L’Rain Walks Us Through Each Track on I Killed Your Dog

Taja Cheek stuns once again on I Killed Your Dog, her third record as L’Rain. The Brooklyn singer, songwriter, composer and multi-instrumentalist is no stranger to pushing her compositions to their absolute limits, entangling foreboding clips of ambient droning with trampling dance beats and breathy, soulful vocalizations. I Killed Your Dog, which we named this week’s Album of the Week is the logical next step in the experimental musician’s career, as we see her settling even more comfortably into the lush garden of sound she so often creates.

L’Rain describes I Killed Your Dog as an “anti-break-up album. She runs the gamut of emotionality, sensuality and even humor through the tracklist, entangling and detangling different threads in the tapestry of her psyche. On “New Year’s UnResolution,” the jittery, overspilling pop track that serves as both the album’s lead single and final chapter, she ends off by singing “Will you forget me along the way?” over and over again. L’Rain’s mastery on I Killed Your Dog makes her impossible to forget. She sat down with us and gave a glimpse into the backstory of all 16 tracks on I Killed Your Dog. Listen along with us as L’Rain takes us on an intimate, eccentric journey into her latest wonder of an album.

“Sincerity Commercial”

This track features a recording of Bill T. Jones talking to an audience about a dream he had. I wanted to emulate the technique video editors sometimes use on commercials, cutting up and splicing together images of different people saying the same phrase so that the phrase has a new cadence, a composite of all the voices.

“Our Funeral”

An exploration of the overlap between grief, death, and breakups: feeling the impending end of a relationship with something/someone you love.

“Pet Rock”

The title is an ode to the iconic 1970s phenomenon of the pet rock that my dad told me about as a kid. It’s also a play on my relationship to rock music: something I love and grew up with, and something I carry the legacy of as a Black musician, despite the very white landscape of rock music today. I came across the original Pet Rock pamphlet while working on the music video for this song.

“I Hate My Best Friends”

I’m referencing ’50s and ’60s synth histories. Early synthesists were experimenting with cutting-edge technology but also, sometimes, using their instruments in service of the most banal and commercial applications, like radio, television and advertisements in general. I’m wondering if there are parallels to be made with experimental musicians working today. On this track, there aren’t any actual synthesizers but, in general, there are a lot of synthesizers on the record because of my collaborator Ben’s interest, and because the music called for it.

“I Killed Your Dog”

There’s so much for me to say about this song and the title of the record. I only have space to share a tiny glimpse for now.

It honestly still feels horrible saying the title of the song and record. That’s also the point. It’s aggressive and contrarian but also deeply confusing in a sense: Is the title an act of maliciousness and revenge or an expression of remorse and regret? Dogs sometimes show up in my lyrics as a metaphor for things and people I love (in “Kill Self” on Fatigue, for example). Dogs function in the same way this time, too. I hope the title prompts listeners to wonder how and why we sometimes hurt the people closest to us, examine how we can mess up and cause harm even with the best intentions, and to generally grapple with being imperfect.

The title is meant to feel very visceral and to reproduce a fraction of the hurt we feel when important relationships end. I also hope that it casts doubt on me as a narrator and to resist any urge for listeners to think of me as a role model (I’m just a person, we’re all just people). I also wanted to bring more depth to the recorded project and to showcase a tiny bit of the chaotic, frenetic, raw energy of the live show in the title. I also realized in the midst of working on this record that Anubis, the dog god in Egyptian mythology is the god of the dead, resurfacing the grief theme yet again.

The structure of this song references Joan Baez’s “Here’s To You” and also Bach’s last work, which featured compositional puzzles. The particular work I am referencing resolves one half-step higher after each iteration of the main phrase. Like “Love on Top” of course. This song does the same, but in the opposite direction, something that rarely happens in pop music because, let’s be honest, it’s kind of a bummer!

In the beginning of the song when I whisper “I killed your dog,” it will sound like it’s coming from the inside of your own head if you’re sitting in the right position in front of your speakers.

“All the Days You Remember”

Each L’Rain record so far contains some reference to a birthday. It’s an easter egg for the listeners and also a challenge for myself. You’ll hear “to you,” which is a snippet of someone singing “happy birthday” to someone I love. The beginning is a snippet of a voice recording of a poem written and recited by a very good friend, Joselia Hughes. She is a constant source of inspiration and often one of the first people I reach out to about my records when I am beginning to sort out my ideas.

“5 to 8 Hours a Day (WWwaG)”

A friend once told me that I should try spending more time with my instrument–five to eight hours a day. I happened to practice that same day we spoke and this song rushed out of me. I thought it was strange that I ended up writing a kind of folk song, and began thinking about folk music as Black music; I felt like I was tapping into something deep inside of me when I wrote this. The pedal steel really cements the rootsy feel of the picked guitar, and the trumpet is a hallmark of jazz (the trumpet was also Ben’s suggestion). In a more general sense, I keep thinking about the messiness of the “jazz” label and how it’s often sloppily (and also kind of rightfully) slapped onto my music. So much of what I created for this record feels like it’s rooted in music—rock and folk for example—that wasn’t as foregrounded in the first two albums. I hope this song provides context on the project as a whole.

“Sometimes”

It sounds like it could be a sample of some old song, but it’s not. It’s a remnant of something from my SoundCloud that I updated to use on this record.

“r(EMOTE)”

I wonder how long it takes to forget someone you’re close to. A play on near opposites, an exploration of unresolved feelings.

“Uncertainty Principle”

The title references the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. You can’t know the position and the speed of a particle at any given time. I’m cheekily transferring that general idea onto a relationship I was sorting out at the time.

“Oh Wow, a Bird!”

Inspired by a voice message from a good friend of mine, Spencer Murphy.

“Knead Bee”

“Knead Bee” uses the main riff from “Need Be” on Fatigue. On each new record, I try to include an element from the last one, re-envisioned. Fatigue included “Take Two” which was a new version of “Bat” on the debut self-titled record.

“Monsoon of Regret”

I recorded this during a residency at Pulp Arts in Gainesville, FL. There was a beautiful sunroom where Ben, Andrew and I were staying and the rain was making an incredible sound on the roof. I picked up some singing bowls and a guitar that were lying around and I started recording myself. I like nodding to the process of making records on the records themselves.

“Clumsy”

I wrote this song after I broke my foot and fractured my spine in the spring of 2022. I wanted something tangibly good to come of something horrible, and figured I could somehow justify the pain of the accident if I could turn that experience into music. As I started writing lyrics, my injury ended up becoming a metaphor for feeling like a failure: constantly saying and doing the wrong things even though I try so hard not to.

“What’s That Song?”

The whole track is an accompaniment to a voice message my friend D left me on Instagram once. We made the song “real” by including Kyle Poole on drums and Kalia Vandever on trombone, along with Ben on sax and my weird humming.

“New Year’s UnResolution”

The words of this song were written at different periods of time to give a sense of what it’s like to think through the trajectory of a relationship at different points of life–right after a break up, and many moons later. I wonder: What is it like to feel like you’ve forgotten a part of yourself?; How does time pass differently at different moments in your life?; How do you set new terms of engagement with someone you’ve interacted with in a very specific way for a long time?