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Wise John

@wisejohnofficial

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art pop about things that end
stream Love, Ozymandias 🛰️☄️⬇️
full album out now

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Love, Ozymandias has been out for 2 weeks!!! 🎉🎻🌄 Can hardly believe it. Here's a ton of thank yous:
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This album took a village.
First thank you goes to @astrahle, who is the only producer I could imagine for this project. Thank you for killing babies, pulling weeds, and bringing the sonic vision the project needed.
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Huge thanks to @freehallas, @rushtorres, @percusshaun, and @elisetrouw for spending an intense, bizarre, wonderful week with Alex and I at Camp Ozymandias laying down the heart of the album, and to @jonobrienrecording for hosting us.
Thanks as well to all the other friends who laid down tracks in post, especially @danielchaee for his essential contributions on strings, and the homies who I lured in to provide BGV's and emotional support.
Special shout out as well to the unstoppable @freehallas and @joey_md_ in the back room for their hard work making this thing sparkle in the mix & master.
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Thank you to my cousin, the fantastic poet @jujujulife, for her editorial wisdom on the lyrics side, as well as to AK47, Jimmyboi, Cajon Joe, and Momma for key conversations during the writing process.
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Big thanks to my magnificent manager @justinsmz and my delightful distributor @cageriot for making this thing go smoothly, and to the magical @mishavenegoni for her spectacular work on the cover art.
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To everyone who i wrote about in this album, i am grateful to all of you for having been a part of my life. And to the friends and family whose support and company in those times was too loving, uncomplicated, and positive to bear mentioning in this extended tragedy of an album, thank you. <3 you know who you are.
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A most special thank you ❤️ to the people who kept me sane through this arduous, often lonely 2 year process of creation, especially AHH, Elliott O, JAR, EAT, and most especially BB. sine qua non.
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And at last, THANKS TO YOU!! I am eternally grateful for my community of listeners. By coming along for this journey you've made all of our work more than cathartic shouting into the void. On behalf of the village, we love ya forever.
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Love, Ozymandias by @wisejohnofficial

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16 days ago

a small peek behind the scenes 🎨🎙️of recording Love, Ozymandias.
these clips are all from hold_me_closer_darling. u get bonus points if u can identify which parts ;)

1,2. rhythm section recording at Music Box in Idyllwild, CA 3. daniel chae is a one-man string section 4. i bought a theremin off craigslist for this album and alex wouldn't let me hear the end of it 5. bing bong 6. snip snap 7. where i recorded most of the lead vocals (at home in indiana) by @wisejohnofficial

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a month ago

the full album is out 🥲🥲🥲
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can't wrap my head around that all at once really, and besides today I want to put attention on the last song on the record. it is called "if_we_meet_again" and it is the only story on the album that hasn't actually happened. ozymandias imagines meeting annie on the street one day, years and years later. what would that feel like? what would he do?

I hope you enjoy this deeply personal record about loss and acceptance; if you have it in you, now's a good time to settle in somewhere for an hour and give it the ol' full front-to-back listen. Please let me know how it goes if you do :)

"God willing we did alright, if we meet again".
- Love, Ozymandias by @wisejohnofficial

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a month ago

at last some joy! a song about new beginnings ❤️🌅☢️
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"guiltless" is the 2nd to last song in the album, and 1/2 of the album's epilogue/Act III. Sort of a look into what lies beyond heardbreak and loss. finally being open to love, finding someone who makes you feel something strange and unfamiliar, and allowing yourself to fly into that feeling. here are some photos from that time and that feeling.
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with this one, alex, the band, and I all immediately gravitated towards a rush of blood to the head-era coldplay-ish sound. feels classic. it's the most straightforward piece in the album and feels right that way. hope u guys love it :)
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this is the happiest song in the album by a long shot, for you listeners (perhaps the only one, really). unfortunately now it makes me sad. you can probably guess why lol.
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anyhow, here is where we leave our antihero/protagonist to live out his life. I wish him well, personally; he's made many mistakes but I think he still deserves another chance. Next week, we will celebrate the full release of the album with the last song. by @wisejohnofficial

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a month ago

I would recommend finding a quiet place to listen to the climax of the album.
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I'm posting 2x for 2 songs today; this is for the second of the two, called "seattle (thru_the_wasteland)". It is 7.5 minutes long and tells the story of how this period of my life described in the album came to an end. We finally meet annie in a way, and we also return at last to where the album started, having traveled over 11 songs and 2 years to get there (the endless plain of time referred to in the first lyric in nothing_falls_apart). this is when all the illusions fall away and i see myself and my life for what it is. honesty at last.

aside from that i would like u to just experience it yourself. seattle is the most difficult piece of art i've ever finished to my own satisfaction; @astrahle, me, and the rest of the crew really pulled off something special here I think. do not expect it to be a relaxing listen, but do expect it to make you feel something, perhaps put you into your own memories. thank you for following me down the road to here :)

2 more songs left in the record! this is the end of act II. act III is an epilogue. by @wisejohnofficial

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a month ago

album climax pt 1 of 2-- possibly my fave song i've ever recorded
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recommended u listen to this and the other song (seattle, which is out today) in one sitting; they are a pair and each tells one day of the same 2 day story.
roll_the_dice is an emotional rock bottom, and like all rock bottoms, a place of long-avoided honesty with the self. easy listening it is not. but i think it does have a sort of sense of humor about it, especially the end. but i can promise u either way that this song sounds SICK. we are all v proud of it.
All that aside, I’ve found listening to RTD comforting lately. It’s a good reminder: “It feels like nothing at all / to get what you want”. these days I’d maybe append to that sentence “if you want the wrong things”. I hope i am wanting the right things now, but regardless, this song reminds me now to keep my expectations down for how much a victory is going to make me feel happy. a good life is built over day after day of keeping on keeping on, not from one moment of win-or-lose. by @wisejohnofficial

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a month ago

wake up ⚡️i should ⚡️work hard ⚡️feel good (headlights is out)
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headlights is about a breaking point, about sinking, about dirty dishes, about the end of the road, about the end of a tunnel, about the heartless mind and its effects, about a mixed state, about night, about static and pollution, about missing persons, and about not giving up.
if you like gorrilaz or the strokes i think you will like it. the lyrics are bleak but the song is a banger. just how i like em
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stream it from the link in my bio. up next we have a turning point; this is the darkest moment in the album by @wisejohnofficial

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2 months ago

dream_on_sunday_rider: one of my favorite songs i've ever recorded 🚗🌄🤖

aesthetically i think it is among the clearest statements of this album's artistic direction. thematically, this one is complicated to explain, and i'm not really in an explaining sort of mood today. but i will say that one lens through which DOSR can be understood is that Kids, which came out last week, is the pivot point; and now we will experience a series of songs that are distorted mirror images of the first half of the album.

another way to say this is: songs 2-7 are "f**k around", and songs 9-15 are "find out". DOSR explores the personal consequences of staking your sense of meaning and self worth on your career, as suggested in phone_line_friends. in my own life, this song describes a very particular moment, on one of many weekends drives through empty eastern Oregon, in which i recognized the loss of the last source of meaning i knew how to feel at the time.

alright i said i wouldn't explain but i'm explaining. i will leave you with one of my favorite lyrics in the album, from DOSR's bridge. It is very informed by my career outside of music (engineering), but I hope the metaphor remains familiar to anyone who has sacrificed for a life of ambition and accomplishment, only to find that life empty: "you turned the screws / you wrote the lines / you cracked the code, but now you wake up living someone else's life / do you know you're fading slowly? / caught in the machine that you designed."

i hope you enjoy :) streaming links in my bio 🔗🎧

oh yeah i should also say--
the events described in this album were back in 2019-2021 and i am doing great & love my life now 😎❤️😁 by @wisejohnofficial

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2 months ago

kids. I wrote this for my friends when we lived together in Bend, Oregon in 2021. Two years later I decided to write an album around it.

I'd been thinking a lot about Manet's postcards at the time. Near the end of his life manet would paint these little paper postcards and then once the paint dried he'd scrawl a personal note to a friend on top of it and send it in the mail. he was a famous painter by then and those paintings would have been worth a lot of money, but the letters he wrote on top "ruined" them commercially.

in our time it feels like art is a gateway to infinities, to forever being known by everyone. sometimes i think this is a disease. art does not have to be enormous. its value does not have to be commercial. its audience does not have to be the world. i felt there was something powerful about this famous well known guy at the end of his career seeing his paintings as just a nice chance to write a postcard.

anyhow i meant this song as my own hyperspecific letter to my friends at the time. didn't expect others to respond/get it. later on though, i felt i needed something else from the piece; thus the album and me sharing it today.

This whole album is true, but this song is especially so. i wrote it as this all was happening. don't have it in me to explain much more but hopefully the lyrics are enough for now!
last thing i'll say--the chorus came true too. 5yrs later, for us AFAIK happiness exists, we paid dearly, but it has come.

you can listen to the song at the link in my bio.
love, ozymandias by @wisejohnofficial

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2 months ago

some more thoughts on grief, and a song to go with them. ❤️

Rest in peace good buddy by @wisejohnofficial

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3 months ago

a song about losing a friend (out today). 👥🦋
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at its core, Love Ozymandias is about loss. there are a number of approaches i considered in writing this song about losing a core friendship in my life, but I decided that rather than focus on the fights or the wrongs or the aftermath, I would write a sort of love song for the times we had. I remember this particular night; I had just moved from NYC to Bend, OR (which, by the way, is what the sonic transition from hyperfluorescency to GOAM represents), and we drove out to the desert to watch a meteor shower. It is a memory that despite it all I can't help but treasure. This is an important tool I think, in how to move forward through grief: don't forget the good times.
With greatest_of_all_moths, we move into Act II of the album. I hope you enjoy, and that maybe this segment of the album can keep you company if you are experiencing grief yourself.
<3, Ozymandias by @wisejohnofficial

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3 months ago

hyperfluorescency is OUT (song 6/15) 🫨🤪🛒🫪🤮
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(swipe to the end for a sneak peak of something cool 😎 🎥)
a top contender for the most unhinged song in the album. it does triple duty: 1. adds a lil humor before we get REALLY SAD (the next few songs are uh. brutal. prepare yourself). 2. conveys my increasingly 🫨 mental state leading up to leaving NYC for Bend, OR in spring 2021, and 3. is a vehicle for discussing the economic colonialism that underpins modern american life. in this and phone_line_friends i begin to draw a parallel between the relentless abuse of resources by our country and my own relentless abuse of my own emotions in pursuit of some form of "greatness". i think that the two are always related. a colonial/extractive economic system is recursive in this way. this perhaps begins to clarify why the album is called Love, Ozymandias. </rant>
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u will have a great time with this track 😎🕺💃 .
as i say in the chorus: "i give permission for you to laugh at me". wooooo onwards with Ozymandias by @wisejohnofficial

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3 months ago