The Paroles is an album I starting writing in 2021. The concept behind the album was the common practice of producer-driven girl-groups in the 80s; Prince's Vanity 6, Rick James' Mary Jane Girls, and Bobby Orlando's The Flirts. I got their name, "The Paroles", from Blondie's song X offender, and played with their concept of a prostitue being in love with her parole officer. One of my favorite music videos is "The Dominatrix Sleeps Tonight", and when I would imagine the group, I'd picture them as Dominique Davalos as she appeared in that video: platinum blonde blunt-bang wigs covered in black leather.
The music went through phases: when I first began writing music in middle school, I was a massive Dead or Alive fan, so their SAW-based Hi-NRG influence is most always to stay prevelent in my music, but this time around I wanted to try something different, and capture the closely related latin freestyle sound of the late 80s, particularly inspired by my obsession with Company B (who consequently also wore platinum blonde wigs). The influence was light at first, but I tried to push myself to feature the genre more heavily, modelling the sound after another freestyle girl group, Sweet Sensation. After a few months I returned to my original sound of Hi-NRG with light freestyle influence as frankly my attempt was pretty shit and not worth the trouble trying to force an entire album out of it.
The album was finished by late 2022, but I was unsatisfied with the production quality. I took a break from the album to work on some different projects, but would occaisionally come back to reproduce some of those tracks. However, my reproduction efforts never resulted in a complete album. I was definitely growing tired of the concept, and I decided to stop working on the album entirely. To me, it felt a little insincere, and while I do think the music I wrote for it was pretty good, I also feel as though it's a product of trying to force myself to be something I'm not.
Here is what is salvagable: