How I Wrote 'The Laws Have Changed'

And Other Tangents

Just off the top: Stay with me. I will get there.

A friend of mine highly recommended a doctor to me. He had learned that he had a kind of high functioning autism, said that seeing the doctor changed his life, explained so much about who he was, his relationship to the world and everyone in it. He isn’t a therapist, he told me that a few times, he studies the way you learn. That is the simple version. The appointment would be a 6 to 8 hour long session on Zoom, the doctor being in Minnesota. He connected us together. I wanted to learn more about myself. I’ve struggled with anxiety and depression for most of my life, pinballing between the two, and I wanted to find out more about it. You can treat the symptoms, but I was curious about the cause, the root. Hell, I was just curious. It’s good to be curious.

So a few months later I spent an entire working day, complete with lunch break, talking to this doctor over Zoom. I really liked him, he was personable and seemed truly interested in my life. There was a lot of testing that I should have recognized as an IQ test but I did not. A few hours in he told me my IQ. I asked if that was a good score. He said yes, that I was in the (redacted) percentile. I’m not autistic, by the way, just for the record. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I told him what I will now tell you: I never thought I was smart. Why didn’t someone tell me I was intelligent? There were very few points in my schooling where anyone treated me like I was in anyway gifted or intelligent. To be honest, I felt like they treated me like I was an idiot. That was just how I read the situation.

Looking back at school there were only a few teachers that I remember taking an interest in me. I said I’ll get there! There was an English teacher named Mr Harris. He seemed like one of those guys whose heart was still in the 60s. He had us analyze ‘American Pie’ and Jim Morrison poetry, loved me because I was the only one in class that knew about Altamont. There was also Mr Stam. He taught chemistry in 11th and 12th grade. I was his lab assistant, not because I liked chemistry but just because I thought he was cool. I wasn’t alone in thinking that, he was the teacher that led the cheers at school assemblies, getting the kids stomping and clapping. Was it true that Semiahmoo couldn’t be beat? It didn’t matter. Mr Stam made it feel true. He once asked me if I found myself forgetting things, like arriving somewhere and forgetting what I went there for. He saw that my brain might work in a different way, that I was smart but maybe my brain was wired in a different way. That’s what I took from it.

In his classroom, right next to the door, there was a quote in a frame. It might have been in German, and he translated it for us, or it might have been in English, and he explained to us that it was translated from the German. Either way, it was this:

Let There Be Maximum Entropy

You see, maximum entropy is a principle in thermodynamics that states that the most probable state of a system is the one with the highest entropy, representing the greatest degree of disorder or randomness. Or to put it another way, a state where a system has reached its highest level of randomness or disorder, meaning the distribution of energy among its particles is as even as possible. I cannot say I truly understand this. In the context of 11th grade chemistry, we needed to know that the best experimental results will come from this entropy. Let there be maximum randomness. Maybe the best thing I learned in high school. I learned the truth at 17.

Again, stay with me… back to the doctor, to the Zoom call, I am perplexed by the knowledge that my IQ is (redacted). Happy as well, sure. He explains to me that my weaker marks relate to memory and attention, but that my other marks are very high. Turns out I have very good pattern recognition. All of us humans are looking for patterns. It’s what makes us especially good at being insane conspiracy theorists, it’s what makes us good at debate. We can connect any bullshit together. Patterns that are there versus the patterns we want to be there, the ones that we really have to reach for, that is the fight. We’re currently losing that fight, FYI. Just as a species. You’re doing great.

So yes, “The Laws Have Changed”…. I told you I’d explain how I wrote it. After Mass Romantic, I was very happy to be making a living from music, happy to be a critical darling, but already I wanted to move away from “the sound” of the band. Even knowing that I would always gravitate toward a certain kind of song, my style, I wanted to approach from a different angle. Sneak up on it.

I don’t know why but I decided to listen to ‘Letter From An Occupant’ backwards. This song. It was one of our more popular songs:

Look how young we are!

This might be a tough listen for you but here it is backwards. You don’t have to listen to the whole thing, I think everything I’m going to tell you about happens in the first half.

There were a couple parts that jumped out to me. The first one was almost immediate. After about 18 seconds, that part will start to loop:

I just played this for my wife to see if she heard anything familiar. She did not. I said “Listen, theres that repeating melody. Yes, I know it's cacophonous but inside of it, listen to backwards Neko singing….” It’s where I found the melody for the chorus of “The Laws have Changed”. Sing all hail, what will be revealed today, when we peer into the great unknown… that part.

I knew there was another part I used but it took me a while to find it. This part. There is a loop that repeats 3 times and then it settles into a 1 bar loop at 0:20:

It helps if you sing along with the lyrics “it was crime at the time”.

Pattern recognition. My brain found patterns inside of it. Not shocking, the song played forward has some very specific patterns. Melodies, they are sometimes called. The next step was to join them together in the forwards world, as I call it. Find more connections. Digging through the chaos to find melody. Does that connect in any logical way with entropy in chemical reactions? Sure, why not? At the very least, it worked. It ended up being this song, complete with a video lifted wholesale from Bunuel’s ‘Simon Of The Desert’:

The girl who played Neko in the video was very cool. Nicki Clyne, an actress who was in Battlestar Galactica at the time. She eventually went to NY state and joined NXIVM. That was unexpected.

So in conclusion, I played the single from our first record backwards and that led down a winding path to the single for our second record. Let there be maximum entropy, motherfucker. Right on.