Hi, I’m LEX the Lexicon Artist, and this is Alter Ego: Explained.

Alter Ego is a song about identity, cloning, and the many alter egos that live within all of us.

Alter Ego is the title track of the album, and it occupies a very important position in the middle of the track order - also known as Track 1 on Side B. Remember those things?

My vision for this track was a minimalistic, concept-driven song with a strong, catchy hook and relatively sparse instrumentation. I wanted it to be the stripped-down core from which all the other songs sprang to life, like an origin seed. I wanted it to have the feeling of not being an album single, but a deep-cut that would be profoundly appreciated and enjoyed by fans who paid attention. The underrated track that people would talk about for years to come. Of course, it’s ALSO the title track and features a major guest, so it was never going to be ignored. It just needed to sound like it might’ve been. I wanted lots of control over this song, so I decided to produce it myself. The musical ideas started with the main melodic riff in the chorus and the ghostly voice synth. I used simple piano chords and a heavily swung, lurching boombap rhythm to give it a very open and staccato feel. From the start I knew I wanted the chorus to be stacked with higher and lower octave vocals for a creepy effect. Finally I added a bunch of weird synths and this bullshit whistling west coast lead that doesn’t have any reason to be there other than, fuck it, it sounds old school and it sounds good.

As a functional entity, the “Alter Ego” song serves as the dividing line between the outward-focused first half and the introspective second half. You may have noticed that the first half is very feature-heavy, which reflects my intentional effort to collaborate with more voices after a featureless first album, Raging Ego. After that album came out, I got a lot of feedback from fans who wanted me to collaborate with more people. It was also around that time that I started meeting more artists who wanted to work with me, so I took that advice to heart. The first half of this album, with its many features, is not only representative of that change, but it’s also symbolic of the part of me that interacts with my surroundings. It’s an external self-examination using the outside world as a reference. The second half of the album, as we’ll get into, is an internal self-examination. Like Raging Ego, it’s mostly featureless, but carries a very different energy. The second half is a deep dive into self, away from the realm of real problems and real people, and into the abstract waters of fever dreams and psychedelic journeys. It’s weirder, wackier, a little more unhinged, and way more metaphorical. It chronicles a gradual transformation, and how egos within egos can take on their own identities.

So the track “Alter Ego”, of course, is the gateway into that world. It’s the bridge that connects reality and fantasy. It’s the mediator - to use Freud’s theory, some might call it the ego that connects superego and id. But what’s its own identity? Lyrically, Alter Ego is probably the song that most clearly lays out the core theme of the album, which is the way that multiple sides of a person can come together to form a walking contradiction. Going from there, I split that topic down further into two hypotheticals that I explore in the first two verses. The first verse asks, “Is there a real me?” to which the answer is “probably not, they’re all real, but some me’s may feel more authentic to me than others.” I reference a really interesting concept suggested by Neil Patrick Harris’s character in the web short Dr. Horrible’s Singalong Blog, which is that people are like pie.

So the layer of identity that I put out for people to see IS actually the one that’s the most authentic, although there are different layers that live in between. The second verse asks: “If there are multiple mes, what would happen if I separated them?” I imagined a scenario where I was able to clone myself and endow it with the sentience of one of my egos. What kinds of moral implications are involved? What if I asked them to live a life I didn’t want to live? It’s a similar question to the one Rick and Morty asks in the episode “The ABCs of Beth”, where Beth is given a choice to be her authentic and actualized self, living out her full potential, while her clone fulfills her motherly duties for her. Oh, and there’s an obvious throwaway line that’s a reference to our feature here, which I think most people are going to get, and there’s not much to say about it other than when I wrote the line, I thought it was fucking HILARIOUS.

Speaking of the feature verse: I needed to get lots of things right with this song, so it was one of the hardest ones to write. After I wrote the first two verses, it didn’t seem complete. But when Schaffer’s verse came in, the song went from good to awesome. That final verse really helped the track deliver on its intent. What I like the most about his verse is that he spends an entire 16 bars talking about alter egos while not saying a single personal thing about himself. I found that crypticness very authentic, which is exactly what I wanted. For a song like this that deals with big concepts on a broad level, it was a perfect complement.

Hello, my name is Schaffer the Darklord, and I am the featured guest on the title track from LEX the Lexicon Artist’s album Alter Ego.

I was psyched to get this assignment. LEX is one of my favorite rappers, one of my favorite live performers, and one of the very best tourmates I’ve ever had the pleasure of traveling with. When we were on tour together in the fall of 2019, she told me about some of her plans for the Alter Ego album, which was going to be the followup to her debut album Raging Ego. When we got home from tour, she sent me materials for a song that she wanted me to do a guest verse on, and I was even more psyched. The beat was awesome, the verse that she had demo’ed was awesome, the hook she had written was awesome, the concept of exploring one’s alter ego really spoke to me, and then on top of that this was going to be her new album’s title track. So as far as guest verse requests go, this was a slam dunk.

But then, it wasn’t.

When I sat down to write my parts for this song, I absolutely labored over it. I wrote stuff, I rewrote stuff, I threw away everything I’d written, I started over from scratch, etc etc. I think she’d given me several weeks to finish this verse, and I didn’t submit my parts until right at the deadline. In fact I got other guest verse requests after I got hers, and I finished those first because they were all a lot easier to write. I can say confidently that Alter Ego was one of the most difficult writing assignments I’d ever been given.

You see, I thought it was going to be easy, because I thought I understood this concept from my own point of view. Early on in my career I saw myself as this nerdcore supervillain character, because I had a secret identity. Because early on, I learned to compartmentalize these two different sides of my personality. There was the real me, Mark Schaffer, which is who I was when I was with my friends and family, and then there was Schaffer the Darklord, this exaggerated cartoonish version of me, that I would play on stage. And I kept these two sides separate so that I could keep my fans at an emotional distance, and still be a sincere version of myself with my loved ones. And that worked for several years.

But in 2013 I released a concept album called Sick Passenger. This record’s mission was to examine some of the issues I had explored in my real life therapy, like addiction, depression, and my struggle with balancing these two sides of myself. And in doing so my goal was to make a record that would be revealing, and make myself vulnerable to my fans. But like, even that vulnerable version of me that I put on the record was compromised, because the story on the record featured a number of embellishments for the sake of the narrative. Or at least I told myself that it was for the sake of the narrative. My real life therapist would later identify that the elements of insincerity that I added to the story were really there to protect myself from being too vulnerable with my fans.

And sure enough this kind of backfired on me, because a lot of my fans really connected with that record, and then started interacting with me in a different way. They wanted to share their stories of their own mental health struggles with this person that they really identified with, and then I felt an obligation to be this “real” version of myself that I had played on the record.

And then to make matters even WORSE, this whole time I had a corporate dayjob for 12 years, where I kept my other career Schaffer the Darklord secret from all my colleagues. So for 40 hours a week I was playing a 4th version of me, and after years of doing this it kind of spiraled out of control. Instead of 2 me’s, I had developed multiple me’s, that I would turn on and off for the sake of whichever audience I was with at the time. Now despite all of this, I do feel like I know who I am, but I don’t feel like anybody else really does. And that is unfortunately by my own design.

The line in my verse that I think is the most revealing is the Darth Vader line. Which goes, “On stage I posture like I’m Darth Vader and make noise. In real life, I’m more like Anakin but Jake Lloyd. Giving the stiffest delivery of a shittily written script, disappointing critics then disappearing to quit and split.” I grew up, and remain, a huge fan of the character of Darth Vader. He’s just this perfect menacing badass with very few details about his backstory, literally hidden behind a suit of armor. And as a kid I always daydreamed, wondering “what was the man who became Darth Vader really like?” So in 1999, I was thrilled when The Phantom Menace was released, because I thought I was gonna finally learn about Anakin Skywalker and what had happened to him to make him Darth Vader. But then I was sorely disappointed with what I got. I got a lackluster backstory, poorly written dialogue, unconvincingly delivered by child actor Jake Lloyd. And I didn’t blame Jake Lloyd for it. I blamed George Lucas, who I felt had personally disappointed me by not giving me the story that I felt I deserved. And I feel that my use of multiple versions of me has been a tactic that was fueled by not wanting to disappoint my fans the way my storytelling hero had disappointed me.

Lex teased me when I finally did submit my verse by saying something like, and I’m paraphrasing here, “It’s so you to write 16 bars about alter egos, and not actually reveal anything real about yourself.” I guess that’s true. But that feedback was just as revealing to me as the process of writing this verse had been. I genuinely feel that Lex’s album Alter Ego is a masterpiece. And I’m sure I’ll be peeling layers away from it during additional listens over the following years. And I am honored that she invited me to be a small part of it.

And thus concludes this Alter Ego: Explained. Up next, we dive deep into my psyche in Alter Ego, Side B. Muahahaha.