Max Clarke, known by his stage name Cut Worms, is a singer, songwriter, and musician hailing from Ohio who is currently based in Brooklyn, New York. The latest Cut Worms record, Transmitter, is out now on Jagjaguwar.
Album titles, and sometimes song titles too, are difficult for me. Even names of people (which is a type of title. I guess) are often hard for me to remember. For whatever reason, I don’t identify people or things by their names in my head — it’s more like an abstract feeling about who or what they are that I attribute to them, and a name almost feels too constricting or reductive. I guess that might sound crazy. Whatever it is, It certainly isn’t very practical. You can’t really call someone by the abstract feeling they give you. Anyways, it took a long time to name this record and there were a number of others that almost made it; each kind of carries with it its own alternative reality that the album could’ve lived in, and rather than leave them forever unknown I thought I’d put them here in this list!
Final Disconnection Notice
I almost gave the album this title because I felt like it spoke to some of the relevant themes. I liked that it had the sound of an auto-generated message. I thought it also had the honest, spontaneous quality of a good title because it came from an unpaid bill that was sitting on my kitchen table. Many of these songs, to me, feel like they deal with the types of people who would be delinquent in payment — putting things off and letting them pile up until they become overwhelming and out of control. Alas, Sonic Youth already had something called “Disconnection Notice.” Someone has always had your idea before you.
You Must Be Thinking of Someone Else
This was Jeff Tweedy’s suggestion for the album title and I almost went with it. It’s a line from one of the songs on the record and I do think that it captures the essence of the record in a nice way. It has some humor in it as well which is always nice. Similarly to “Final Disconnection Notice,” this one alludes to shirking responsibilities, or being the type of reclusive, shy person that sort of “disappears” rather than face up to life. Paranoia plays into it, like someone who’s been framed — “you’ve got the wrong guy.”
But it also has metaphysical layers to it, like who are any of us really anyways? It would have been a fine title, but ultimately I wanted something short, ideally one word, and this I felt was a little too close to my old record title, Nobody Lives Here Anymore.
In An Absent Mind
This comes from part of a song title on the record but I thought it had the makings of an alright album title. I was thinking about the phrase “absent mind” and I pictured a cavernous inside of a skull that you could walk into. Where does a mind go when it’s absent? Meanwhile, thinking about this, I walked directly into a lamp post. But I thought — what does it mean to be absent? People that you walk by every day could be and probably are facing insurmountable struggles that you’ll never know or begin to understand. By their blank expressions, it can be tempting to believe that they are not even really there. How convenient for one who doesn’t want to have to think about them! What if you could transmigrate your consciousness into their skull for a couple minutes and see how they are feeling? Would that make you more sensitive to the plight of other human beings in general? Even the ones that don’t look like you or may come from someplace else? The word Empathy gets thrown around a lot these days, but I wonder how many people really go to the lengths necessary to truly empathize with another. If you could enter into the absent the mind of someone else and walk around in there for a spell and get a glimpse of how they experience the world, you would witness sacred, secret moments that are ineffable — there is too much happening at every instant to ever dream of communicating, but you might feel that dream and know intrinsically what it implies. You would know that all of these countless hidden worlds are bright and full of meaning and serve a real purpose however small or seemingly insignificant. This title would have been OK with me. Ultimately, though, I wanted it to be one word, so Transmitter it was.
Transmitter is out now on Jagjaguwar.
