Key Lyric: “I thought of quittin’ but my heart just can’t buy it!”
Acceptance of everything I just sang about! I wanted to celebrate the absurdity of it all. What I went through, what I’m doing now with it. I’ve learned that sometimes, you just have to laugh. That’s what this song’s trying to say, and I think it’s the perfect way to end this story. I never got justice, my tuition back, even an apology from the school for how it caused me lasting harm. I just have this story. I won’t let it go until my life looks like how it should’ve, but being angry isn’t productive. I’m just going to laugh & keep going
Purpose (Why this song?)
More than any song on the album, I entered the creation process of That’s Life with no intention of perfection or class. Reflecting on themes of absurdity alongside the song’s main focus of acceptance, it was important for me to encapsulate my attitude towards the whole situation as accurately as possible. I personally believe the things that I’ve had to accept are stupid, which became my directive through the creative process of this song. Stupid and silly to encapsulate the absurd. I threw in any and every idea I had, no matter how “cringe” I thought they’d end up. I got a chipmunk voice throwing stupid adlibs around, random animal sounds taken from the Logic Sound Library to communicate “stupid monkey business,” stupid bouncy ball sounds all over the place, and best of all: Some stupid voices saying the stupid things I suspect my old college community will have on their mind when they hear the album for themselves.
Looking back: The isolation I lived through following everything I went through wasn’t absurd by itself. As I’ve come to learn time and time again, no one owes me a thing in this life: But the isolation I experienced following everything I went through while being in a community with foundations in Jesuit Values… that was absurd. At least, according to the Jesuit Values I learned about and experienced at my All-Boys Jesuit High School. The ways I was socially and academically/professionally punished for how I acted while going through a breakdown: Not absurd. They became absurd when you see the countless times I sought support and help, knowing full-well that I couldn’t handle what I was going through on my own; times I was heard but not listened to. So, as I created absurdity through music during the recording & producing process, I’ve got some traditional instruments playing my rendition of That’s Life’s accompaniment, which I wrote to be pretty true to form for standard covers of this song you might hear. Through the creative process, I came to realize that the absurdity only “hit” when emphasized by the structures around it. Hopefully, you hear that through the song!
The Creative Process:
Sonic Identity
That’s Life features a few motifs from the album, bent out of shape if you will. For example, the Steel Drums from “For Boston” & “Sunshine, Lollipops & Rainbows” return here with heavy distortion and stress, sounding almost like pots and pans being hit together. Likewise, the woodwinds played throughout the song are attached to a bit-crusher that sends the instruments into 8-bit territory during moments of movement during the track. It’s all about sounding stupid and silly against something that’d be otherwise “classic.”
Core Sounds
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There is a classic Grand Piano (Steinway) used throughout this track. It provides the structure of the song that allows the rest of the production to really be creative and expressive to create a sense of absurdity.
It’s like the job I don’t have to support my creative endeavors!
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The song starts off with a bang, literally! I took a synth that had a similar tone to the Steel Drums used earlier in the album and put the drive on MAX to really make them pop like pots and pans being banged together.
I hope it has a “very much over it” energy. But like, not actually over it.
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The monkey sounds used in the song’s intro aim to emphasize the absurdity explored through this track. It’s like, sure, we’re singing a modern standard. Something classic. But I’m so past any of that, that it’s like: Fuck it. Throw some monkey sounds in there.
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Likewise, I push against the expectation of a jazz-standard-type performance from this song by introducing ad-libs in lieu of the usual backing vocals on standard renditions of the song. I pitched them up so that they kinda give annoying. Everyone seems annoyed by me whenever I talk about this PTSD stuff. So I wanted the song to be annoying.
Storyline
To understand the final song of the album, we must start with the track before it. See, Let The Light In wasn’t going to be the penultimate song of the album, originally. At first, it was L’appuntamento, a classic Italian pop song about waiting for a date that might never come. With this in mind, I wanted the song that follows to be something that touched on themes of acceptance. Personally, I can’t think of a better song for that topic than That’s Life! I sourced a few different renditions of the song for inspiration and got to work on my own. I didn’t want to produce a song just about acceptance, though. The song usually holds a confidence to it, which I appreciate… But I wanted to emphasize something a little different here. See, for me, it was about the acceptance of absurdity.
The entire album, up to this point, has been a reflection on getting roofied and my community’s reaction to how I sought support in its aftermath, which ultimately left me feeling like I was the perpetrator of what happened to me. That’s the message sent through their actions, anyway. In that, and in how my life’s turned out in the years since, I constantly felt and continue to feel confusion: I spoke out, and suddenly I had a Scarlet Letter! I felt punished for getting raped, I still do. As I’ve tried to make sense of that fact, I’ve always returned to how STUPID it all is. When I think about the situation being stupid, that’s when I feel normal again. So for the final song of For Boston, well, I hope it sounds stupid as hell!
Key Moments
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As mentioned, I brought a tendency to disregard traditions with this song in its creative process. Usually, That’s Life ends with a booming Forte. The song, vocally, has gotten grander and grander until the end brings one’s full volume. I certainly embodied this for the final chorus, but for the last line, I wanted to subvert the expectations and end the album is a non-grand way. I never got justice, after all. So I just sarcastically speak the line instead.
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The song has a conclusion, but one could argue that the album does not. In the last seconds of the song, I bring in some synths from Babylon and re-introduce the text-to-speech voices. This time, they’re reacting to the album and saying their various opinion. The track and tension rise, and then stops.
It is abrupt, unless the album is on repeat: It’s actually a perfect loop into the beginning! I did this not to be cool or gimmicky, but to communicate how this story has never ended for me, despite years passing and everyone else moving on. Cheers y’all, see ya in Hell I guess.
