Kyle Landon - Margaux (2018) Full Album

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0:00 1. What's in a Name?
4:14 2. Vanilla and Ribbons
8:33 3. The Model / Skinny Girls
12:35 4. Halcyon Theory
16:29 5. Relax
20:45 6. Left Blank
26:15 7. Limerence
33:40 8. The Boy in the Light
A step in the other's shoes.
Made in 2017.
Released February 14, 2018.
All songs written, performed, programmed, produced, engineered, mixed and mastered by Kyle Landon.
Recorded in my car 2017.
2024 writeup. For a long time, this was my opus. A sleek 42 minutes across 8 tracks. I wanted it to fit on the front and back of a vinyl, versus Selfish Animal, which was too long or a CD. I consider this album art pop. Dense, magical, dramatic art pop. The cover art is just the neighbors grass covered in jacaranda flowers, posterized and colored green, my old "oneitis'" favorite color. With the Evangelion font, which I had just gotten into at the time. As for the name? It's pretty simple, I randomly stumbled upon a model named Margaux one day. She's an exceedingly beautiful lady with an interesting name. Not much thought was put into it than that. It's super easy to figure out exactly who she is. The album overall is from the same period of time as Selfish Animal (and Displaced) but it serves as the best of the best of that year, and by extension my discography up to this point.
As for the overall concept of the album? Well, every song here, except for the last, takes place from the perspective of women. It's not a trans allegory or something, its more of an attempt to understand their point of view, to place myself in their shoes/heels. To think differently, and to see my own actions and words towards the various women in my life in a new perspective. This kinda makes it sound like I was some pest monster, no, I will never have allegations, I just was an emotional dude. Still am, but I try not to burden others with it anymore. I burden the music with it instead lol. Released Valentines Day cuz of course I would.
What's in a Name? Everything. The idea of this song was simple. Names. Names can be everything to someone. I have a close friend who got married around this time, and I knew that every time he heard her name, whether it was in reference to her, or in reference to someone else, he probably felt a little jump in his chest. Every time you see or hear the name of whoever you get to have closest to you, there's a little part of your brain and your heart that activates, gives you a little jolt. I had it for my "oneitis" for a while, and she shares her name with a huge star. It's probably really bad for me mentally to just casually refer to that girl as "my" oneitis smh, especially now that I'm happily in a relationship. The production of this song is absolutely twisted, it feels like some maze folding into itself, then expanding, then collapsing again, over and over. I intentionally made it as layered and busy as possible while trying to make sure it was still pretty in its own way. Yes I'm aware that there's a rhythm/bassline that sounds like Dream Theater's These Walls, the one in the intro and outro. It was an accident and I realized it pretty quickly, but it was too good to replace. It be like that, they rip people off constantly lol love u DT
Vanilla and Ribbons. The meaning of the name of this song is not important for you to know, but if you guess correctly, I will confirm it. That "my own" sample? Same one in Soul Lapse on Selfish Animal, same one in Dragging Change on Gold Shadows. Best sample ever and it was recorded in Audacity with an iPod Touch as a microphone. One of my close friends favorite songs of mine, which is weird because it's weird! I feel like no one else in the world could make this song. The whole song is just the M1 keyboard and Battery 4 on the drums. I adore it when vocal songs just have instrumental choruses cuz the instrumental was catchy enough. Such an interesting sound, that M1. The lyrics are about getting stalked. I've never stalked anyone, I never will, I hope that's abundantly clear, but as a man who has been attracted to a girl before, I understand how maddeningly one tracked our brains can get, and it's horrifying. The last lyric, while evocative, as good art should be, doesn't sit right with me, but maybe that's the point. That's an awful thing, to imply that all women have a stalker, they just don't know it yet. But goodness me what a unique song. I think I rewrote the verses 4 times. It still feels sometimes like I might rewrite it again. I think this is my favorite song ending ever, tied with Money's Good if Money's Great. It's basically the same exact thing as Gamma's Theme from Sonic Adventure, where the whole song just kinda fades away except for the weird noise that remains.
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The Model/Skinny Girls. I would call this my first pop song. The Margaux the album is named after is a model, so around this time I was thinking about what it would be like to be a model, what it would be like to deal with the makeup, and the photographers, the agents, the booking, the unrealistic beauty standards, all that. The background vocals in the chorus have autotune, one of my rare uses of it. Just a super smooth song, I love it so much, definitely would be a live staple if it wasn't horrifically hard to sing and completely out of my range. The Skinny Girls section was actually written first, but you gotta get that hook in there early, this is my idea of "pop" music. Why is it two songs? I dunno, that's just how it happened! Halcyon Theory. This songs instrumental is 100% based on Arid Sands - Night from Sonic Unleashed. I didn't know what a scale or key was, and was just trying to figure out how all of the different instruments could be making all these different chords and notes and still sound good together! Eventually, I realized that the song had what my brain called an anchor, basically, those 3 chords you hear repeated over and over again in the little keyboard towards the right speaker. So I made my own 3 chord pattern with an EP sound and then got to work. Nowadays I can jam in whatever key or scale, or confidently break out and use some accidentals or whatever, but back then this song was a huuuuge personal flex. As for what the lyrics are about? Just confidence I guess. The "why can't these problems hover" passage is from a song from these sessions I never did anything else with, I just thought it would sound good there. If you look at the song's lyrics, you'll notice there's a ton of stuff that you never hear. Well, anytime you hear the saxophone jamming, there probably was a vocal going on there originally that I decided to trash later on. For how little I knew at the time, I'm very proud of the sax solos, it almost sounds like I knew what I was doing. Or maybe I did! Relax. This song serves as sort of apology towards the women in my life I had the habit of trauma dumping onto. A bit more relaxed on the production side. This song kinda feels like the transition point of the album, it's certainly the most relaxed (though it still gets hectic towards the end). I dunno, just a cool song. Always stuck out to me as the odd one out for whatever reason, but it serves its purpose well. Left Blank. I cried while recording this, you can hear when I break. Another huge mixing nightmare. Not the crying, just the song overall. The idea of the song was just to picture myself falling for someone and then just have them get suddenly killed in a car accident out of nowhere. I had a lot of friends around the time I wrote this, I'm still close with all of them, but I was trapped in my head at the time and felt very alone. If you notice, there's a last set of lyrics that you don't hear. The vocals weren't cut or anything, I left it blank so it sounded like their ghost communicating or something. You can't hear it, but maybe you can... Limerence. The bass is huge across this album, it's ridiculous sometimes lol. Those drums are totally System of a Down's Toxicity, I won't deny it. I remember writing the "father taught me" part of the instrumental, and then my computer crashed, and I had to jump through some hoops to recover the corrupted project file. The huge guitar solo at the end was added because I figured, if people could only listen to one of my albums, it should be this one, and I should have some evidence somewhere in here that I'm a guitar player (even though the next song is all guitars too.) In a way, this is the end of the album. It's the final song from a woman's perspective before it returns to mine for the final song. This song is about relationships, and the guesswork involved, and portrays me both trying to convince myself to, and dissuade myself from trying to make contact with a girl I liked. Like yeah, on one hand she probably is busy, what am I doing texting her on a Friday night? But on the other hand, maybe she wants me to text her and doesn't have anything else going on. How will I ever know if I don't hit send? I remember now, there was gonna be a short monologue between Limerence and The Boy in the Light. I was gonna get the girl I liked to do it. She agreed, but it fell through over time. I will print it out for you here: "some boy told me that i should grow bangs. the nerve of him. he stuttered. he must have repeated it to himself a hundred times. and he still messed it up. so this is your life? you lose a little sleep, make some "art", and expect everything to fall into place because of it? all of those feelings and you can't even show them. do you regret your life? he looked at the floor in silence. then he told me that he always loved me. he told me that i'm the most beautiful girl he's ever seen. that his heart drops every time he looks at me. i asked him if he knew how long he made me wait for him. i asked him if he really thinks that i still cared about him. i told him that he wasn't strong enough to hold me. his hands never left his pockets. we both knew he was afraid of me. dreams don't come true until you wake up. dreams don't come true until you wake up." Wow, I haven't looked at that for like 5 years, the fact that I thought it would be a good idea to make the girl I liked read that is INSANE and I probably have some deep seated sadomasochism raging inside me. It would have been super interesting but it's probably for the best that it never made it to the album. The Boy in the Light. My best song (so far). My crown jewel. The result of all my hard work, all my progress. It's 8 minutes long, but I'd still probably say this is the song to listen to if you only ever listen to one of my songs. The working title was "jennifer connelly." I had just seen Requiem for a Dream, you see. This was the 9th song I made in 2017, I remember clearly (though I also track everything I make in chronological order via playlists.) It was started January 8th, 2017 and was iterated on constantly over the coming months. If this ever "posthumously" blows up I'll post the original versions, the transformation is crazy. Thinking about it now, it's kinda like Poor Rockets in that its a rock/metal song with clean guitars. When you hear shakers like halfway into the song, that's me shaking a pepper grinder full of peppercorns. I held my hand on the bottom but it still got everywhere somehow. Lyrically, I just wanted to sum up and dramatize everything I felt I had learned about man-woman relations, and how they affect me. I love the callbacks to Abandon You, What's in a Name, and Ghost of You. It really feels like the Kyle Landon grand finale. The vast majority of the vocals on this track were clipped and I did my best to mix it. I really just wanted to put my all into this song. I just kept adding and adding and adding. Once the song explodes, and the whole "you don't believe in me" part kicks in, that's when I know, yeah, maybe I never made any money, maybe I never got any plays, maybe nobody knows who I am, but fuck it, I'm one of the best of all time, shame on you if you don't know, shame on the algorithms, shame on the journalists, shame on the reviewers, shame on the tastemakers, shame on the record labels, shame on the playlist makers, shame on the a&r's, shame on everyone not reading this, and shoutouts to you if you are reading this. Kyle Landon Forever. 2016-2024.