Dog Breath
Kick him while he's down
This is anger.
This is shame.
This is pity.
This is bad sex.
This is something transactional.
This is actually quite complicated.
This is the story of a song.
I named ‘Dog Breath’ long before I wrote the song or had any concept of its coming genesis. In a suburb in Brisbane, back in 2022, we walked past a bar called ‘DogTap’. I thought, ‘Shit, that’s a good name for a band or something.’ Alas, I am bandless (if you want to be in a band with me, please feel free to get in touch!), and as cool as the name was, it didn’t really have the same zing for a song title or album name. So, the alternative ‘Dog Breath’ came to me shortly after, as we walked past the sleeping bar in the lingering warmth of that Australian winter.
Following a mixture of bad experiences with various men I met during my first year at Uni, I found myself holding onto a lot of anger, shame and sadness that was slowly wearing away at the little self worth I had left. The start of University for me felt like such a setback in all of the strength and confidence I had spent the previous two years back home building. I entered this new world with an open vulnerability, my heart on my sleeve, as it were, and when my heart then got bruised by these men, the pain felt brand new, stark and wet.
After years of knowing who I was, all I wanted was to find someone who also knew who they were. There are people out there that enjoy helping people discover their identities. I think there is a nobility to that, a generousness and a kindness. My capacity to hold those qualities in me, for those people, were spent. Being that experiment, that teacher or that test was no longer my thing. Because I kept putting my heart and hope into what I thought was a genuine exchange of romance, feelings and saliva, I ended up getting repeatedly hurt by what was, in actuality, something more carnal and singular, if that’s how you approached the situation– which these men almost always did.
It’s even harder when the person you’ve fallen head over heels for within the first two weeks of your first term has, from what they tell you at least, some pretty hefty cultural and religious trauma that has hindered their ability to accept themselves fully in their sexual identity. I always hold sympathy for those with this story, except when it used an excuse to treat me as they please, will little care for my feelings and boundaries.
Here we go again.
This person merged with that person, him with him and so forth, until I was left, a year later with this unresolved, spectacularly wounded spirit that I thought could be mended by the Good Guy I then went on to meet in the summer. To some extent, he did. But it wasn’t fair on me to expect him to fix everything, because the sourness I had not yet purged began to imbibe what I thought were genuine feelings of love and kindness in this new compatible pairing.
This was a devastating infection. I began to question whether or not love was even for me, if this is the love that they’ve always told me about. Intimacy was new and exciting, especially in this emotional environment that I had always wanted; one of mutuality, based on expressing a genuine feeling of desire and love for the other person. In my mind, it was perfect, but my body just wasn’t responding. It was quite an incredible paradigm of the body-mind split: I was convinced that what was happening was real, this was what I had always wanted!, but in actuality, my body’s rejection to fully respond to and feel what was going on was more telling than I think I wanted to accept.
Fuck.
Now I’m the bad guy.
Hurting this guy– making him think this was good, that I liked it, that this was working for me; was like kicking a puppy.
Kick him whilst he’s down on me,
Kick him whilst he’s down.
Wait, that sounds like something.
Feelings fall into words, and words fall into strings and keys and suddenly I’m writing a song and the pieces start to thread themselves together to create something that encapsulates a bigger feeling I could never quite express in words alone.
The bad men, the ones that just need to use you for their own pleasure or exploration, all fell into this image of a dog.
Men are dogs, no?
They’re so pretty, they’re cute, they smile in your face, some of them sloppy and animalistic with their teeth and tongues, but there’s this wretchedness inside of them, this miasma of shallow selfishness. How it wreaks, how it comes from the face of something so beautiful, this dog breath.
I needed this song to sound angry, twisted and primal. The beat in the first half of the song was composed by me randomly, probably a year or so prior. It had this slow, raw percussive element that I had merged with something more sharp and electric. Often throughout the production of this album, if you listen closely, you’ll find I’ve merged a lot of natural, organic sounds in with the synthetic, particularly in the drums.
The first is me scratching the coarse leaves of a Gunera plant outside of a friend’s holiday home:
Which, post editing and merging with the other beats, becomes:
The second is Myla’s bark (how could I have a song called Dog Breath that doesn’t feature a bark somewhere in it?):
Which, when merged with the other snare sounds, becomes:
Honestly, the mixing of this song took a good couple of years. I would leave it for months at a time, filled with such ambivalence as to whether or not it was scrap or something worth saving. As is often the case, all it took was adding something new to bring it back to life for me; another drum-line, another microbeat, or a new vocal layer or harmony stack (my favourite things to record and mix).
The toil and tussle of trying to get the drums to sit right in the mix, deciding if it was a guitar or drum heavy song, and how the vocals should sit and sound was lengthy, but worth it. I am pleased to say this is possibly my most accomplished mix to date.
There’s more lyrics in the poem than there are in the actual song. I’m holding on to them for now as I might use them later, but the big guitar section ended up speaking for itself. No words or melodies beyond the simple adlib harmonies could sit with them.
The scream took a few takes, technically and emotionally. I’m happy with the final one. There are more beneath the noise of the outro section. Very cathartic, I must say. Enjoy the chaos:
However much pain is ever involved in the making of a song, and however much I go through as I make it, I’m always grateful when songs like these escape from my grip and stick the landing.
I hope you can feel the purge.
I encourage you to scream whenever you can, without concerning the people in your immediate vicinity.
I encourage you to thrash about to some pure UK garage rock per my favs: Wolf Alice, Daisy Chainsaw and IDLES.
There is a great freedom to be found there.
It is a very important part of my music, and me.
Let it bite.
But make sure you bite back.
