the "performance" story
The third single from my upcoming album INFINITE NORMAL is out: “performance”. I’ve released it in two ways:
performance versions, which is a Bandcamp-exclusive EP containing 5 different takes on the song (plus a coda), out today
the “performance” single edit will also be available on streaming services next Friday, October 10.
As I’ve recently mentioned, “performance” will be my last streaming release for the foreseeable future. Kid Lightbulbs is a project of highly personal and emotive narrative arcs set to music, and singles cannot do these justice in my opinion. Streaming platforms are walled gardens, and I am an open book, so the future of Kid Lightbulbs will be on platforms that I can better control and deliver that open book. For now that platform is Bandcamp.
"performance" is the de facto centerpiece of INFINITE NORMAL. It’s a dry, jaded, sometimes-angry musing on what it's like to be online in 2025. It's also a somewhat intentional throwback to several 90s genres, almost as a yearning for what it was like to be social back then. It also calls back lyrically to my song "(loser in the) free world". Classic Kid Lightbulbs, in a way.
When I released my previous single “the grass is quicksand”, I mentioned in some of my posts promoting it that the lyrics were directly inspired by chatter and conversations I had with folks in public on the social platform Threads. “performance” was also inspired by that community, but in a very different way – the community pushed me to create the song from nothing and led to its evolution into the massive theatrical monster of a song it is today.
Back in May 2024, after having joined ilyBBY’s Imaginary Friends community on Discord, they organized a 30 Days of Beats challenge – each day for 30 days, they would either make a new beat or collaborate with someone in the server on a beat. The first idea that became “performance” was a little piano riff that I contributed on day 11 or so, which is the piano riff you hear in the chorus and the ending section. ilyBBY took this, and a little noodling on the bass guitar I recorded, and made this fun little lo-fi beat that was somehow both mellow and chaotic in its percussion. We called it “cram” because it felt like the right background music you’d play when cramming for a final exam.
I couldn’t get the piano riff out of my head, and I decided to try and do something with it but I couldn’t figure out what. My other internet friend M. Walker was separately challenging his fellow musicians on Threads to share music ideas they were working on every Friday. It was called the “Friday f***around”. One Friday I was feeling particularly inspired by some frustrating news, likely about the Gaza conflict and how the US government was speaking about it, and I quickly wrote lyrics to the “cram” piano riff around the refrain “this is just a performance”. With a little polish, this became the original demo for the song, which I dubbed the “chill mix”.
I was dead set on developing this version of “performance” and including it on the 4th Kid Lightbulbs album. At the time, I envisioned LP4 as more of a direct homage to my favorite genres of the 90s (I even planned to call it INFINITE NOSTALGIA for a time), so the 90s-inspired hip hop beat driving the “chill mix” seemed to fit, though it was far from the sound I had started to cultivate as Kid Lightbulbs after releasing my albums STEP INTO THE OCEAN and RUINED CASTLE. So I sat on it for a while while I focused on other musical ideas.
I happened to have this other beat I’d made in the same key as “performance” (C), which lifted the bassline from my earlier song “(loser in the) free world” and included the creeping piano line from the verses of the final version. Suddenly in early 2025 I got the idea to merge all these idea together, but I still didn’t really know what the overarching sound of the song was.
At this time I was feeling pretty jaded about a lot of interrelated things: Between the political discourse around the last US election, the state of various entertainment industries, the proliferation of AI slop, and my deeper immersion into the world of content creation through my day job, I’d been feeling this very mixed set of emotions around being online in 2025. On one hand, I loved the small but genuine community I’d found; on the other, I felt like everyone outside that community, my family and a small group of friends & colleagues were in a constant state of performance. I couldn’t take seriously what anyone was saying. Everyone seemed like they had an ulterior motive and that motive seemed to be to maximize attention. Any virtue signaling seemed no more than that, both on the scale of my own government representation and in the minutiae of a random Instagram post. (I’m now spending far less time on social apps than I was then, even if I’m posting to them somewhat regularly.)
This changed the tone of “performance” to something more angry, jaded and bombastic. I ended up also revisiting the lyrics to “free world” and incorporating some lines into “performance”, making them sort-of bleak sibling tracks.
By May or so, the overall structure and tone of “performance” was mostly finalized, but I had no idea how to end. I found myself resorting to my favorite way to unblock myself creatively: piano improvisation. I recorded myself riffing on the chorus piano line, keeping the click running out of the chorus and I figured I’d keep playing until I run out of ideas. The piano in the ending section of “performance” is the second take of this improvisation. (It goes on for another 2.5 minutes, but you’ll have to wait for the album version to come out to hear the full thing!) With an extended percussion section and some noodling on the guitar, I had a way to end.
I then realized the chorus would sound so much bigger with a big female lead vocal, so I asked my friend Brenna if she was willing to double my vocals in the chorus. She quickly agreed, and I challenged her to also try improvising herself on the end section, over my piano improvisation. She sent me two takes, and they blew me away. I ended up using both – you can hear each (slightly edited) vamp in the end section as well.
When it came time to prepare “performance” as a single, I was really into The Perfect Drug Versions, an obscure EP that Nine Inch Nails put out to promote their single “The Perfect Drug” but containing 5 remixes and not the single itself, and presented as a continuous sequence. I loved that idea as a way of extending the journey, and since I already had 3 versions of “performance” to work with (the final version, the original “cram” beat with ilyBBY, and the “chill” demo), I thought about trying to pull together a couple more. I reached back out to ilyBBY about the idea of remixing this new version of the song, and they quickly signed on, even convincing Brenna to record more vocals to reimagine the song as a “Baby One More Time”-inspired bubblegum pop banger. I separately had my own idea to reposition the eerie piano melody from the verses as the centerpiece to a dark ambient industrial piece. These two remixes ended up being polar-opposite companion pieces to the final Kid Lightbulbs version of “performance” – the “anxiety” and “dread” remixes, respectively.
The “coda” you hear at the end of performance versions is a snippet of the piano improvisation removed from the single edit of “performance”. It’s a teaser for what’s to come when my fourth album INFINITE NORMAL comes out in November.