Gregory Clark passed away last night. As far as I know, nobody knows why yet. It seemed like he was at the height of his powers and career. I’m told he was in the best physical condition of his life. Greg seemed to squeeze ten lives into one, but it’s still too soon.

I already knew that Greg had a huge personality to go with his talent. But now I’m seeing that he also radiated a giant swath of influence and generosity. There are so many stories surfacing online today of the ways that he touched other people, stories that sound nearly identical to my experience with Greg.

To put things in perspective, this is a musician that has worked with everyone from Lady Gaga to Michael Jackson. And yet when I, an unknown among unknowns, got in touch with him about possibly singing on my record he was all about it. No questions asked.

I only got to work with him the one night. Just the one marathon session in New York. I had been warned jokingly beforehand that Greg did things his own way and was kind of like a lion in the studio: at some point, when he was good and ready, he would pounce. So when he showed up I got us all some food and we talked about the songs, trying to get acclimated to each other in the time it takes to eat a meal. I knew that I wanted him to sing on “I Believe,” and that not everybody would be comfortable getting behind what that song is saying, so I talked a little bit about where I was coming from on religion and my upbringing. It turned out that we had similar stories and both came up in the same style of churches. Greg was from Kansas City and I, by coincidence, had pissed a few years of my life away attending religious colleges in nearby Springfield. We knew the bible belt. We got each other.

So we started with “I Believe” and the rest was a blur. Afterward I joked with him that he ended up singing on all of the record’s best songs. “I Believe,” “One More Time,” “Got To Be,” “Zhivago.” Greg’s ears are unreal so all I had to do was stammer out a crooked little soul melody and he’d memorize it on first hearing. The man could concentrate like he was defusing a bomb and he wouldn’t give up on something until he had all the bends and dips the way he knew they should be. You don’t auto-tune a singer like Greg. You just let him find his way and then print that. And of course, when you asked him to go off script he gave you an embarrassment of riches.

Greg is the secret weapon of my record Extracolor. He’s the first sound you hear on it, a sample I cut from video I shot of him warming up. If you don’t believe in straight time, as I do not, you can understand that I wrote a lot of the record with him in mind. I can’t imagine the record without him. Just like I can’t imagine never seeing him again.

We hung out a few more times after that and spoke on the phone once or twice. We kept talking about writing a record together or doing this and that. We just hadn’t gotten around to it.

I don’t want to make more of my connection to Greg than it was. But he is inextricable from a part of my recent life that is so important to me. I guess I’ll just say that I knew him briefly and found him to be kind, exuberant, funny gifted beyond description and blessed with a big, beautiful heart. I miss him already.

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I’ve been nearly living out of my studio at Yessian the past few months. A lot of really exciting projects have come through and I’ve been trying out some new directions with my composition and production and just really feeling it. The Y’s did some renovations to my room just before the new year and the timing couldn’t have been better. Whereas it used to feel a bit like working in a submarine kitchen in there, now it’s pretty spacious and nice to be in and working in an environment you enjoy being in really changes everything.

I was excited this morning to see that Liz Phair came to Lana Del Rey’s defense in an op ed, but after reading it I think I can add to what she wrote. Phair made some good points but most of her piece seemed to be about her and I think that the Lana Del Rey controversy is really a controversy about all of us and our relationship to the internet.

The first thing I would say is that the best defense of LDR are her songs themselves. “Born To Die,” the song (and its slinky tats and tigers video), is one of my favorite songs of the year. I love the distorted Native American war cry samples, the on-point happiness-through-nihilism lyrics, the John Barry strings and just the beautiful construction of it. It has so many hooks I can never pick a favorite. “Blue Jeans”: same deal. Stellar work, Lana. Throw in “Summertime Sadness” and “Dark Paradise,” both of which are growing on me a lot since buying her record last week, and you’ve already got a better collection of songs than anything given to us by a lot of the artists ruling the pop world right now.

And then there’s “Video Games,” the shot heard round the world that started this whole mess. “Video Games” was a classic on arrival, destined for the pop canon (I can’t wait till I can karaoke it). It was so good that it inspired a wave of spontaneous popular affection. It went viral in the purest way, popularity without marketing. Since it was spread voluntarily, people felt ownership of it the way they do of memes like the double rainbow guy. They thought, Lana belongs to us. The tastemaking blogs and web magazines who joined in the love fest thought this too. It’s part of their identity and reason for existence to stoke the kindling of burgeoning cultural fires and the less machinery behind it, the more they can take credit for it if it catches on. When it came out that Lana had signed to one of the biggest labels in the world, that she’d had some “work” done, that she was using a moniker – there was widespread revulsion, as if she were a Trojan Horse dropped onto our ipods and that people had been duped into doing the Majors’ devil’s work. Because no one wants to feel they were tricked into giving the Man free advertising. If we found out the “Ow, Charlie” youtube video had been produced by Steven Speilberg, we’d all feel similarly gross, and rightly so. But this is not really what happened with LDR, if you take her word for it. She didn’t pretend to be any of the things people projected onto her. She just made some music, thought it was good and put it out on the internet. There are no lies in the “Video Games” phenomenon, just misunderstandings. She’s been an open book in interviews and if anybody felt burned it was just spin eating spin.

But the controversy is real. And to me what’s really interesting and kind of important about it is what a toxic place the internet is turning out to be. When companies dump their chemicals and waste in our water we call it pollution and think of it as an evil thing to do because that water is something we all have to share. I think the same thing is happening with the web and the social networking sites, which are these relatively brand-new things that humans are having to figure out how to use in healthy ways. Comments sections and micro blogging feeds are putrid from all the mental poison that people dump into them every day. Only it’s not shadowy corporations doing the poisoning, it’s just regular people, dripping their dirty thoughts in the water a little bit at a time.

The more toxic things get, the more weirdly disproportionate the tone gets. And nothing has been more weirdly disproportionate than the LDR backlash. A singer goes on Saturday Night Live and does not lip synch and performs two of her songs, looking nervous and sounding like she could use more practice in mic technique but otherwise nailing the tunes. And people let loose a torrent of judgement and rebuke because… why? Thom Yorke sings on television and sounds nothing like he does on recordings, and off key and out of breath, and people say it’s great because it’s Radiohead. Live Television is a brutal medium for singers. When people sound as good as someone like Beyonce does, it’s a miracle and shouldn’t be taken for granted. It doesn’t make Lana a bad singer because she wasn’t miraculous. But then you see her on Letterman the next week (in a performance that must have taken guts, coming right in the middle of a Lana-sucks movement), and she sounds beautifully exactly like the record, but people keep making fun of her. And by the time you see Bon Iver the next weekend on SNL, and the band absolutely nails two songs from its really great record, and at the very same time you’re inspired and thinking about how you’d like to do things that you’re involved with as well as Bon Iver just performed on SNL you notice your facebook feed filling up with people mocking the wonderful performance you just saw, it’s hard not to throw up your hands and wish there were cleaner social playgrounds to hang out it in than the ones on the internet.

I can see both sides. I can see (without agreeing with it) why people felt tricked for loving “Video Games” and campaigning for her pop presidency. And I can see why there is this other wave of people defending her now, who feel that there is a “weirdly mean … like high-school level meanness” (to quote Ken Tucker) to the backlash that is about more than just Lana Del Rey. I’ve found myself on this end, talking about her more than I would expect to. Because I just feel like that kind of artist should be defended on principle. I like her songs a lot and it’s fun to stick up for her. But I’m also sticking up for all people trying to make things. Because Lana Del Rey didn’t get famous for being in a sex video with an R’n'B singer. Or for selling her music with performance art that uses silly hats and meat suits. She got famous for writing a great, great song and leaking it on the internet with a homemade-looking, low-key but moving video that translated the song’s feelings well. In other words, LDR got famous first because of something she made. For bringing something beautiful into the world that didn’t exist before. It’s so simple that it’s easy to forget. Whether you like the songs or not, how can it be appropriate to throw that much hate or judgement at anybody for doing a creative act? The heritage movement in US culture right now is based on the fear of a future where America can no longer produce anything. Lana Del Rey is one of the people that makes things. Maybe they’re just songs, but they’re something. It seems to me the “American” thing to do would be to get behind that. LDR for President.

I didn’t mean to tease this out for so long but it turns out that self-releasing a record is a lot of work. But I’m happy to say that Extracolor is available today. Please give it a spin. This is a very personal album about the years I started to heal my mind and there are spiritual themes but I hope it works just as well on a carnal level. There is no filler on this record. These are the 12 best songs I can give you.

If you are one of those people who pays for music, you can grab it on stores like iTunes and bandcamp. Both of these options will give you the beautiful graphic booklet, created by Josh at Kingship Creative, which has artwork, credits and lyrics. It’s really nice. Extracolor will be available on other stores too but wherever you grab it please do me a favor and throw up a review on iTunes. It helps.

There will be some more singles, remixes, b-sides and maybe even some videos coming down the pipe this spring. But for now just check out the record.

I hope you love the music as much as I did making it. I’m really proud of this one.

Zach Shipps’ remix of “One More Time” is up for free download today: download it here. It’s straight bananas.

Extracolor is out 1/23/12!

Cover art by Alex Stoddard.

I’m very excited to announce the first official single from the new album Extracolor: “One More Time,” featuring Gregory Clark. It’s available in all the usual places, including iTunes and Bandcamp.

I don’t have a preference for where you get it, so long as you get to hear it. If you get it from Bandcamp or a store besides iTunes I would ask one favor, that you head over to iTunes to comment on and rate the track. I can use all the support I can get!

Extracolor will be released January 23.

My remix of Lettercamp’s new single “Oh Well” dropped today. You can get it here.

LETTERCAMP “OH WELL (DANIEL REMIX)”

She’s only put out a couple of songs but I’m going along with the hype on this one. I dig her production but it’s kind of beside the point because the writing is so good and it makes me feel like in the end only good writing will last. There are like 25 parts on Video Games that give me chills, just so many evil hooks. And as a singer Lana is killing it. I’ve really grown to love her fake lips and giant hoop earrings and the way her whole image goes through an instagram retro filter. I love all that because she seems so real anyway and I like that friction. One the one hand, wildly over the top image control but then gives super frank interviews and just talks straight and is smart and normal makes the interviewers uncomfortable. Sitting there with attitude because she can back it all up with that witch’s voice.

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