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

Retcon Artist is a song about wanting to change the past, and the cyclical nature of regret and shame. It was the last song I finished for the album.

The beat for this song originated from a musical motif and rough draft I composed, titled “Trap experiment sad bside”. The harp synth, main acoustic guitar riff, and violin melody were present in that demo, but the beat was originally a trap beat with 808 hi hats and snares. After tweaking the beat around a bit, I decided that it needed live instrumentation, which moved the entire track away from trap and towards a rap-rock sound. I ditched the trap drums in favor of realistic rock drums, saturating and distorting them for a really nasty overblown sound. Then I hired Mikal kHill, who you heard earlier in Self Care, to play acoustic guitar, electric guitar, and electric bass to fill out the track.

The song is heavily influenced by the concept of time travel, especially going back in time to change major life events that are sources of regret and shame. You know when you close your eyes and suddenly remember a cringy fifth grade moment? It’s that feeling. The message I try to convey is that doing so is essentially futile, since changing external events and appearances does nothing to change the internal constructs of shame that you’ve developed over time.

One of the things that inspired the song was rediscovering some of my old journals and written projects that I wrote in word documents, dating all the way back to 2010 and older. Reading old journals is something I really enjoy doing, since it offers a look in the near or distant past, along with the feelings and mindset I had at the time. It’s a snapshot of a former me, which I find valuable when I want to analyze how I’ve grown and changed over time. Upon reading some of these documents, I discovered that a lot of the core issues I wrote about five to ten years ago remain unchanged. In these journals, memoirs, essays, and even school assignments, I wrote about being uncertain for the future, wanting to fulfill a greater purpose, searching for a career that would make me truly happy and self-actualized, feeling conflicted about my social and cultural obligations, and worrying that I’ll never be in a relationship. You know, just human things. Things that come up over and over and over again in Alter Ego, Raging Ego, and basically all of my music. I realized then that despite all the growth, improvements, and change I’ve pushed myself to do over the years, through hardship and success, my core concerns and neuroses haven’t changed much at all. I still think and write about the same things. I began to visualize it as one big time loop that I can never escape: even if I go back and change certain events of my past, things will still happen the same way because of who I am at the core.

Constantly changing and improving yourself, whether it’s working towards the future or hypothetically editing the past, ultimately does nothing if you don’t fix the underlying thoughts and emotions causing your own lack of self-worth. I wanted to capture this phenomenon of a “cycle of cringe”, something I experience often, where I look back at things I wrote a year, a month, or even a day ago. I change and improve for tomorrow, but it doesn’t stop me from cringing AGAIN when I look back on the me of today, which is now yesterday. Becoming a better person isn’t changing the root of the shame. It’s the unwillingness to forgive myself.

I imagined my many alter egos, who all want different things, interfering with my personal process of healing and forgiveness. “Sending a text back” is a direct reference to the anime Steins;Gate, specifically Season 1. SPOILERS AHEAD. In Steins;Gate, the main character figures out a way to jump across different “world-lines” where certain events occurred differently, based on a text he sends to someone on a past date. Each of these texts creates a new timeline, which is like an alternate universe, with only the main character hopping timelines noticing what has changed. So I imagined my main ego trying to change the past by sending texts to past selves at key moments in their life - April 2015, December of 2016, and so on - and ending up with multiple timelines where things happened differently, none of which actually fix the protagonist’s self-hate or inability to heal. The protagonist regrets sharing too much, yet continues to do so; eventually they realize that the problem comes from their early childhood development, which has resulted in expressing emotions outwardly in unhealthy ways, instead of accepting them privately. I wanted the song to feel both unresolved and resolved, just like the cycle of trying to better oneself, so I reflected that by making the music and lyrics sound conclusive but still somewhat open-ended.

Again, I want to shout-out Cecil for not only the overall engineering job, but the fantastic drop that happens at 3:36. I received an email from him after sending in all my vocals. He said that the way I had arranged the third repetition of the chorus didn’t give it the conclusiveness I was going for, so he added a drop out, some extra drums, and a guitar line that follows the violin line. I was completely floored at how well he captured the explosiveness I wanted for the final chorus, which I had been building up to but couldn’t execute properly. It makes the serenity of the outro really shine, especially when the acoustic guitar and piano come in to gently lead the listener out of their experience. He helped the track achieve a perfect contrast between the storm and the calm that comes after. And for that and all the other tracks, I have to take my hat off to Cecil, the true magician of this album.

One of the things that has made working with Lex fun as a producer, is she has more of a songwriter’s sense than a lot of rappers do when they come to you asking for beats, and she knows enough about composition and music theory that she can bring you something. Even when she wants a beat from you, she might already have the melody or the chords worked out. Which has been the case on stuff we’ve worked with before. So when she asked me to do this song, it was interesting because it was the first time she’d have me kind of come in just as a session musician, and she had written out parts already that she had sequenced out with programming and then she asked me to recreate those with live instruments. So I played my acoustic guitar, which is like a little epiphone dreadnought that I use, this acoustic electric, so I used that for the acoustic parts. And then I have a hoffner bass that has a McCartney violin style semi hollow bass, and I ran that into a vox pedal I have that emulates different types of cabinets, and just overloaded the hell out of it, to play some of the heavy chords in the song. And for the actual electric guitar parts I also played, I have a Gretsch hollow body that I play through a vox AC30, it’s tube powered and I just overload the fuck out the of the tubes, and then, no distortion pedals, just straight up overdriven. As soon as I would stop playing the guitar, it would be like *WEEHHHHH* howling feedback. So the guitars are mixed really well by Cecil, so it doesn’t sound overwhelming, but the original tracks I recorded were super gnarly. And I did a bunch of layers of them, playing deeper chords, and also played the power chords on the bass, and ran those through it, through the AC 30 also overloaded. So that I’d be able to get a really… when she sent me the original programming some of the chords on the heavy parts were played really low on keyboard, and that’s deeper than you’re normally gonna tune your guitar, so I played power chords on a bass, and just overdrove the tubes really hard for that. And it came out with a really cool, thick sound. I’m really happy with how that song came out. I think she did a really cool job with the composition. It deals a lot with sparsity, and that’s been a big thing for me for a long time. I used to call myself - it was a joke on what MC Lars had done with post punk laptop rap. I started calling myself sad-core minimalist doom rap. The minimalist thing was something I tried to do with my band, where I’d tell everybody, when we were trying to come up with my arrangements, I would be like, I want you to play as few notes as possible. There should be no extra notes in this. The raps are gonna be fast, and energetic, so we don’t need a billion instruments playing a billion things a second. We need a lot of space. And I like that the arrangement she had come up with for that really utilized sparsity effectively in a way that was interesting sonically and gave her raps a lot of room to breathe.

And thus concludes this Alter Ego: Explained. Now that it’s all over, I do I wish that I could go back when…