Track List Mike Marchant, Outer Space And The Sea

“Outer space is the place for me,” sings Mike Marchant in “Outer Space And The Sea,” the opening track of his new EP of the same name. The Denver singer-songwriter recently took time out from his other projects—the psychotropic Widowers and the haunting Houses—to home-record five solo songs that drift on interstellar currents of hazy strumming and dub-deep echo. Readying for a release party at the Meadowlark, Marchant gave The A.V. Club the story behind the EP’s five beautifully head-bending tracks—and invited everyone to stream them and listen along.

Track one: “Outer Space And The Sea”
Mike Marchant: This song was birthed out of this really long, silly conversation I had with a friend of mine. We were sitting at Bar Bar [a.k.a. the Carioca Café], and we were talking to this random older drunk dude. He told us he was bummed out because he was coming down. He didn’t say off of what, and I didn’t ask him. He eventually left, but me and my friend started talking about why people always relate mental well-being or happiness to altitude. Everything’s a high or a low or an up or a down. We just wondered about how strange that is, and why that is. So we started tossing around ideas, just jokes, basically. If being high means being happy, everyone in Denver should be happy, you know? [Laughs.] Finally we decided the best place to be would be outer space, and then worse place to be would be the bottom of the ocean. The song itself is an upbeat pop tune; it was already written, but I decided to use that joke we came up with as the basis for the lyrics of the song.

"Outer Space And The Sea" by Mike Marchant

Track two: “Lower Downtown Curses”
MM: There’s a funny story behind this one, too. I went to see The Pseudo Dates one night at Old Curtis Street Bar—who I love and will go see every time they play—and I got out of there kind of late, around 1:30. I was going to catch a cab home, but it was a Friday night, so I knew it would be really hard to get one. I started to walk downtown, and when I got to 17th Street, I saw this girl who looked kind of lost and confused. I went up and asked if she was all right, and I realized she was pretty drunk. So I said, “Do you need help finding anything?” And she said she’d been at a bar and had gotten in a fight with her friends and took off on foot. She said she lived in Park Hill; my place was on the way there, so I said I’d find a cab and that we could share it. It took forever, but we finally found one, and when we got to my house, I gave the driver money for my part of the ride and got out of the car. But then this girl starts to get out of the cab, too. I was like, “No, wait, this is my house.” And she said, “Yeah, I know. I want to come into your house.” [Laughs.] She was all insistent. But I was just trying to help her out, so I said, “That’s okay, you just need to get home.” So got her back into the cab and shut the door. That experience just made me think about that whole worthless, casual sex thing. Most everyone has done regrettable things like that, but when I was writing this song, I thought of that night and that girl. Had anything else happened, it just would've made both of us feel all hollow on the inside, you know?

"Lower Downtown Curses" by Mike Marchant

Track three: “Surround Me”
MM: I wrote and recorded this song in one night. I’d just left my girlfriend, whom I’d been with for a year, and I was trying to wrap my head around that. The best way to do that, for me, is to put it into words, write tunes about it. Breaking up is a subject that’s been beaten into the ground. There’s not much left to say about it. [Laughs.] I’m aware of that, but it’s still therapeutic to try to figure out what you’re feeling and put it into song.

"Surround Me" by Mike Marchant

Track four: “Lord, I Hope”
MM: This is an acoustic song, a very quiet one. It’s like “Surround Me”—I wrote and recorded it all at once. I like doing it that way. You can capture a little more of the feeling, you know? This is another one that deals with the subject of leaving someone you care about, trying to deal with that and figure it out. Since I’d just done “Surround Me,” though, which has a lot of crazy layers going on in the recording, I decided to do this in one take on a nylon-string guitar. I just threw a mic on it, then went back and sang all the harmonies. Then I gave my friend Cole Rudy from Wetlands—who’s a total shredder—a 12-string guitar and told him, "You have one take to play over it. Just don’t shred." [Laughs.] And he played this really nice, subtle, quiet little complement to my strumming. I just left it like that. If you listen, you can hear everyone breathing in the room.

"Lord, I Hope" by Mike Marchant

Track five: “All Of Our Old Haunts”
MM: Originally I had a different song that was going to be the last one on the EP. It was another in my series of bummed-out folk tunes. [Laughs.] I decided to save it for later, though, because I didn’t want to end this thing with three consecutive love-gone-wrong songs. So I built a song from the ground up that was different than the others. I started with the guitars and ran them through a bunch of distortion and echo. Once I was done with that, I started adding synths and stuff, then came all the drum sequencing and lap steel. I like hearing things that don’t normally go together, like lap steel and a distorted drum machine; I love that contrast. I’ve been playing in Houses, and so I asked Maria Kohler from that band to come over and sing whatever she wanted. Then we filled my basement with fog from a fog machine while she was singing. [Laughs.] But we ran the machine too much, and it kept setting off the fire alarm in my laundry room.

"All Of Our Old Haunts" by Mike Marchant