“Midriff”

Track 2 is “Midriff.” It started with a crop top that was not mine.

Where the line came from

During covid I put on a lot of weight. Alcoholism and an Uber Eats habit, in roughly that order of seriousness and reverse order of frequency.

At some point I put on my wife's crop top, caught sight of myself, and the line arrived fully formed:

If you ain't like my midriff, you just ended up off my friends list.

That is the whole origin. A guy who had gained weight in a bad year, wearing his wife's shirt, making a joke about it before anyone else could.

Which is, broadly, how I handle most things.

But the chorus came first

The hook is Clay Herzing — The Real Biggs Malone. He wrote it and performed it, and the chorus is what fuelled everything else. The verses were built to live up to it, not the other way round.

Clay has since passed. The album is dedicated to him and to Wayne Holtz, who sings the chorus on track 9.

That hook is the last of that particular thing. There is no version of this song where I go back and ask for another take.

Partee McFly

I harassed Partee McFly for months to write his part. Months.

He allegedly wrote his lyrics about an hour before walking into the studio, and then knocked it out of the park in a minimal number of takes.

I would like to report that this was infuriating. It was not, quite, because the verse is excellent. But after ten years of not being able to finish a record, watching somebody produce something that good in sixty minutes is a particular flavour of humbling.

Some people work the way I do. Some people do not need to.

The video, and a last hoorah

We filmed in two places: a co-worker's apartment pool, and the former Flavors warehouse, which Partee owned.

Flavors had an infinity wall and was, in my opinion, one of the coolest places in San Antonio — possibly the coolest. We shot there days before the lease was up.

So the footage is also a record of a room that does not exist any more. We got in just before they shut it down, and the last thing that happened in there was us making a music video about a crop top.

I can think of worse send-offs.