Spoiler alert: Clicking around on Santiago Ramones’ website, you might find an obituary for Rebecca Michelle Woodward (1992-2016). But don’t worry; she didn’t really die because she never really lived.
Like many musicians’ sites, santiagoramones.com/hypothetical features links for streaming Ramones’ new album Hypothetical and lyrics from the songs, but some of the words and even individual letters contain hyperlinks to less common artifacts: letters, journal entries, codes, clips from video games and at least one obituary.
Ramones calls them “secrets.”
“All of the secrets are associated with individual tracks on the album,” Ramones said. “So, like, that obituary is associated with the song ‘Late.’ If you read the lyrics to ‘Late,’ you might think ‘Oh, OK. I think I know what this is about,’ but then maybe you read this obituary. … In this specific context, it’s about the sort of feeling where you’ve ever had someone that you wanted to become better friends with but never got the opportunity to or maybe they moved away or, in this instance, they passed away.
“By the way, that obituary isn’t real. I made an obituary for a person who I thought I would have been good friends with. … I really wish I could have gotten to know this person, but the universe made me late.”
On “Late,” Ramones sings, “Every light I got to turned red / Every door I pulled at was locked / Everyone I spoke to didn’t know / I tried, I tried, I tried, I tried / I’m sorry I was late.” If you click the “o” in “sorry,” you’ll go to a regretful letter from an absent father. To get to the fictional obituary, you actually need to click a link in the lyrics to “Koi.”
Clicking on a link on the page for intro track “Bit Depth,” meanwhile, takes you to the first episode of Ramones’ podcast Bit Depth, but not the episode of the podcast discussing the track of the same name. The complexly interwoven web component, which we seem to be only hinting at, complements the songwriting approach on Hypothetical, which Ramones calls “shape-shifting fiction.”
“Star Destroyer” is a theme song for a nonexistent sci-fi anime series with lyrics translated from English to Japanese and back to English. “Space Heat” a few tracks later, could play over the closing credits. Many of the other songs on the album are from the perspective of fictional characters with sadder backstories. Ramones said he began working on some of the lyrics as early as 2011, when he was in high school.
“Honestly, whenever I started songwriting, I didn’t feel like I had enough experiences or traumas or failures to say something about,” Ramones said. “Maybe that had more to do with, like, my sense of self-worth, I guess, but it didn’t feel like I had something worth saying. So instead, I made up these stories. … Here’s a hypothetical about a man with a drug addiction. Here’s a hypothetical about a veteran with PTSD. Here’s a hypothetical about losing a friend that you’ve never had.”
When Ramones gets “a little more personal” on “Letting Go,” he’s still describing unrealized possibilities.
“It’s actually like an amalgamation of three different breakups from my own life, a friend’s life, and another friend’s life. Two of those relationships are actually still going. My wife is still married to me. She’s my wife. … So even that is sort of like a hypothetical into what would have ended those relationships.”
Ramones sings, “It’s too late to say all this / What I wanted was to show you / That I’m capable of feeling things / Just like you / It was far too hard to do / To put my feelings all away / Even harder then to let ’em out / Show ’em to you.”
The track also features vocalist Nia Moné, one of the 15 additional musicians credited on the album, including but far from limited to Jared Lekites, Kat Lock, Roz and Bailey Gilbert. The list concludes with the note that “All credited above are present on” final track “Hypothetical.”
Song conditioning
Ramones, who we’ve previously seen playing songs from Hypothetical solo on an acoustic guitar on OKC stages, said the album took 13 years from conception to release because of the additional instrumentation the songs required.
“I think the big thing that made it take so long is the fact that these are a bunch of alternative rock songs that demand live drums, and having the right environment to record live drums is expensive or time consuming.”
Ramones wrote the lyrics for “Replacement,” the oldest song on the album, on the roof of Lee’s Sandwiches while he was working on the air conditioning unit with his father.
“I was just humming with the air conditioning and, like, harmonizing with it,” he said, “and it was just kind of this four-line mantra that was, like, the first quote unquote song that I ever wrote.”
On “Replacement,” Ramones sings, “Colder, colder, colder / Warm / Colder, colder, colder / Noise / You’re past your prime / You’re out of time now.”
In the time between the rooftop and the recording studio, Ramones said the song became more instrumentally complex, but he couldn’t improve the simple words.
“Over the years, I tried adding more to it,” Ramones said. “I tried adding more lyrics, more chords or something, and none of that really stuck. It eventually kind of solidified into itself.”
A $5,000 grant from Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition’s Artist Entrepreneur Program allowed Ramones to complete Hypothetical, a process he began while studying production at the Academy of Contemporary Music at the University of Central Oklahoma (ACM@UCO). Mixed by Mac Seigel and mastered by Kevin Lively Mastering, Ramones said the album represents the best of all possible versions of these songs.
“I really love the creative approach of chiseling away at the statue that is beneath the marble,” Ramones said. “Whatever the initial approach was, even if it’s from a thing that’s like so many years ago, the pursuit of enhancing it is not about throwing everything that I can at it. It’s more about honoring what that thing is trying to say, and so rather than the songs changing over time, they kind of more solidified into a place that feels more right. These songs feel the most right that they ever have.”
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This article appears in City crowned.