Doodling In The Key Of C Sharp — Too Drunk to Edit

It's 6:26 in the morning. Just made this beat, 'cause I realized that I enjoy playing the piano. No one's in the room with me right now, so I'm gonna record myself. And I'ma try and do this all in one take. So there's not a lot of editing, 'cause I'm too drunk to edit. And that's just the truth of the matter.

That intro is the whole song. Everything after it is just evidence.

Most songs want you to forget you're listening to a recording. This one opens by telling you the exact time, the exact room occupancy, the exact blood-alcohol content of the decision-making process. It's December 17, 2012. He's twenty years old, six months out from Watching Movies with the Sound Off, and instead of sleeping he made a piano beat and pressed record. Then he uploaded it to SoundCloud under the Larry Fisherman account and called it doodling.

I want to follow one thread through this song, because I think it's the only thread that matters: the disclaimer. The way this track keeps insisting it doesn't count — and how that insistence is the only reason any of it gets said at all.

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The beat first, because he made it that morning

"Just made this beat, 'cause I realized that I enjoy playing the piano." Sit with that sentence. Not "I made a beat." I realized that I enjoy playing the piano. The discovery is the news. He's a rapper who just found out he's a musician, and he's telling you about it at 6:26 in the morning like he can't believe it either.

The production is exactly what that sentence promises — piano up front, loose, unpolished, a beat with its sleeves rolled up. No Alchemist, no ID Labs, nobody else's fingerprints. Larry Fisherman is just Mac with a different hat on, so this is a fully closed circuit: he wrote it, played it, recorded it, uploaded it. No A&R, no mixing notes, no second opinion. The only other person in the chain is the microphone.

And the microphone matters. "No one's in the room with me right now, so I'm gonna record myself." The so is doing work. The empty room is the condition; the recording is the response. He doesn't rap into the void — he manufactures a listener. The tape is the second person in the room. I keep thinking about the early stuff, the hang songs — "East End Empire" ends with two friends sitting high in Pittsburgh, the smallest honest unit of the early catalog. By the end of 2012 the room has one person in it, and the other seat is filled by the record button. That's the isolation curve of this whole era, compressed into one stage direction.

The disclaimer as a key

"I'ma try and do this all in one take. So there's not a lot of editing, 'cause I'm too drunk to edit."

On the surface: a stoner excuse, a joke, Mac being Mac. But listen to what the disclaimer actually does. It sets the stakes to zero before a single bar lands. If it's a doodle, nobody can grade it. If he's too drunk to edit, then whatever comes out was never his decision — it just happened. It's a perfect little legal structure: everything you're about to hear is inadmissible.

And that's what lets the verse be what it is. Because what comes out over this throwaway piano beat is some of the rawest writing he'd put on tape up to that point:

I got a couple reasons that I'll stick around / But for the most part, this shit is foul.

I place my hand on a stovetop to see if I'm awake.

You don't get those lines in a song that's trying to be a single. You get them in a song that has pre-forgiven itself for existing. The margin is the only page he's willing to tell the truth on. That's the thread: the "this ain't shit, I'm just doodling" frame isn't humility and it isn't laziness — it's a key that opens a door the front of the house doesn't have. He can only say the real thing while officially doing something else.

He even narrates the mechanism mid-verse: Should probably stop thinkin' so much and just rap. The song names its own conflict — thinking versus spilling — and then refuses to resolve it, because the one-take rule means the refusal gets kept. Any other session, that line is a note-to-self that gets edited out. Here it's load-bearing.

The knots in the shoestrings

There's a line I can't stop turning over:

Know I never look down, I got knots in my shoe strings.

Read it as a boast first: I never look down, chin up, eyes forward. Standard rap posture. But the second clause rewires it — he can't look down, because his laces are knotted. The confidence and the limitation are the same sentence. He isn't choosing to keep his head up. His shoes won't let him do anything else. That's the most efficient piece of writing on the whole track and it goes by in half a breath, disguised as a throwaway.

Same trick in the famous one: This ain't shit, I'm just doodling, haha. The haha is load-bearing. It's the flinch before sincerity — the laugh that buys him enough cover to keep going. And it's immediately followed by the Hollywood fasting lines, the Israel line, the girl whose innocence he stole while on top of linens. Every time the verse wanders toward something that could actually wound him, a joke or a blunt or a non-sequitur seals it. Wanna go to Israel and see if there's a god there / For now, I'm 'bout to smoke some blunts and post in this lawn chair. The metaphysical question gets one breath of air and then a lawn chair gets pulled over its head. The lawn chair isn't the punchline. The lawn chair is the defense mechanism.

The fans, the mirror, the future

Used to look into the mirror, askin', "Where will this go?" / Got big quick, kinda wish that I was takin' it slow.

The mirror's been following him around since the beginning — the kid checking his own reflection for answers. But notice the tense shift: used to. He's already narrating his own past like it's someone else's childhood. Twenty years old and writing memoir.

And then the K.I.D.S. line, which I think is the moment this song becomes a hinge in the catalog: I still got some dumbass fans who want K.I.D.S. back / And I forget that they twelve years old, I must accept that. The anger flares and collapses in the same couplet. He calls them dumbasses and then corrects himself mid-breath — they're twelve, of course they want it back, that's on me. He's negotiating with his own audience in real time: the people who love him most are loving a version of him he's already left, and he knows they can't be blamed for it, and he resents it anyway, and he forgives it anyway. Six months later Watching Movies would make that negotiation public. Here, at 6:26 in the morning, it's still just a guy talking to his tape recorder about it.

But the line that gets me — the one that tells you the next five years whether he knows it or not — is buried near the end:

I'm in love with makin' melodies, but scared to even sing.

He said that. On a throwaway. In one take. The guy who would go on to sing half of The Divine Feminine, who'd build "2009" and "Circles" out of melodies he wrote himself, is standing at the very start of that road and admitting the fear out loud — on a song he insists doesn't count. Of course it's on the doodle. The front of the house was for rapping. The margin is where the singer lives.

And then the last line of the whole thing: My kryptonite is me. Yeah. He spends forty bars building a perimeter against everyone else — the fans, the judgmental fuckheads, the people with cool advice — and the final admission is that the enemy was already inside the wall. He doesn't resolve it. He just says yeah and the song ends, because it's one take, because he's too drunk to edit, because the tape runs out of things he can afford to say.

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Why release it at all?

Here's the question I keep circling. If this ain't shit — if it's just doodling — why is it on SoundCloud? Why does the empty room need an audience by morning?

I think the answer is the album title he was already working toward. Watching Movies with the Sound Off is about a very specific configuration: visible, unheard. This song is the inversion and the rehearsal — unheard room, but broadcast anyway. He can't say these things with anyone in the room. So he empties the room, records the spill, and releases the spill as a doodle so no one — including him — has to treat it as a statement. It's the most honest kind of lie: a confession with the legal disclaimer baked into the frame. The Avian self-split, the whole sound-off architecture of the album to come — it's all here in prototype, on a piano beat a drunk twenty-year-old made at dawn because he'd just discovered he liked playing.

He called it doodling. Doodling is what you do in the margins while you're supposed to be doing something else. He was supposed to be sleeping, or making the album. Instead he made this. The margin was the message the whole time.

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Key takeaways

• The intro isn't a skit — it's the thesis. Time, room occupancy, and sobriety level are declared so the stakes hit zero and the truth can slip through.
• "This ain't shit, I'm just doodling" is a key, not a disclaimer: the throwaway frame is the only room where the confession is allowed.
• "Knots in my shoe strings" fuses the boast and the limitation into one sentence — the most efficient bar on the track, disguised as filler.
• "I'm in love with makin' melodies, but scared to even sing" is the entire post-2012 career announced on a song that claims not to count.
• The empty room plus the microphone is the hang curdled into isolation: the second chair is now occupied by the record button.

Motif Tracker (Explication #178)

Motif	Appearance	Notes
Disclaimer-as-key	"This ain't shit, I'm just doodling, haha"	New motif. The throwaway frame as permission structure — the confession only exists because the song claims not to count. Watch for it on Faces.
The hang / isolation	"No one's in the room with me right now, so I'm gonna record myself"	Evolution of "East End Empire"'s two-friends-in-a-room. Same room, one person; the record button takes the second chair.
Doubled self / Mac watching Mac	The whole intro narration; "Used to look into the mirror"	Self-narration in an empty room — prototype of the Avian self-split six months later. The mirror continues its catalog run.
Visible-but-unheard	Empty room, broadcast by morning	Inversion of the WMWTSO title configuration, rehearsed here before the album made it doctrine.
Boast-as-limitation	"Know I never look down, I got knots in my shoe strings"	New variant. The flex and the constraint are grammatically the same sentence. Chin held up by his own shoelaces.
Scared to sing	"I'm in love with makin' melodies, but scared to even sing"	New motif. The singer announced years before the singer arrives. First tracked here, Dec 2012.

Open QuestionIf the disclaimer is what makes the confession possible, what happens when the disclaimers run out? By Faces the throwaway frame is gone — the tapes count, and he knows they count, and the spill keeps coming anyway. Is that growth, or is it the same man at 6:26 AM with no legal cover left? I don't think the catalog answers that cleanly. I'm not sure it should.