Hello to you too!

Having made 2 mashup albums already, both of which had really dense, frenetic intros, I wanted to do something different for the third. I liked the way that the Cabaret theme (from the movie) and the Elmo rap fit together (both have a distinctly lo-fi sound), and from there I got the idea to bookend the album with Cabaret (since I always thought the ending of the movie/play was really impactful).

Cabaret has a lot of thematic baggage to it. It's essentially a story about queer and marginalized people living in Germany during the rise of Nazism. The titular cabaret is a bastion of the risqué and spitting in the face of everything the Nazis stand for, but eventually it all falls apart. So I started getting ideas that maybe the album would be about queerness and fascism in the modern day. I thought about this in a pretty abstract and detached way... at least until I realized I was a woman.

This happened partway through production of the album, and led to some recontextualization. I didn't find the "Hello, Allison" sample from Jet Set Radio by myself; it was sent to me by a friend after I told him my new name. It's fitting that this is followed by the extensive, protracted greeting of the Cabaret sample. "Willkommen, bienvenue, welcome!" It's like I'm throwing a party for myself. (Almost like that's the name of the song...)

The second half of the track isn't as interested in these themes, but I had a lot of fun with it musically. The Bjork sample makes everything sound really heavy, and I think I was able to make something exciting without just retracing my steps from previous albums.