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

Party Hop is a song about time management, public transportation, and the nightly responsibilities of a modern-day social butterfly.

It’s not really a secret that Party Hop sounds pretty different from the rest of the album. There’s a couple reasons for that, but perhaps the biggest reason for it is that it was actually from a different era of LEX! This song is by far the oldest song on the album when it comes to inception and basic composition. I came up with the hook, most of the verses, and a songwriter’s demo in late 2017. Here’s what that sounded like.

I came up with the hook, as well as the basic riff and chords, after getting Indian food with my friend Jordan back in Berkeley, CA. This Indian place isn’t even OPEN anymore (and not just because of pandemic)! During our lunch, we mentioned the topic “party hopping”, as he had invited me to a party of some mutual friends later that evening, and I was considering going even though I already had other plans. “Maybe I should do some party hopping,” I said. Almost by instinct, a tune started forming in my head. “I’m gonna party hop, wooooah. Cause one party’s not nearly enough.” And the rest is history. That night after I got home, instead of attending that party, I went straight to logic and started entering the notes that would eventually become the skeleton demo you just heard.

The craziest thing is that almost nobody who is currently my fan had even heard of me in late 2017, and yet the song had so much staying power that it made it to an album in 2020. I knew from the start that the hook was catchy enough to be single material, but it wasn’t anywhere near complete for Raging Ego, and it didn’t fit thematically. Not that it’s a great thematic fit for Alter Ego, either, but it does make a little more sense. In the Alter Ego storyline, “Party Hop” comes after “Self Care”, which is a meditation on how to feel better about my own aimlessness. “Party Hop” signifies the path that I end up choosing - hedonism and high levels of work and activity, which is consistent with the way I actually deal with my problems. After heavy socializing, extroversion, and productivity, I redirect my energy internally, leading into the title track, where the album takes its major turn. You can learn more about that in the next commentary track.

I’ve long known that this song has staying power and would make a great single. But I also deliberately chose it, because it sounds very different from the rest of the album. I wanted to play with expectations as well as do a little deceptive advertising. I wanted to trick audiences into thinking the album was gonna sound and feel a certain way, and then have it be completely different, just like the anime opening of Death Parade.

As the name suggests, Death Parade is a somber show, but its opening is peppy and bright, sharply contrasting with the tone of the series. I loved that contrast because it not only deceives the audience, but also brings some lightheartedness to a very heavy series. I wanted to recreate that for the album release, and so I decided to lead with this song.

When I started performing this song live, I introduced it as an open letter to public transportation, specifically because of the line about BART. When I moved to NYC and I started playing shows in places that weren’t familiar with BART, I began explaining the line before even starting the song. So in my head, the song morphed from a party song into a song about trains.

The single art created by Danji’s Designs incorporates the two public transportation train systems in the two U.S. cities I’ve lived in, the Bay Area and New York City. On the left is the Antioch train, formerly known as Pittsburg Bay Point, which is the yellow line. On the right is the 7 train, which is the purple line that spans Queens and Manhattan. I picked these trains to represent each city not only because they’re trains I would take frequently, but also because they’re complementary colors. Me jumping across from the top of one train to the other signifies my move to a different city, and making a jump to a brand new life.

This song was created via a similar process to “Artist Anthem”. I knew after making the songwriter’s demo that it would need plenty of improvement. I also knew early on that I wanted Klopfenpop to work on the track, as we previously had great success creating Artist Anthem, a pop-punk track that was heavy on organic instrumentation like guitars and bass. It stayed mostly faithful to the demo, but added many elements and touches that elevated the song.

Hi, this is Josh, intermittently known as Klopfenpop. And Lex asked me to talk a little about some of the production candy sprinkled throughout this track that I produced for them called Party Hop. Let’s take a look.

So right there coming out of that hook, instead of a crash I used the sound of a bus air brake releasing. Which is always one of my favorite sounds that you can encounter in the world, but it was surprisingly hard to find because the actual sound that you typically hear when a bus air brake releases, 1) buses don’t make that same sound anymore, it’s usually a lot more cold, cutoff *TCHHH*, but also the one that we’re used to hearing in media, in movies and TV, is sort of the platonic ideal, hyper realistic version that doesn’t reflect the actual sound we encounter in buses when we interact with them in real life. So it was pretty tough to actually end up designing one that sounded like the platonic ideal I was used to in my head. Anyway, here it is on its own.

And then here it is one more time in context.

Alright, so I have a little story to set up the next break. Oh, right here, vibraslap. I mean it’s a CAKE nod, but mostly because vibraslap is always awesome. But this guy named Paul Wright put out this transitional EP between his phase of being a mediocre white Christian rapper, and getting signed to a big Christian record label and being a mediocre Christian Jack Johnson that still tried to be a rapper, I dunno, it was weird. But there was one song that stuck out to me called “Microphone Check” not because he pretended to freestyle it, which he did, but because of a breakdown that had the sound of friends playing at a pool in the background.

No Paul, you can’t have the mic right now.

But just hearing those sounds in a musical context, even though they weren’t lined up rhythmically, always made me think, “Oh I can use those someday as percussion elements.” So in this break, coming out of Lex talking about how much there is to do in California, I’m like, “Okay, I wanna evoke California in this drum break.” And so leading up to it, I have: the bouncing of a diving board is part of a fill, and then where a crash would be, instead it’s the splash. Here it is isolated, and here it is in context.

Real quick before we move on, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out the best line of that old Paul Wright song, which is obviously when he said “Grabbing the microphone, get high on God and not the weed”. *LMAO*

I know.

Oh, before I go, I did wanna talk about the sample that plays when Lex says “‘Bout to party bounce into outer space, c’mon.” Did you hear it? That’s actually audio from the original Apollo 11 launch. Here it is isolated.

Oh, and there’s this thing. But that’s just me going *pop*.

And thus concludes this Alter Ego: Explained. Oh, will you look at the time! I gotta run. It’s time to...