2016 caught me by surprise.

On referendum day I grumbled that Cameron was wasting my time making me do his job for him, asking stupid questions about a matter that was a foregone conclusion. Then the result came in and my world view was shattered. I blamed the media for misinforming the public and providing a platform for quacks to spout racist rhetoric in the name of entertainment. We discovered that misinformation is now significantly more prevalent than facts. The information revolution isn't working for us any more, it's become skewed in favour of 'remarkability' instead of truth. So it was less of a surprise when Trump got elected, even though I prayed he wouldn't. 

The first song on this EP was written and recorded on the day Trump was elected. I wanted to capture the emotion, the despair, that feeling of being forced to regroup and rethink everything, because it will be easy to forget as further developments mount up. Each crazy event supplants its predecessor in the public consciousness and now Brexit seems like the least of our problems. Let's not forget what a disaster it is though, even as Trump tweets the rest of the world into oblivion.

I wrote each of these songs to capture my thoughts and feelings as the situation progressed. As such, this EP is intended to function as an emotional anchor - because I think we'll become numb to a lot of these events before too long. I know this because I'm pretty numb to Brexit now, and even Trump fatigue is starting to set in. 

Anyway, I hope you like these tracks. I shelled out for top quality mastering and I think they sound pretty good. 

I'm on social media if you connect with or object to any of the ideas I've expressed here and I'd love to hear from you.

Download on Bandcamp

2016 EP

"This is a song about how you can't reason with some people. I think we're all feeling like this a lot more recently as we attempt to understand the reasons many people voted for Trump or Brexit. To me, their slippery logic is reminiscent the sort of paranoia and conspiracy theorising I'd usually associate with serious mental illness. A mistrust of the mainstream media has transformed into wholesale dismissal of evidence-based discussions - with people making convoluted connections to justify their theories. We also have to contend with this insidious 'reverse bigotry', 'reverse racism', 'reverse sexism' rhetoric used to attempt to wriggle out of responsibility for spreading regressive ways of understanding people and the world.

I think a lot of it comes back to confirmation bias - we look for the reasons we feel bad. If people felt happier they wouldn't be doing this. The reasons that the West's happiness has plummeted in recent years are manifold and complex. There are no easy answers. It's more important than ever before to defend humanitarian, inclusive, globalist values, and to construct our belief systems accordingly. We are in crisis as the new architects of widely adopted beliefs are not motivated by these values, but by narcissism and a grotesque drive to arbitrarily simplify the world no matter who pays the price."
-- 8th December 2016

If she really stood as large in life as in his mind
She’d topple buildings when she breezed 
Her whispers would echo through the streets

Desperate he needs to see her true face be revealed
Go on hit me, now, he screams
Doesn’t seem to know he’s real
Yet he looms across the doorway
Looms across the doorway
And there’s no way, no way out

They won’t stop until someone bleeds
They won’t stop until someone bleeds

And he only reads between the lines
The only one who sees her tapestry of lies
See how his anger begins to rise how could she speak so easily
The more revealed, it must be yet more intricate behind the scenes

And he cries, cries conspiracy, conspiracy, conspiracy

They won’t stop until someone bleeds
They won’t stop until someone bleeds

They Won't Stop (Until Someone Bleeds)

I wrote this on the day I released it:

"This was really tough to produce - I want to rage about the recent effects of our information-age bubbles and the catastrophic effects of our irresponsible media whilst continuing to challenge myself musically as well as create the lyric video. It's quite intense compared to the last one and you won't have heard me shouting like this on a track before. It took me longer than I hoped so forgive me for bringing up "last week's news" again.

Making the video has been painful. I have been mired in the cesspool that constitutes right-wing political commentary for a few days and I'm becoming painfully aware of the schizophrenic attitudes being adopted by so many people - conspiracy theories and juicy made-up news stories - trapped by logical fallacies and arguments that are impossible to refute. They'd even prefer to say "Snopes has a left wing agenda and can't be trusted" than simply investigate the sources cited in Snopes' analyses (which often lead back to explicit declarations by fake news sites that their stories are to be taken as satire!).

I wrote this song for those of us who want to find solutions and learn everything we can about what's gone wrong and how we can fix it but I have been panicking that this work could itself be twisted into an anthem for the right-wing press who think everything on TV is 'liberal propaganda'. It's hard to keep a piece of music protected from such interpretation without things being even more on-the-nose so I've tried to make my stance as unambiguous as possible through the video.

I've always hated engaging in political discussion. I have always found technology more interesting. Tragically now we're seeing a new wave of technology being exploited for destructive propaganda and it's impossible to ignore the role of humanity's darker instincts in our drive to progress. I hope I can bring a novel perspective to bear on these matters but I also feel shamefully ignorant of the complexities of the political world. I don't feel that any understanding is possible from the mainstream media - I can only listen to Radio 4 in the morning for 10 minutes before turning it off in disgust. Even the BBC have normalised hateful rhetoric, pursuing emotional responses and entertaining stories just as callously as the internet trolls who try to make up the most shocking stories they think they can get people to believe.

I really don't see a way out of this. We're up against types of reasoning that cannot be rationally argued against. Will these people connect their bad choices with the bad things that will happen to them in future as a consequence or will they chalk it up to further conspiracies? I can draw some hope from the fact that millions of people can't ACTUALLY be schizophrenic so they should have the capacity to snap out of it, given the right arguments. I suppose we can only try to do this one person at a time, taking their "you lost, stop whining" rhetoric on the chin while we try to get them to see sense. I don't know though - I feel bad enough without having to have those infuriating conversations." -- 22nd November 2016

When you wrote this thing you must’ve been smoking
It’s not funny enough for you to be joking
Now my horrible friends have become outspoken
Now the thing we all lean on seems to be broken  

Far too much to read on my Facebook feed
Now I don’t know what I can believe
Far right facts masquerading as balance
These fallacies overpower our defences

Whatever you want can find what you’re looking for
However you feel you can find a way to feel it more 
So many lies, I didn't realise

Far to much to read on my Facebook feed
Now I don't know what I can believe
The truth is at war with the Internet trolls
Doesn't take a lot for a lie to be sold

Everywhere I look fake news is coming up
No one seems to mind that the story's all made up
When I see a headline I check it on Snopes.com
Try to fight back fake facts get 'em out

Fake News Stories

"2016 - first we lost David Bowie, then we lost our minds.

I made this to help you grieve. 

Cry until you can't cry any more. 

Then we will get to work."

-- 11th November 2016

I know how it feels to be betrayed
To have your future torn away
I used to have some faith in people
To tell apart what's news and what's fiction
They couldn't really think that this is real?
A crank on the TV saying
Here's the ones to blame
When things don't go your way
When they're the ones we should be trying to save

BUT YOU WENT AND MADE IT REAL

It caught me by surprise
I try to recognise how we ended up with all this trouble
I guess I stayed away from what the awful papers say
I stayed inside my bubble
And if I saw a post I didn't like, I didn't say
When it's so easy to unfollow
I couldn't overhear the echo chambers of my neighbours
Perhaps I could have helped them with their struggle though

FUCK THIS I WANNA GO

Ziggy take me in your spaceship
I wanna exit Planet Earth
'Cos everybody's going racist
Forgetting what a life is worth
You've only been gone for a minute
I thought you left things in a pretty good way
But now I see the human race is falling into retrograde

We're gonna need a better way
The system's had its day
We've got a lot to rearrange
Times ahead will be full of pain
None of us will ever be the same

I hope that we can all be brave
The fear we have to face
This maniac in charge of everything 

OH NO, THIS COULD BE TOO MUCH FOR ME TO TAKE

Ziggy take me in your spaceship
I wanna exit Planet Earth
'Cos everybody's going racist
Forgetting what a life is worth
You've only been gone for a minute
I thought you left things in a pretty good way
But now I see the human race is falling into retrograde

-
Written and produced by Michael Forrest / 2016-11-09

Exit Planet Earth

I introduce this song on-camera here: https://www.facebook.com/michael.forrest.music/videos/10150857443984956/

I might be bad but I’m better than you 
I might be bad but I’m better than you 
I might be bad but I’m better than you 
I might be bad but I’m better than you

Whatever I believe I concede is a story that I use when it suits me
It isn’t very deep, I take what I need and try to be what I wanna be
And I can let it go even if it was the whole of the way that I used to see it 
I’ll never see the truth so I pick and choose from the best ideas I can find out there

I can’t say I know what’s true
I can’t even say I know

Now you’re moving on the world, I can see similarities like you’re following same track  
Never taking any books to read, you prefer the ease of making up your own facts
Not everybody knows you that can't really overthrow some kinds of stories
But it doesn’t really matter what they believe just has to stick around for the week

You can’t even say you know what’s true
You can’t ever say what’s true

I might be a hypocrite
But I try to see beyond my limits

Any ways I'm wrong the worst can happen is I give myself a problem 
In my life and maybe I upset some of my loved ones
Or missing out on doing something yeah that  might have been fun
But if you are wrong then the very worst thing that will happen is an 
H-bomb, cities going underwater, hurricanes and earthquakes
higher seas and poison in the air and persecution
wars across the world and sacrificing any wisdom 
You need to factor all this in when you make your decisions 

I might be a hypocrite, but I try to see beyond my limits
I might have a loose relationship with the truth
I might be bad but I'm better than you

Oh Donald, Donald, you can suck my bum, oh oh oh Donald try not to blow us to kingdom come