Running head: LET'S START A RELIGION: A MUSIC ANALYSIS 1

Let's Start a Religion: An Analysis of "Inspire the Liars"

Owsley J. Tanner

PSYC 4310 W: The Psychology of Music

Young Harris College

October 20, 2017

Inspire the Liars by Dance Gavin Dance

Youtube recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-aQrBZ4Duw

LET'S START A RELIGION: A MUSIC ANALYSIS 2

Let's Start a Religion: An Analysis of "Inspire the Liars"

My tastes as a music listener have evolved to be more complex with time. When I was

young, I was more drawn to simple nursery rhymes than I was to the complex guitar-driven

songs I listen to today. Psychologist and musician Daniel Levitin (2006) suggests that this

attraction to simple music results from an infant's underdeveloped minds; an attraction to simple

music at that age results from our inability to process too much information at once.

As I grew older, and my capability for processing additional musical actors became

stronger, I was able to appreciate more complex song structures. My attraction to guitars

undoubtedly resulted from music I was exposed to as an infant. My father would listen to the

Grateful Dead almost exclusively, and my mother blasted Pink Floyd and Alice Cooper tapes at

all hours of the night. From this mixture of heavily jazzy performances by Jerry Garcia and dark

riffs of Alice Cooper arose my love for hard rock.

Around the age of eleven I began to play with my radio-dial. In this process I found a

now-defunct Atlanta radio station by the name of Project 96.1, which played hard-rock acts like

Nickelback, Godsmack, and Metallica. I heard traces of Jerry's intricate guitar solos I had grown

to love in these artists as well as the dark and rebellious undertones of Alice Cooper. The more

rock I listened to, the more I became attracted to guitar virtuosity, encouraging a desire for

increasingly complex music. I loved the drastic uncertainty provided by masterful guitar solos,

working up and down scales and dropping the listener in places they never expected to be.

Finding interesting new music on my own was exhilarating. I began to branch my

interests into all sorts of guitar-centered music, from widely popular genres like classic rock to
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the more fringe genres like folk metal. One genre in particular stood out to me: post-hardcore.

With its emphasis on intricate emotional expression and complex guitar performances, post-

hardcore contained all of the intricacies I had come to crave. To put it into a sentence: I actively

seek music that features virtuosic instrumentation and complex structure while still retaining a

sense of familiarity. These ideas are represented strongly in the song "Inspire the Liars" by

Dance Gavin Dance.

Inspire the Liars is complex in interesting ways. The song's structure is chaotic and

almost entirely unpredictable. While there is a chorus, it is only repeated twice throughout the

song, giving the listener a brief sense of recognition when it is heard the second time, only to

revoke that comfort immediately after. Even the pre-chorus that introduces the song is different

the second time around, reinforcing the idea that we should not trust our instincts and simply

enjoy the musical ride.

Furthermore, each verse has a different melodic structure than the last, introducing drastic

variations to the main theme. This refusal to follow the conventional rules of verses like what is

heard in fellow post-hardcore band Sleeping with Sirens' song "If You Can't Hang"

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UwWYtLWEZg) keeps the listener on their toes, retaining

their attention and refusing to be background music. "If You Can't Hang" is a song I enjoy, but I

find myself wanting more. The song features an unchanging pre-chorus and choruses that adhere

closely to the main melodic theme, building intensity as the song progresses in predictable ways.

My tastes demand a higher level of stimulation for me to enjoy a song as much as I do "Inspire

the Liars"; I crave a greater challenge.

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Conversely, a good example of a post-hardcore song that is too complex for my liking is

"Think Dirty out Loud" by A Lot Like Birds (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjw-1_5eIx8).

The instrumentals are highly complex and unbound by typical musical conventions, resulting in a

collage of raw emotion that is difficult to follow. While complex instrumentation and song

structures are something I desire, this song seems to intentionally dismiss the concept of

structure, failing to repeat the same melody more than once.

Inspire the Liars sits at the apex of my inverted-U of complexity and enjoyableness (see

Figure 1). The contrasting clean and harsh vocalists convey a wide array of emotions, trading off

purposefully and building tension between choruses. The chorus is expertly crafted; every note

comes off as the result of great deliberation despite the guitarist's intricate and complicated riffs

and the drummer's frantic-but-calculated rhythms. The harsh vocalist encourages a more brutal

style from the rest of the band, taking the song almost to the point of no return after the second

chorus, before dropping us in unfamiliar territory, where we are rescued by the clean vocalist.

What follows is a smooth and funky bridge that contains flavors from the original melody of the

song without strictly adhering to an established structure. The song climaxes with both vocalists

showcasing the extents of their range, backed by an unrelenting drum track that shifts into

double-time midway, taking the already high tension to unprecedented heights. The song ends on

a minor chord, enforcing an air of mystery, challenging the listener's expectations.

Pate and Johnson (2013) describes embodied resonation as a deep emotional connection

to a song resulting in faux-transcendent experiences. Inspire the Liars evokes this response in me

through its musical perfection. Despite the experimental nature of the instrumentation, the music

is far from improvisational. Each part comes off as carefully calculated; each and every note is
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there by design. This makes the song sound larger-than-life, conveying emotions that are as deep

as they are mysterious.

The concept of sympathetic chords can best be explained by Pate and Johnson's (2013)

sitar metaphor: strings vibrating on the outside of a sitar cause additional inner strings to vibrate,

making the sound more whole (2007). People are drawn to certain songs (outer strings) for

nearly unexplainable reasons, striking a chord within them (inner strings). Dance Gavin Dance is

my favorite band and I am inexplicably drawn to most of their songs, including "Betrayed by the

Game" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUL5lnd9iXI), "Carl Barker"

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRah1_OSu9I), and "Blue Dream"

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1k8QaKQGXE). While these three songs feature

drastically different lineups with only the lead guitarist and drummer remaining constant, the

musical elements that drew me to the band are present throughout each of them: structural

perfection, attention-grabbing instrumentation, experimental (but not chaotic) guitar parts, and a

deep contrast achieved by alternating vocalists.

The last of three defining characteristics outlined by Pate and Johnson (2013) is the found

mirror. He conceptualizes this as the feeling of a song representing things about oneself that are

rarely represented. The listener feels a sense of understanding through the art that makes them

feel more whole; it is as if they had gone years without seeing their reflection until they one day

found a mirror. "Inspire the Liars" largely comes off as the pining of an agnostic with lyrics

blatantly criticizing organized religion. The introductory lyrics suggest a figure that tells people

anything that they want to hear, even if it is untrue; the climax of the song is a repetition of "let's

start a religion", suggesting that this is something so easily done that a post-hardcore band and
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their fans could realistically establish their own religious order. Even the most devout believer

sometimes has moments of uncertainty; this feeling is extremely complex and heavily emotional.

As a Christian, I feel that this feeling is often discouraged and rarely talked about, making any

conversations on the subject rare and special. This makes "Inspire the Liars" a wonderful

example of the found mirror.

While the effect of the found mirror is strong in this song, I feel a stronger embodied

resonation. The culmination of instrumental expertise, interesting rhythms, and varying-but-

sensical song structures evoke an otherworldly experience in me. It is almost unbelievable that

one song can represent all that I've come to love in music so much. That being said, it is

important to note that it is in part a result of the environment I grew up in that I am so attracted to

this song. If I had not spent my youth absorbing Alice Cooper and The Grateful Dead my tastes

would likely not be the same. Some people simply don't have an ear for this often hard-to-

understand genre of music, much in the same way I refuse to eat salad. Some people simply have

different tastes. Those who wouldn't typically listen to post-hardcore still stand to learn a lot

from Dance Gavin Dance's mastery of complex song structures, and those who don't typically

enjoy overly-complex music stand to be impressed by the band's instrumental virtuosity.

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References

A Lot Like Birds. (2011). Think Dirty Out Loud. On Conversation Piece [CD]. New York,

New York: Doghouse.

Dance Gavin Dance. (2009). Carl Barker. On Happiness [CD]. Portland, Oregon: Rise.

Dance Gavin Dance. (2011). Blue Dream. On Downtown Battle Mountain II [CD]. Portland,

Oregon: Rise.

Dance Gavin Dance. (2016). Betrayed by the Game. On Mothership [CD]. Portland, Oregon:

Rise.

Dance Gavin Dance. (2016). Inspire the Liars. On Mothership [CD]. Portland, Oregon: Rise.

Levitin, D. (2006). This is Your Brain on Music. New York, New York: Penguin Group.

Pate, J., & Johnson, C. (2013). Sympathetic chords: Reverberating connection through the lived

leisure experiences of music listening. International Journal of Community Music 6(2),

189-203. doi: 10.1386/ijcm.6.2.189_1

Sleeping with Sirens. (2011). If You Can't Hang. On Let's Cheers to This [CD]. Portland,

Oregon: Rise.