Jack Larkin Wrote the Ending Before He Knew the Story.
Jack Larkin has a problem with salt-and-vinegar chips. Put ten different brands in front of him and what ought to be an ordinary purchase becomes a series of questions about flavor, texture and price, all while somebody behind him grows impatient.
– WORDS BY CJ • PHOTOS BY CHRISTIAN WHITTEMORE
He offers this imaginary supermarket ordeal to explain “Matches & Oil,” a song about the unexpected burden of having almost limitless choices. Even when the stakes are as low as a bag of chips, he would still rather make the right decision. The more consequential decisions have proved considerably harder.
His album Purkinje Shift is occupied with the problem of trying to recognize yourself while you’re still changing. Larkin has imagined plenty of different futures over the years and admits that almost none of them happened as anticipated. Looking back, he sometimes wonders whether the person he used to be would approve of the one making these songs now. There is no particular tragedy in that admission. He seems more interested in understanding how somebody can travel such a distance without noticing how far they’ve gone.
“I’ve always had some vision of what my future would look like and I’ve probably been wrong 100% of the time,” he says. “Sometimes I wonder whether the old me would even approve of the new me.”
The album builds an elaborate vocabulary around seeing: blurred impressions, afterimages, temporary moments when the picture sharpens. Curiously, Larkin didn’t begin writing with a vision test in mind. The songs were already taking shape as unusually personal examinations of his experiences when, during the writing of “Afterimage,” he found a way to connect them. He went back through the material and drew it into the idea of a journey toward clarity. The concept came from the music, not the other way around.
“I then sort of retconned the other songs into being a part of said vision test,” he explains. It is a cheerfully unromantic description of how a record can acquire an organizing idea, and perhaps a better one than pretending every detail was mapped out from the beginning.
Larkin was trying to understand a collection of feelings that remained difficult to name. Seeing them as parts of the same process didn’t make all the questions disappear, but it gave him a way to follow them.
The title’s suggestion of a shift in perception is useful precisely because Larkin refuses to treat recognition as permanent. A vision test might tell you what you can see today; it cannot promise what the room will look like tomorrow. He came away with more understanding than he started with, although he hasn’t mistaken that for finishing the work of knowing himself.
There was, however, one destination he knew almost from the start. “Colorburst,” the closing song, was actually the first thing he wrote for the album. The lyrics arrived later, but its chords and melodies already sounded like an ending to him. He kept it nearby while the other songs took shape, returning to it whenever he became unsure what the record was supposed to be. A song written before the journey had properly begun became his reminder of where it could finish.
Elsewhere, direction was harder to find. “Grandfather’s Axe” borrows from the Ship of Theseus, the philosophical question of whether something remains the same object after every part has been replaced. Larkin turns that thought toward his own life, where experiences and decisions have gradually altered the person doing the remembering. He describes hundreds of occasions when he has looked back at an earlier version of himself and struggled to understand how he got so far away. The song asks whether identity is something we preserve or something we continually rebuild.
It was also one of the most difficult songs to make. Larkin wrote, produced and played essentially everything on the record, expecting the experience to sharpen his instincts. Instead, the absence of other people sometimes made him question those instincts more. He has always liked the feeling of a song practically writing itself, when the chords, melody and words appear without much negotiation. “Grandfather’s Axe” refused to behave that way. He was dissatisfied with the bassline and production for so long that he considered abandoning it.
He continued reworking it, and the song is now his favorite on the album. That leaves him with an awkward lesson: the difficulty of making something isn’t always evidence that it shouldn’t exist. “Sometimes I think a bit of diligence can be fruitful,” he says, “though it feels wrong to have to force something to work.” For a musician responsible for nearly every decision, there is no simple way to distinguish necessary persistence from spending too much time alone with an idea.
The personal nature of Purkinje Shift also follows a deliberate change of direction. His previous album was a sync-licensing project, with lyrics intended to remain general enough for uses beyond the songs themselves. Larkin appreciates the freedom of writing about people and places outside his own life, and recognizes that even escapism can reveal something personal. But making an entire album of intentionally nonspecific material pushed him toward greater directness. This time he wanted to say what he had previously been circling around.
He doesn’t insist that this is how he’ll write forever. The decision feels to him like a pendulum swing, and the next album could easily move back toward fictional stories or more distant subjects. That uncertainty is consistent with a record that questions any permanent understanding of the self. The person singing these songs has become clearer about his needs, but he has little expectation that the picture will remain unchanged.
The music itself offers a softer surface than some of those thoughts might suggest. Larkin is drawn to warm, welcoming melodies alongside lyrics that examine anxiety, confusion and discomfort. He doesn’t see those qualities as opposed. Warmth can make it easier to approach something difficult, while the contrast reflects the ordinary experience of appearing composed when your private thoughts are anything but settled. An inviting arrangement can bring the listener closer to a subject they might otherwise avoid.
Humor does similar work. Larkin believes a room full of people can laugh together at something genuinely morbid, discovering a shared understanding before anybody has had to admit how uncomfortable the subject is.
That helps explain why a song such as “Stress Ball” belongs on an album dealing with such intimate questions. He isn’t trying to make uncertainty sound noble or grand. Some of it is ridiculous, and allowing it to be funny can make it easier to examine.
He has emerged from the record with some answers, although he is careful not to describe clarity as a permanent achievement. He knows more about the people he wants around him, the goals he wishes to pursue and the ways he hopes to grow. New questions are inevitable. He sounds less interested in preventing them than in being prepared when they arrive. For him, recognizing how little control you have over the future need not prevent you from making deliberate choices.
“A couple years back I was just going with the flow,” he says. “Now I’m at least trying to steer.”
