guy usually. So to keep that one "pure" I'm opening this album with it and I kept the arrangement to just guitar/voice. "Packrat II" - its reprise - comes back later to bookend the album (except for the coda track) and offer the kind of arrangement I envisioned for it originally.

"Blood, Sweat, and Gasoline" (tracks 2-5) were written during and specifically about the first portion of 2016's solo tours, driving around the country totally alone for a month after the release of "Eric DTX." I split up the year with many back2back2back2back smaller runs that each differed slightly. April/May was just me solo, and damn did it suck. Not cause I was alone, but because I just wasn't playing good shows. It was challenging to get it booked because I was still new as a solo act, but I did it anyway. Honestly I loved being out on the road by myself, and if I wasn't broke the whole time it would have been fine even dealing with smaller than comfortable shows.

Right off the bat, I played an awesome show in a Houston suburb, then a shitty bar show in Birmingham and then had 2 days of nothing until Charleston. Those 2 days were brutal. I had no idea what to do. I hadn't really had time to make plans cause it was so time consuming to book the dates I had as well as the upcoming tour for The Holophonics in June/July. So I busked for gas money to no one. Then I drove to Knoxville and did the same. I spent 2 days in Market Square watching people avoid eye contact with me as they walked by. Watching bougie-ass Tennesseans ignore my "From Dallas, need Gas $$" sign while they bought ice cream. I even tried covering Megan Trainor to no avail. It was pretty defeating. The one guy who did want to talk to me was riding a bike around town offering whimsical non sequiturs about Jesus. I was trying to work for sub-sub-minimum wage but he just really wanted to know what I thought about Jesus and strawberry ice cream, or something. It was hot as hell, and that fucker didn't give me any money OR ice cream.

When I got to Charleston I immediately went swimming at Folly Beach and that was rejuvenating in a sorely needed way. I played a good show and hung out with the buds in Sex Wax. David would go on to play organ with me on a leg of tour later in October. Already pretty rollercoaster-y, touring proved to me that good things were in fact possible, if not always probable.

"Every Wednesday" is about buying comic books. It became sort of a ritual on tour, to seek out the local comic shop in whatever town I was in that week and try and find some local charm with a few issues and a coffee. A gross misappropriation of funds, but ultimately necessary to retain my sanity and temporarily get my mind off of the Existential Dread™, especially when I found myself on the East Coast near where I had many formative experiences. Once you get to the Northeast the drives become much easier, so I had quite a lot of free time to relax in Montclair, NJ. East Side Mags was one of the most rad shops I've been to on tour, so much so that I came back and did a solo show in store later that year in November.

"Iowa" was about the end of that first month out by myself. I think it was the third to last show. I had just done a cool little coffee shop show in the Quad Cities with longtime pals in the Fairhaven crew, and I made the easy drive to Cedar Falls for a DIY basement show that wound up being the most wonderful crowd of tour. I was greeted with a pre-show kickball game, the whole scene showed up early to hang out and just be wholesome together, and then really give a shit about some dumbass guy from Texas who wanted to sing some songs that weren't all that necessary. I've since gone back with my band for several more shows. Iowa is a real fucking ray of hope for me and I owe a lot to those kids.

"Jeff" is about when his album WORRY came out. He's my favorite songwriter, has been for such a long time. It's crazy, growing up on Long Island, ASOB were THE big local ska band when I was in high school. BTMI was the soundtrack to my "leaving home forever and feeling shitty about everything" phase of college and grad school. I'd talk about him to anyone who'd listen, and then FINALLY an album actually blows up and gets a little bit of popular success. It's a weird feeling trying to fight the cliche "I listened before it was cool" thing, but the Jeff fandom community is so positive and loving and it's really great to finally see so many others affected by his music the same way I am. Most of this song is actually just about feelings of inadequacy, and somehow falling in love with touring when it kept fucking me over again and again. I've kinda modeled a lot of my career after Jeff's, and I just kinda pictured him being in the same situations and it would make me feel a little better. "Thinkin' About Death, Baby" is also kind of about these things too. In December of that year for the last run of solo dates I pretty much only listened to WORRY in the van. Like, the entire Eastern seaboard, just WORRY. I just love Jeff so much. I've never met him, and because of my own crazy touring schedule I often miss his shows, but maybe one day.

"One Year Later" was written almost exactly like the title says, in April 2017 after having a pretty nutso anxiety attack that lasted all night and made me sick. There was just a confluence of bad news all smacking me in the face, and it was scary thinking that after a full year of doing all this, I was really only the worse off for it. I wrote and recorded it that day on my phone and haven't ever played it live, don't know if I ever want to.

The Chaos Chaos cover is cause I love how tragic Rick and Morty is, and that song's inclusion in s02e03 is one of the most tragic moments ever. (and I mean, I'm def never gonna cover NIN). Rick and Morty provided a lot of abstract imagery for me when writing "Phantom Arrival" for The Holophonics and I love that show a lot (although Steven Universe wins the prize for "Eric's Fav Cartoon"). I usually keep the covers and originals on separate albums, but here I go mixing it up!

"Years Into Seconds" is a song I was holding onto for such a long time. From well before 2016 actually. I released it as a single earlier this year in January because I just couldn't keep it to myself any longer. It's my coming out song and it was always supposed to be on this album, but this album just took longer to record and release than initially planned. Coming out in your 20s kind of weird cause it just felt like I had been waiting sooooo looooong and that wound up being a lot of meta commentary on everything surrounding this song. But I like this song a lot and showing this to the world was probably the most gratifying experience I've had a musician, and it has fortunately led to many other very positive experiences.

"Shudder" is the most recently written song on this album, so it kind of made sense to place it last, as a coda, sort of outside the Packrat brackets. Whereas the music I write for The Holophonics deals with somewhat more abstract themes and larger scale compositions, there was a big part of "Phantom Arrival" that I hadn't yet dealt with on a personal level in the way I do with my solo albums. That theme or idea I had is that "starting over" doesn't ever really exist the way we want it to. We never get a truly fresh start because "our experience is dovetailed" - if you spend all your time waiting for the bad shit to end you're gonna miss the start of something good and you'll be playing catch up, running after it forever. This song is pretty dreary, cause I gotta acknowledge the shit that keeps holding me down just isn't gonna end, but ultimately it's hopeful cause moving on gets easier the more we do it.

credits

released November 30, 2018

All songs and lyrics composed, performed, recorded, and produced by Eric Daino at Holophonor Records in Denton, TX

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Eric Daino New York, New York

Independent songwriter and producer based in NY, formerly TX, formerly NY.

My other car is The Holophonics.

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