The new, acoustic version of “Uncomfortable” is out now! Hear it on this page using the player below. You can also:
For all other outlets, simply search for “Uncomfortable (Acoustic) Simon Spire”
A clean version of the song/lyrics is available by request for broadcast purposes
Below you will find a blog post about the song, its creation, and what it’s meant for me to be in conversation with it during this tumultuous year. You’ll also find the original Plato’s Cave-themed music video featuring the original Four-Letter Words version of the song. If you’re looking for lyrics to the song, click here. To hear more music, visit the Music page. Thanks for visiting!
Credits: Words and music by Simon Spire | Produced by Mike Beck | Mixed by Brian Malouf at Cookie Jar Recording, Studio City, CA | Mastered by Louie Teran at Century 22 Productions, Long Beach, CA | Photo: Karen Keith.
Blog Post: An Uncomfortable Conversation with Death, Birth, and Waking Up
“Uncomfortable” is a song I’ve journeyed with for some time. Like most companions, it reveals different facets of its character depending on the light in which it’s approached. At times, it’s a song about awakening from the constructed, conditioned self. On other days, it can feel like an expression of the seemingly interminable, crushing passage of dying to one’s known condition—or perhaps witnessing the death throes of the current version of one’s world, a world that simply cannot continue the way it is—with only the faintest hint that something new may be waiting to emerge on the other side. Sometimes the repeated line “I’m uncomfortable in this world” seems to be the only thing that registers for the listener, perhaps giving voice to the abiding angst and alienation—maybe subtle, maybe glaring—that many experience in this current moment of our human story. Since finding myself drawn to rekindling my journey with the song early in 2020, all these hues and more have taken on renewed life against a dramatic global backdrop.
When I first recorded “Uncomfortable” some years ago with producer Mike Beck in New York, my production aesthetic was still firmly in the full-to-saturated-with-a-good-dose-of-punch camp. Yet there was something in me that felt the need for a more spacious version of the song. I asked Mike if we could record some additional tracks during the session for a prospective acoustic version of the song at some later date, and we did just that.
So it was that early this year I finally felt ready to unearth my hodgepodge collection of recording equipment that had mostly been boxed up since leaving NYC. Having recently settled into a new home, I now had a studio space in mind and went about making good use of it, experimenting with acoustic versions of songs I’d been longing to bring to life in the studio for some time. At the top of my mind, however, was revisiting “Uncomfortable.” Ever since leaving New York, I’d been wondering when I would finally have the opportunity to explore that acoustic ProTools session and see what might want to emerge from it. In March of this year, I dived into the session and came back up with an arrangement that was even more bare and exposed than I had originally envisioned. I liked it. I had always felt that the song called for not just the full production sound of the original version, but also a stripped-back, raw setting that would allow the essence of the song to stand on its own.
The timing has had a certain poetry to it. As I was working on a song that insisted on highlighting the discomfort of inhabiting this world, the collective coronavirus shock and shutdown began to take effect, and by the time I had finished the new arrangement, North Carolina (my current and adopted home), New Zealand (my original and timeless home), and a significant portion of the world had effectively gone into lockdown. As George Floyd’s death reverberated through this country’s psyche, refusing to permit the perpetuation of cultural blindness and self-deception, this song kept playing as I accompanied it through the mixing phase. And as I now reach the point of being able to share this new version of the song, the country in which I’ve spent most of my adult life is in the final stretch of perhaps its most painful election in my lifetime. Needless to say, this is all taking place against a backdrop of upheaval and rising stakes that’s been gathering momentum for as long as we care to remember.
A song can’t help but reveal itself anew to a traveling companion over the course of such a journey. One image that moved to the forefront of my mind and that has remained there since is that of the birthing process. In recent years, I’ve arrived at a simple description for my work with individuals and groups: I accompany people on their initiatory journeys through life. It struck me that this song is no different. Stanislav Grof’s psychodynamic and transpersonal model of the four “perinatal matrices” experienced by the fetus during birth provides an apt metaphor here. The second matrix, in which the first stage of potentially blissful intrauterine experience is abruptly severed by the onset of labor, is characterized in Grof’s understanding by feelings of helplessness and despair: With the commencement of uterine contractions before the cervix has opened, our previous home begins to crush us, giving rise to the feeling of being trapped in an impossible situation with no way out. The ensuing third matrix precipitated by the opening of the cervix and the descent of the head into the birth canal brings a further stage of ordeal and seemingly endless struggle, eventually building to a moment characterized by simultaneous annihilation and radical liberation into a qualitatively different state of being—the moment of birth.
Fittingly, the mixing stage of “Uncomfortable” was itself much more protracted than I anticipated, owing to my not having stepped into that world for eight years and a sequence of events that led to a couple of different collaborations—and, more than anything, my own occasionally tortured growth process along the way. The journey felt like an extended birthing process, and I began to experience the song in such terms, as an expression of an archetypal process that, in the current telling, foregrounds the elements of interminability, struggle, despair, and hopelessness that may precede a radical shift and opening. I have some experience with these dynamics, both in my own journey and with those I’ve had the privilege of working with, and I bow to their mystery and gifts. This is probably the ground from which the song originally sprang. I must admit, however, that I also dream not only of their individual expression, but also of the collective potential of such transformative dynamics, and I know this sense was at least partly present in the song’s inception. It feels appropriate to have been accompanied by this song through a time of such collective upheaval, an experience of upheaval that may well be just the beginning of whatever is to come in the time ahead. I recognize that the song gives greatest expression to the endings, struggle, and despair inherent in this archetypal birthing process. And while that’s an inevitable part of the journey, my hope and trust in this moment of our collective journey is that we will somehow find our way to what wants to be born on the other side of it.
A version of this essay along with Q&A also appeared in Kosmos Journal.
View the original, Plato’s Cave-themed video for the Four-Letter Words version of the song below. Music video directed by Petter Tangmyr / A Greedy Animal production.