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

The Real Thing, Schrodinger’s Heart, and Loss of Ego make up what I call the “Loss of Ego Suite”. The three of them share one narrative thread, form a functional unit in the story arc of the album, and also have some musical similarities in production, mixing, and melodic motifs.

All three beats were gifted to me by a producer named NSF, also known as Jeff Ward. I met Jeff in the Bay Area and liked a LOT of the beats that were featured on his instrumental albums. After lots of difficulty, I picked three to stitch together into a loose narrative within the narrative. If you want to hear his other beats, you can check them all out on Spotify under the artist NSF.

This suite marks the point in our protagonist’s downward-spiraling internal journey where they have finally made it past the delusions of grandeur and the online posturing going on around them. Now they are forced to take a real look at themselves and their journey, all the events and emotions that have brought them to this point, and decide what, if anything, truly matters to them.

There’s a name I give to the end result of this deep dive. I like to think that by the end of Loss of Ego, the protagonist has, in my words, “cracked the surface”. What does “cracking the surface” mean? It’s a moment, usually in altered consciousness, when you transcend your typical frame of thought and discover a truth about your life that significantly changes your values and worldview. Some might call it becoming one with the universe. It’s usually cathartic, and can feel enlightening, revelatory, spiritual, or even out-of-body. Imperfect analogs include being unplugged from the Matrix, attaining nirvana, or arriving at the Gate of Truth in Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood. Cracking the surface can feel different for everyone, and can be induced by a variety of different things, such as chemicals, meditation, trauma, or performing human transmutation.

So what is the protagonist’s cracked worldview like? Well, to put it shortly, they experience loss of ego. But in order to fully understand that, let’s take a look at how they got there.

The Real Thing is a song about my journey over the last seven years, and how the smallest of decisions can make impacts on your life you would have never imagined

The Real Thing is most similar to what anime fans would call a recap episode. It’s a look back on the protagonist’s life so far, or at least their life in the US from 2012 to 2019. It frames their journey as a result of the butterfly effect. It draws new conclusions, and asks new questions that help them look forward. The primary literary device that triggers the chain of events described in the song is a flyer the protagonist receives while walking through campus, which in turn sets them on a path of love, loss, pain, and fulfillment. The chorus uses butterfly imagery to evoke the fragility and unpredictability of our futures, and to reinforce the theory of small moments making big impacts over time.

I get really personal in this one, and talk about the two relationships I’ve been in. The first verse is about my first ex. We’re no longer on good terms, and the only song I ever wrote about our breakup was unpublished and will continue to be. The second verse is about my second ex, who is also the subject of The L Word. You’ve probably noticed that I’ve stopped performing that song because we broke up, although we’re still friends. However, I never had the opportunity to write a proper breakup song about him, so I took this opportunity to address them both. The third verse is about my push towards self-actualization, looking forward to the future, using my previous steps to inform my next moves, and struggling to let go of negative ties to the past. It’s funny, I talk about feeling like I finally found The Real Thing and my community, but two years from 2018, things have change d a lot. Turns out what found wasn’t the be-all and end-all of what I was looking for. I realized that I still have a long way to go.

Two things worth mentioning upon relistening to this song: “The jump hurt” in verse 3 actually refers to a somewhat serious injury I suffered from a literal jump off a stage in 2016, which coincided with the time I began taking my music project seriously. I vowed to keep pushing forward despite my injury, which in retrospect may have not been the smartest thing to do. But I think it’s worth noting that I basically spent the first two years of my performing career in some sort of chronic pain. Dealing with that pain was also a major source of emotional hardship, which paralleled the growing pains of moving into a new career.

“A moment that shook the world” refers to the 2016 election which I spent with my partner at the time, watching the live results. I remember that night really clearly as we were both quite upset and surrounded by people who were crying. It brought us closer because we shared that experience and were there for each other during that hard time. But neither of us could’ve predicted the kind of tragedy that election would mean for us today in 2020. Again, a result of the butterfly effect.

Schrodinger’s Heart is a song about thinking through your emotions, confronting uncertainty, and facing your fear of the truth.

Schrodinger’s Heart is like a scientific experiment in musical form. Although it’s musically closer to its two siblings in the suite, I actually consider it a thematic cousin of “All The Time”, because both songs take a liberal interpretation of a famous scientific theory and apply it to something decidedly not scientific. Both songs can be described as a scientist’s attempt to quantify attachment and other emotions. Both songs parse spiritual experiences through a logical compiler and see what that yields. At this point in the album, however, the protagonist has had the opportunity to ruminate, self-care, party, vent, and reflect, which means Schrodinger bears a far more positive and encouraging message than its distant cousin. Within the suite, it’s an intermediary between reflection and deconstruction of self.

Here are the first signs that they’ve cracked the surface. They acknowledge their rejection anxiety and their fear of the unknown, and imagine a fictional young Schrodinger applying his newly discovered theory to his own personal life. Schrodinger’s Heart doesn’t just break by romantic rejection; anything could be of any outcome until he discovers the truth. Did he want to live a life of knowing or not knowing the truth? Obviously I’m invoking my own anxieties here; for example, I’ve had to work really hard to push myself to open emails I didn’t want to read, even though the result is already decided. It doesn’t change the result whether I open the email or not; the question is do I want to open my eyes to the truth? If it’s already decided, why don’t I just find out?

Here’s a quote from a fan that I thought really nailed the core idea of the song: What's the status of Schrodinger's Heart? I find an interesting lyric. If you put your heart in a box for safe keeping, so no one can ever hurt you, you'll never know. If you keep the box closed, you can't connect with other people, but if you open the box you run the risk of getting hurt. As long as the box is closed, you're in a perfect state of probability between being dead inside or being healthy and feeling loved.

It’s a dense and somewhat heavy topic, so my instructions to Cecil were to make it melancholy and abstract. At one point, I vocalized two layers of a melody that I came up with to go along with the beat. I told Cecil that I wanted it to sound like a “lonely chorus of ghosts”. Cecil ended up stacking auxiliary harmonies on top of my singing vocals to create that effect. I remember my first reaction to hearing those stacked vocals was “OH MY GOD THIS IS SO FUCKING GOOD I COULD NEVER HAVE THOUGHT OF DOING THAT.” That single moment elevated this song from one I wasn’t sure would work at all, to one I absolutely loved. It was definitely the biggest surprise of the first round of mixdowns I heard, because I wasn’t expecting this song to be much more than “okay”. But I ended up liking it so much that I decided to incorporate that same melody into Loss of Ego, making it a recurring motif in both songs. You can even hear those same stacked harmonies in the background when the motif recurs in Loss of Ego. So, another well-deserved hats-off to Cecil, who made the song more than I ever intended it to be.

Loss of Ego is a song about psychedelic experiences, ego death, and our connection to people and the universe.

The original working title was “Loss of Ego/Moving Air”. You’ll notice the cut part of the title remains in the second verse. The two verses of the song detail two separate revelatory moments that ultimately helped the protagonist let go of their ego.

The first verse aims to capture one’s thinking process during a psychedelic journey. I try to musically reproduce the experience of rapid-fire thoughts, stream of consciousness, vivid imagery, absorption and deconstruction of external stimuli, and the overall inward self-analysis. The protagonist disconnects their identity from their physical body and deconstructs themself into a glowing core of light - think “Truth” from Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood. Experiencing ego death, they reconsider the meaningfulness of all they thought to be meaningful, and come to a negative conclusion that everything is meaningless. However, when they return to the surface with a sober mind, they no longer fully understand the reasoning behind that conclusion. They can remember the conclusion itself, but not how they got there - which is why this song is also just an approximation of what the whole thing feels like, because it was written above the surface. The only way to make sense of everything and see these revelations as they were meant to be seen is to crack the surface again.

The second verse subverts the conclusions of the first verse, via a different psychoactive experience. The protagonist attends a music festival, and from their hotel they hear a mixture of noises coming from the festival grounds. It sounds like a nebulous haze of sound waves colliding against each other and blending together to form a quasi-musical cacophony. It’s a combination of hundreds or even thousands of music shows going on at the same time, in indoor venues and outside stages, combined with the street noise of people and traffic. Regardless, in the state it’s in, the thick gumbo of sound is no longer recognizable as its individual parts.

The protagonist deconstructs music the way they deconstructed their own identity. Just as they are made out of light, energy, and atoms, music is a combination of vibrations, passed through a conductive medium to our ears and brains. “Moving Air”, if you will. We know that musicians put a lot of effort into delivering the exact message and sound they want to send into the world. But the protagonist realizes that all of this effort can only be enjoyed at a short distance. A few hundred meters away at most in a concert venue, or a few millimeters away through earbuds. Have that sound travel any further, and it loses the information its creators worked so hard to perfect. By the time it reaches an ear, it can no longer achieve its originally intended purpose. It is no longer music.

And it’s this that allows the protagonist to subvert their first conclusion that nothing matters. Humans determine what matters by creating close connections with each other. Perhaps the most important moments are ones we can only share by being close. Talking, listening, touching, tasting, and experiencing in person. Intimacy is the only way we can experience the things we’ve created as they were meant to be. Otherwise it’s all just moving air or moving light waves. We determine what it means to enjoy life to the fullest, and perhaps we can only do it if there are people with whom we can be close, and with whom we can share our world. Even if that’s yourself, and the only intimacy you have is someone speaking to you through your headphones. Closeness matters, which is also why social distancing in the time of pandemic is one of the most difficult challenges for people today.

This song is both a really dark and really bright point in the album. On one hand you experience the protagonist falling to their psychological lowest, and completely lose what they believe was their identity. On the other hand we see that they come out on the light end of the tunnel, reformed. It serves as the final narrative inflection point, after which the alteration of the ego is finally complete.

So how does this track tie into the rest of the Loss of Ego suite? For one, Loss of Ego shares a musical motif with Schrodinger. The end of Loss of Ego also features the trumpets from The Real Thing, just heavily edited. It’s barely noticeable, but it’s there. And the third verse of The Real Thing actually reflects a changed way of thinking that was triggered by the events in Loss of Ego. So all three tracks interact with each other across time and space, like a cycle of energy and thought. See if you can find connections for yourself.

And thus concludes the Loss of Ego suite, and this Alter Ego Explained.