NEW RELEASE : WE ARE PARASOLS - CAN I GET A LITTLE LESS OF ME?
“Can I Get a Little Less of Me?” the second single from the new We Are Parasols album, Body Horror, is out now!
There’s so much I can say about this song. It was the first real song we had for the Body Horror album. We had a nearly complete version in spring of 2020 and we planned to debut it live at the Out From The Shadows Festival that year, but the world had other plans for all of us. So, it didn’t get its live debut till October of 2022 and we still haven’t gotten to perform it live with Alec! Soon…
In the beginning “Can I Get a Little Less of Me?” was supposed to be a sort of blue print for the rest of Body Horror. In a lot of ways it’s still the beating heart of the record, but as you’ll notice when you hear the entire album, the rest of the songs had other plans for themselves. They each went their own way. Well, in a lot of ways I see the songs existing as pairs, like four sets of siblings. But more on that later.
For now…About ”Less of Me” as we call it.
Yes, one of us said during soundcheck, I believe at The High Water Mark Lounge, “Can I get a little less of me?” referring to our monitor levels. Somebody else jotted it down as a funny title for a song. Then Deb worked out the vocal phrasing for the chorus one night in our living room and we made the decision that it would be a song about social media and our uneasy relationship with it. I created a weird noise loop in the Austin airport on our way home from visiting the Bloody Knives guys and shooting a Last Ice video. After that the pieces just started falling together. The entire last minute of the song, after the “scream,” didn’t even exist in the demo but GL3 from Hawks Do Not Share gave me some obscure suggestion that I can’t even remember now that inspired us to edit that whole section together from preexisting vocal and synth parts, a sludgy new beat from Alec, and a classic Roland string patch.
We’ve mentioned a few times publicly that most of the songs on Body Horror had the lyrics rewritten and vocals re-recorded because we hated the original lyrics that I wrote. There are two that did not. The last song on the album, which only has one line of words, and “Can I Get A Little Less of Me?” The lyrics to “Less of Me” were electrifyingly perfect the first time around. They were inspired. They are also painfully honest, almost gutting. Yes, the song is about social media, but it’s also about us. Sometimes I feel personally exposed when I hear Deb sing certain lines (in the second verse). I am pretty sure in retrospect that the reason all the other songs had to be rewritten was because they felt fake and insincere next to “Less of Me.” The beating heart that is “Less of Me” forced us to dig for the deepest truth in all the other songs and now we’re a little bit exposed in each of them!
Jeremy
Check out “Can I Get a Little Less of Me?” and pre-order Body Horror now!