The Day I Die
This song was recorded for Dreaming of Roses but I set it aside as a later, non-album single for two reasons. First because it is quite different to everything on that album in a rather unique way, which made figuring out its place in the tracklist a bit challenging. It didn’t fit on the high-energy first few tracks, wouldn’t gel well with the quieter weirdos in the middle of the album, and would have been a little too sickly melodramatic as a closing number. Plus, I felt like the presence of Memories Die and With Love, Death would have made the inclusion of this track a head-scratching one, both because of its title (repeating words on a tracklist? I think not) and because its theme clashes with them a little bit. While those two are dark but have an almost optimistic aspect to them, The Day I Die is quite matter-of-fact. The chorus is something I’ve always wondered, and it is weird to think that there’s a good chance that I’ll be conscious to know the answers to all the questions on here. At least I hope I do, as the best-case scenario for me would be for my body to go before my mind does.
How brutal. Sorry for that. Brazilian music has a tradition of cheery melodies over bitter lyrics, and this is but one humble contribution of mine to the tradition.
The cover was done by one of the best people I’ve had the pleasure of working with, the outlandishly talented Lari Azevedo, with whom I’d worked before on the cover for the live version of Medeia, a couple of years ago. Her religion and mythology themed art is beautiful and often times quite striking, and she manages to touch on so much with the pictures she paints. I gave her full liberty with this one, and she came up with the idea of modeling the cover on the tarot card for Death. She nailed the style and came up with a striking visual. It definitely stands out among all the Ruby & Rose artworks so far, and it soft-launched a mainstay of my stage attire, the flower crown. She didn’t even know it, but when I got the first sketch, I was working on crafting my first flower crown. Some might say this was synchronicity, some will call it coincidence, and the daring will shout “foresight!”.
It is great to work with Brazilian artists, and even better when those artists are also people who fight for the right things, and somehow even better when they’re artists of Lari’s level. Look at that, how gorgeous it is.
The beautiful cover by Lari Azevedo. You can and should check her out on Instagram @cores.de.jupiter.
The Day I Die is a reworking of an old tune I wrote in 2021 for my defunct solo project Duck Motherfucker called Everything is Bad, which must still exist somewhere on the internet. The chorus of that one is straight lifted from one of my favourite Brazilian rock classics, and so that had to go, but the soul of the song is quite the same and a good number of verses survived. They say every joke has a serious meaning behind it, and all I did was get rid of the sillier, intended-as-a-joke moments of that version to lean into the heart a little. However, I do not consider The Day I Die to be a serious song at all. It’s got doo-doo-doos on it, for heaven’s sake.
Speaking of those, I had no idea how to write them down. I spelled them so many ways and none of them seem to work for me and it made me very upset indeed, so I ended up not doing it at all here. You, however, may do as you please, I do agree that without some form of representation of them, something big is missing on the page.
For the nerds, this song was the ninth song I started working on for Dreaming of Roses, on January 17th, 2025. On that day, a demo of drums was recorded first, then keys (a Rhodes emulator, two pads, synth brass, strings and glockenspiel, and the synth bass you hear on the intro before the acoustic bass takes over from the first chorus onwards. A lot of that stuff was cannibalised from the Everything is Bad sessions). That, of course, makes up about 90% of the instrumental. Demo vocals and the bass track were laid down on the 25th. Lead vocals were recorded on the 21st and 22nd of February; backing vocals on the 22nd and 25th of March. Drums were finished on April 18th, making this the last song to be properly finished on those sessions. There was one guitar part on Genuine which I had to re-record during the editing stage after that, but we do not count that one because I said so. Working title for this was TDID, for obvious reasons.
Everything that happens seems bad
And that’s because it is
With the billionairic idiocy that runs
Our paved, grey, dusty streets
Everything is bad, nothing is worth anything
It all tries to bring you down
And it makes me sing
I wonder what I’ll look like
On the day I die
I wonder what I’ll look like
On the day
I dreamt it happened again
It felt like such a defeat
And I keep making the same mistakes
Don’t even know what it is I need
Everything is bad, and I have learned nothing
The past keeps creeping up on me
And it makes me sing
I wonder what I’ll look like
On the day I die
I wonder what I’ll look like
On the day
My face, my age, my name
My mind, my love, my friends
What will stay the same
And what will be forced to change?
Girl, you’ll make it all change
If it looks like a wrecked up facade
Well, that’s just what it is
Walking in circles forever, it feels like
The feeling will never retreat
Everything is bad, the world is run by fools
You try to drag me down
I wrote a song about you
I wonder what I’ll look like
On the day I die
I wonder what I’ll look like…
