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Stuck

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By Grace Medley power46 Bandcamp user-743933328 SoundCloud power464646 Twitter power464646 Tumblr ← Make Them Pay Previous track by this artist → [S] DISC 2 ==> Next track by this artist, SplitSuns splitsuns SoundCloud ← The Greater Good Previous track by this artist → Light in the Darkness Next track by this artist, WHATISLOSTINTHEMINES what Bandcamp whats-this-thing-here SoundCloud ← Sburban Fall Previous track by this artist → Home / Stuck Next track by this artist (prod., vocals, add. guitar), and Ucklin ucklin SoundCloud ucklin Tumblr ucklin Twitter ← Stop The Drip Previous track by this artist → Home / Stuck Next track by this artist (lyrics, vocals).
Cover art by Artatruc artatruc Tumblr ← PLEA AND JUDGEMENT Previous track art by this artist → Arf! Next track art by this artist.
Released 9/16/2023.
Duration: 10:25.

Listen on Bandcamp or YouTube.

Read artist commentary.

Tracks that Stuck references:

Tracks that Stuck samples:

Tracks that reference Stuck:

From Fandom:

Tracks that sample Stuck:

From Fandom:

Lyrics:

You collapse on the fractured earth with a shovel in your grip
Over your quivering chest you see there's another on the lip
Whatever’s inside has been circumscribing far too long
You try your best to resist but find it's enticement far too strong
Suddenly you're beneath the roots of a massive flooded tree
Far from the crown as the leaves fall down they transform and wiggle free
Smoky drool spirals from their schools and collects in painters' trays
You point and turn for the awestruck crowd but you only see your face

If nothing beside remains
Why can't we try again?

You can bead all of the words that you want on the string of your sentence
It doesn't matter because they slip off and the ringing is endless
Clattering across the carpet floor, never to be found
Even though the air becomes the sound, somewhere
The meaning gets stuck

In a room full of frozen eyes and twinkling silver drills
Your precious breath drips down from ears that don't distill
And you stumble right back to the rift you rent amid drifting stalks of grain
And you ask when the field's getting plowed again
And the buildings extend to the edge of sight with no taper to their ends
But your fate's still written where the sky bends
And when you run your fingers across the sun, you find the surface bears a crack
Don't look inside, something's looking back

If nothing beside remains
Why can't we try again?

You can bead all of the words that you want on the string of your sentence
It doesn't matter because they slip off and the ringing is endless
Clattering across the carpet floor, never to be found
Even though the air becomes the sound, somewhere
The meaning gets stuck

If I had a voice
Still I couldn't say
One sole secret syllable that wouldn't bleach to grey
Now that we've unfurled
Spectacles regrown
Who's to say they aren't just the old ones, clean as bone?

(The craters are all rounded off. There's quite a few of them, some of them are newer. Many of them look like, especially the round ones, look like hits by meteorites or projectiles of some sort.)

Artist commentary:

Grace Medley:

It should more or less go without saying that this is the most complicated thing I’ve ever made, by a considerable margin. By the time of the final mix, you’re looking at well over 200 tracks of audio here. This thing has been eating gigabytes of storage space on my computer. Stuck is not the track of mine on here that I’ve felt a compulsion to make for the longest time (that title goes to Make Them Pay), but it is the one that’s been eating at me the most. I think it was during the making of Home, sometime towards the end, that I pitched a sequel (not in absolute sincerity, I just thought it would be funny to propose a sequel called Stuck) because collaborating with the team was some of the most fun I’d ever had in working on music.

Fast forward to 2022, when, behind the scenes, we’re sort of deliberating over the prospect of a new LOFAM (we had no idea at the time that we’d get more than thirty-odd tracks even optimistically, we couldn’t begin to dream of netting three times that). I say to Split, well, since we’ve both improved so much as producers, what’s the harm in taking a crack at Stuck for real this time? To my surprise, both WHATISLOSTINTHEMINES and Ucklin jumped on the opportunity in a heartbeat. Looking back, I’m more or less shocked everything fell together so perfectly like that.

We cut ahead a few weeks more and I’m sitting at work, with Another Jungle stuck in my head. It gets me thinking: Home is largely inspired by Forever/Dawn of Man, which in turn borrow largely from Sburban Jungle. Another Jungle doesn’t have a Forever/Dawn of Man equivalent, but what if Stuck behaved like it came from another universe where it did – using the same melody, but over poppier, more bittersweet chords? To my surprise, I had the chords in my head in minutes. You can hear them in the chorus, which actually largely remains unaltered from what I wrote down that afternoon and the following week. Actually, the melody to the vocals in the chorus mostly follows I had an idea to put over the top of that, too, although with some important adjustments from Ucklin who also wrote lyrics that blow the kind of stuff I was thinking up out of the water.

I think a big part of what I had going for me production-wise on this track is that I’ve not only become better at mixing (actually, you hear practically none of my mix work on Home – that’s almost entirely held together by Split’s fantastic work there), but I’ve also diversified my music tastes – I know whose styles I’m drawing inspiration from, and I know what benchmark to aim for in producing Stuck. Some I leave it as a challenge for any keen-eared listener to go looking for are George Duke, Fatboy Slim, Magdalena Bay, Bicep, Slowdive (who I sample in here – keep an ear out!), Röyksopp, Oneohtrix Point Never, Barker, and early Apparat. The ending is almost entirely pastiche of the musician Lawrence English – and I thank Split for the idea, who suggested Stuck’s ending should be something ambient to contrast with Home’s big, climactic rock-out, and I still wanted something larger-than-life, so English’s heavy drone style seemed like a perfect end to aim for.

On the lyrical side of things, Ucklin drew a brilliant connection between what I was trying to evoke in terms of these two figures reunited at the end of Home finding they can’t explain to each other what they saw in their time apart, and trying to explain the serial and communal experience of Homestuck to an archival reader. When I saw how much steam LOFAM was picking back up, and I realised the community was far from a thing of the past, that’s when I proposed the prechorus: “If nothing beside remains (itself a quote from Percy B. Shelley’s poem Ozymandias) / Then why can’t we try again?”

If I could, I’d like to dedicate a quick aside to everyone who has helped motivate me to keep at working on new UMSPAF stuff, not least of all my wonderful partner, who stayed up countless late nights in online calls to keep me pushing through this song, even when I thought I couldn’t any further. It was well worth every second, I think.

SplitSuns:

I still find it so surreal that we already made Home four years ago. I second Grace when she says that working on the piece was some of the most fun I'd ever had in my music career. It was difficult and demanding, but undeniably rewarding and an experience that we all learned a lot from. It felt like such a complete work in and of itself that I couldn't ever conceive of how a sequel would turn out. Yet when Grace seriously pitched the idea of making Stuck in 2022, I wasn't skeptical in the slightest, because I knew if anyone could pull it off, it was us four. And so we did.

Grace was responsible for the structure and composition of Home, but with the exception of the shoegaze climax, the bulk of the production was my department. For Stuck, we divvied up the responsibilities differently. We all decided on the structure together, and Grace took on the task of composing and producing the vast majority of the 10 minutes you hear. We split the song into three main parts: the intro, the "vocals" section, and the ending. Planning the song's structure around these parts to make sure it hit our projected length was no easy feat. When it looked like we didn't have enough connective tissue to reach that point, I came in to fill in the gaps (aided, of course, by Grace's wonderful mixing).

Instead of adding random instruments throughout the entire piece, I contributed two full sections to the song. First, I wrote a new second half of the intro after Grace felt hers wasn't working. After Grace's Dawn of Man sample, I decided to shift gears and funnel the mysterious energy of the first half into a heavy-hitting dance number. My goal was to preserve the drama of Home while giving Stuck its own joyful flair. I drew upon some of my favorite electronic artists to construct this veritable EDM medley: George Clanton, Daft Punk, Naked Flames, and Todd Terje, just to name a few. Instead of settling for mere style pastiche, as I did in the past, I wanted to synthesize these influences into a grand welcome to Stuck, one unmistakably mine. And what better way to do that than with a glitchy transition to bring everything crashing down, sampling scattered moments from Home?

The other section I came up with was a synth-guitar breakdown/solo in the middle of the track. I had always wanted to contribute an instrumental section to Stuck, to mirror Grace's own shoegaze section in Home. But instead of putting it after the vocals section, like in Home, Grace had the idea of using it to break up the verses. Listening to it now, the flow sounds perfectly natural. I stayed up late into the night attempting to create the most "SplitSuns" section of music possible, full of crazy chord changes and those over-the-top synth runs I hold so dear. When all was said and done, Grace loved it so much she told me to not change a single note. For once, I agreed with her. I'm satisfied with my work on this song in a way I usually never am.

In a way, I consider these passages as my swan song to Homestuck fan music; if not a farewell, then a goodbye for now, showcasing everything I've learned from making music in this sphere over so many years. Leave it to Grace to take me out of semi-retirement for one last hurrah. I am immensely proud of all the work we accomplished over the last year to make this happen. I sincerely hope you enjoy this song, all we've done, and all we'll continue to do. Thanks for listening.

Makin: (album management)

Sorry, I have nothing to do with this, but I bet he’ll be back in 5 LOFAMinutes.

WHATISLOSTINTHEMINES:

A handful of different vocal styles were tested for my part in this track, but ultimately we went with the quiter, more gentle one here.

I'd like to think I've improved my technique since my part in Home, haha.

Collaboration takes a different, but not altogether unpleasant different form of thinking than working on something on your own. I usually find simply go in without much thinking when either producing or composing, but there was a lot more discussion here in trying to find the exact thing we wanted to get out of this piece. I think it turned out pretty damn well.

Ucklin:

This project reminded me of both the frustration and joy of collaborating!

Early in the process, I had a meeting with Grace to plan out the subject of the song. I left that meeting feeling like I had a pretty good idea what she wanted it to be about, but a few weeks later when I tried to start writing, it felt like I just couldn't get it right. It felt like fitting a cube slightly larger than my head into my skull. It wasn't that I was coming up with things that weren't working; I just felt like I couldn't come up with anything at all because the concept was like a Klein bottle: Both open-ended and closed off.

I felt avoidant, but we were running out of time, and eventually I did share some concepts with everyone in the group chat for the song-- Only to find there were issues with them. For example, in the second verse, I had written lyrics with the same structure as the first verse, even though the harmonic rhythm was different. Grace took the liberty of coming up with the duet version of the verse (as heard in the final song), changing my lyrics a little to fit. Agh!! I was surprised at how huge a feeling of defensiveness and frustration that created. But when I calmed down and Tay and I recorded our vocals, I knew Grace's vision for it was definitely right.

That feeling was really important, because it reminded me that whenever we give people feedback on their music and art, we are asking them to push through for the sake of the album, recognizing sometimes feedback from others can make it better. And I don't take that for granted!

Anyway, about the actual lyrics: Grace gave me the suggestion to make the feelings real, but the imagery unreal, and that really guided my choices in creating the song. In the verses, I wanted to evoke the feeling of journeying through something man-made, but infinite in its repetition and growing with a life of its own. Something that you are experiencing in isolation and in a crowd of countless others. And something you can't re-create, even just in trying to explain it to someone else. I was a little stumped because the concept of the song seemed self-contradictory: How was I supposed to write imagery if its defining feature was supposed to be that it was inexplicable? The chorus idea came about as a way to reconcile that idea, by saying that the issue is in the listener receiving the meaning or feeling behind the imagery, not that the imagery itself can't be spoken. I'm proud of the way it turned out, and I hope you enjoy it too!

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