When we released Jitterthink in May of 2021, it was the culmination of a couple of years of “work from home” life that I had been doing before the COVID-19 pandemic had ever started. I had been working as a writer and content editor for an online education organization, and had transitioned to a remote work-from-home setup a few months before pandemic lockdowns started happening. Adjusting to the new work format would have been a normal (though manageable) challenge in its own right, but doing so as the whole world took an unprecedented step into life under a global pandemic brought so many other issues to the surface.
One of those was my relationship to time and how it is shaped by, in all likelihood, some kind of neuro-divergence. Both and I many people close to me have long suspected, some since my childhood, that I might have some kind of “spicy brain," so to speak. Autism was the earliest guess in my childhood, and I have for several years now come to highly suspect ADHD as well. It would explain a lot about my relationship to time. As the barrier between home life, work space, and “the broader world” was blurred beyond distinction, I struggled—not only with time and task management, but with boundaries. I struggled both to start working and also to stop working. I struggled to have dreams about what the next years of life could entail while being perpetually stuck. I struggled with frustration about both how leaders and common people were handling the collective response to the pandemic, our new restrictions, and what it would mean to cooperate and work together for everyone's best interests. And through all of that, I found myself face-to-face with my tendency to wallow in feelings of shame as a dysfunctional way to escape the stress.
The path to diagnosis has not been simple or straightforward and I have yet to cross that bridge. But at least being aware of the kinds of things neurodiverse people experience in managing the functions of daily life has been helpful in trying to keep moving forward.
But music, of course, was a powerful way to heal some of those wounds as well. Jared and Jericho had shared a simple guitar-and-drums demo with the working title “dullshiv.” Working titles are such a goofy thing, what can I say? I sat with that demo for a long time. I worked on keyboard parts and other arrangement textures. The instrumental was coming along magnificently. But I was absolutely stymied for lyrics.
The difficulty came, again, because of the factors around me. Protests out in the streets. Social upheaval and, as far as we assumed at the time, seeming major reckonings about racism as its own kind of pandemic. Massive injustice in how the response to COVID deprioritized some of the people most vulnerable to illness and least able to access medical care. Inconsistent policies that helped only as much as they also caused confusion. I felt a deep compulsion that I must take this instrumental demo and turn it into a song that addressed the state of humanity and the obviously pressing problems of the world at large rather than just focusing on my own little personal mental health bubble.
And that compulsion held the song back from being born. No matter how many drafts I wrote, no matter how many voice recordings I improvised looking for new words and musical phrases that would capture that feeling, nothing came. I was wrongly telling myself that the massive, heavy riff at the end of the song needed to be some kind of massive, rallying cry—a triumphant moment that would inspire people to persevere, to rise up, to overcome, to make change. I was telling myself over and over again that this song needed to accomplish that specifically.
That riff is one of the darkest and most bleak sounding things this band has ever written. What was I thinking trying to make it sound empowering?
When I finally came to terms with that realization, it set me free. It reminded me that not every piece of art could accomplish everything and that one song wasn't going to fix the world. The world, it turns out, didn't need me to engage in delusions of grandeur. And the people in my life—also a real part of the world, it turns out—needed me to work on myself and make my corner of the world a better place to be.
And with that thought in mind, I shifted focus to emotional catharsis. Taking a look at the real conditions I was living in and experiencing through this whole mess of a situation and purging the negativity as honestly as I could. The worlds came instantly when I decided to follow the emotion that my bandmates had already baked into the demo.
As the song got closer to completion, I leaned into the intensity of the ending section. I needed something to push it over the edge, and that special “something” came in the form of a guest vocal spot by Nick Young from our fellow Toronto metal scene peers Pillars of Autumn. His contributions, the much more unambiguously Deathcore power in his growls, really cemented the song as exactly the emotional purgation that it needed to be.
It was a lesson about honesty and artistic awareness that I've carried with me ever since in both my songwriting and my own thought processes. I don't have to fix everything—but this doesn't mean I can't at least address something. And I hope that, in some way, those who have encountered this song have been able to see some of their own struggles in it and somehow find some of that same catharsis.
I shared a lot about how the writing of Jitterthink related to my own mental health journey in this early video essay for Passionfroot—a YouTube channel and podcast I run with some of my closest friends, including multi-time Kozen collaborator Evin Nazya. Check out the video if you want just a bit more on the history of this song.