Lyrically Speaking: Eric Sarmiento – The Friend Is This Animal

Photo by: Jimmy Mack

We’ve gone and asked the ever wandering, singer-songwriter, Eric Sarmiento, to let us in on all the stories that make up the lyrics of his new album The Friend Is This Animal. Purchase Eric’s new album over at Alchemist Records.

“Alejandra”
I wrote this song after going to a party in the Barrio del Carmen, in Valencia, Spain, several years ago. A little, dark apartment, people kind of dancing, but more just standing around, and goofing off. Dudes striving to impress women, everyone striving to wrest control of the iMac where the music was coming from. Most of the time, I sat on a wooden chair by the wall, talking to my friends Aleksandra and Pauline, neither of whom actually said anything about trying too hard. The whole night had a kind of mysterious vibe to it, more film-like than dreamlike. Living in Valencia, I seemed to be always walking around the ancient-feeling streets, feeling the crumbling walls and lovely, plant-filled balconies, the music and the voices reverberating off of stone walls. This song was one of those that just spontaneously came out, due mainly to the influence of those streets, that party, and my friends Aleksandra and Pauline, and how all of that articulated with other stuff in my life at the time. Originally written on acoustic guitar, I wanted to sort of hybridize this version to introduce the electro-acoustic style of the album, as well as the theme of trying and not trying, which recurs throughout the record.

“So She Says”
Written in a country house in Oklahoma, this one’s basically about how particular places may be both the same and completely different at different times, under different circumstances….in other words, places ebb and flow and become something different alongside us as we live in them. That particular country house, in the summer when the song was written, was populated by ghosts that lived in the ubiquitous sound of buzzing cicadas, locusts, and crickets. The “she” who sings songs in the song was a mixture of people, a bit inspired by the singer Penny Hill, who acts in the video for the single version of ‘Alejandra,’ and as such was a fiction of sorts.

“Strange Power”
A song about the affective waves that wash over us and play such a central role in transforming us and the places we know. As the two different parts of the song attempt to illustrate, these waves of power can be both magnificent and wrenching, lending a kind of deep luster to things or flattening things into a frustrating and increasingly narrowing gap. Written at the piano at my friends’ Hank and Sonya’s house. Their dog, Romeo was barking in the background. The video for the song, created by Monica Barra and myself, links the complex power of affect and relational bodies to ‘politics,’ in this case the 15 de Mayo movement in Spain.

“Dust”
Stemming from my attempts to make something empowering and freeing out of a circumstance in my life that seemed to be constrained by what felt ominously like ‘structural forces,’ I wrote this one with the French philosopher Michel Foucault in mind. It’s very much about how we are all produced as subjects through the interventions of a very wide range of actors and practices, all of which are potentially transformable, if not reversible. Above all, I wanted to stress the limits of control, as opposed to assuming that the forces that influence our lives have the power to determine things in the last instance…

“There’s So Much”
One night, I was walking home through Nezu, my neighborhood in Tokyo, and it suddenly struck me that there was some kind of odd, almost rhythmic logic to the world, and that it could be seen in the layout of the streets of that grand city, Tokyo. Not just the street grid, but the geometry of the streets, little square houses and tiny, plant-lined walkways of Nezu, as well as the topology between specific points that I knew and loved in the city: the public bathhouse, the big stone staircase in Ueno Koen, a gyoza shop in Ueno Station, the pond in Yoyogi Koen, the little French bistro down the street from Grapefruit Moon, the hilly street in Kamakura where Jack and Chie live, a karaoke booth near Omote Sando where Kenzo and I sang Beatles songs, the laundry mat, the zoo, and the smell of tatami mats in the bedroom. All of this served as the germ of a song, and eventually connected with the snowy streets of Highland Park, New Jersey…

“Bilumsman”
This song sort of wrote me one night when I was improvising with a keyboard and a guitar. Once the kind of ambient keyboard part was recorded, each subsequent part asserted itself as I went along, including the two vocal tracks I did, which didn’t seem to call for words, really. A few months later, my friend Kalpana and I had just come from a nice dinner of good food and probably a fair amount of wine, and she came up with the spoken word piece and her melodic vocal part on the spot, both of which fit the bill perfectly and completed the piece.

“These Little Winters”
A song about how quickly a notable iciness can blow in amidst what is normally a warm and loving relation with someone….and how that wintry feeling can blow away as easily and inexplicably as it arrived.

“Sunset Burned the City Down”
The oldest song on the album, I wrote this one in 2004 before moving to Japan. I was spending a lot of time alone that summer, packing up boxes and wandering around leafy streets. It wasn’t terribly lonely or anything, really, but there was a certain underlying melancholy some of the time, particularly in the nights. Perhaps it was to push back against those feelings that I found myself writing a song about New York, a place I hadn’t been in for several years at that point…I always like the bustle of New York, the feeling that someone’s awake at any point of the night, and the way that so many people more or less get along, and the city keeps functioning.

“We Waited For Nothing”
The lyrics to this one are something of a mystery to me. I wrote them sometime around the time I was moving to New Jersey, after living in Spain. I hope the vibe of the song isn’t too existentialist and bleak, as it sometimes seems to me. To counterbalance this feel, I added the instrumental section at the end, which I think conveys a more excited, if still perhaps embattled energy.

“Husbands and Wives”
My friends Nate and Desi were married two summers ago in a park outside of Philadelphia. It was a grand occasion, with good food, lots of wine, good music (The West Philly Orchestra played), and of course good people. Some of us wedding guests brought tents and camped out in a clearing in the woods, building a big bonfire, playing guitars, drinking whiskey and having spirited discussions about nature, social construction, and yoga. It all reminded me of the summer prior, when my friends Anna and Sheridan got married in the woods around Arcadia, Oklahoma, and that reminded me of lots of other weddings and marriages, and I started thinking about the whole idea of marriage and family, creating a little autonomous nation of people, a culture. This song is sort of about that, in general, and quite about Desi and Nate’s wedding night, in particular. And about the challenges and rewards of long term monogamy as a way of harnessing the chaos and drives that move us all the time.

“Awake”
I don’t know if the above musings on the lyrics to these songs makes them seem particularly connected or organized around central themes, but in my mind they most certainly are closely connected to one another. The album title sums it up pretty nicely: the record is about learning how to live and to love others by becoming once again the animals that we humans are. This last song on the record explicitly treats that idea, through a brief chronicle of some assorted scenes of my life in the spring and summer of 2010. Later, I had completed the music for the song without any lyrics for several months, and then super late one night I woke up with the complete lyrics and melody in my head. I dragged myself out of bed and did several vocal tracks, most of which remain on the track. When all was said and done, I decided that the way to deal with the confusion and complexity of relations is not to try to get out of the woods, but to go deeper into them.