# Roy Voice Memo - S1 Arrowhead > **One-line reading.** Forty-two seconds of the album's producer talking Roy down off a fear — and, in doing so, naming the whole record's thesis in plain speech: build the vessel before the flood arrives. It ends not on resolution but on the threshold itself. > [!info] Album & credits > **Album:** *Subject to Flooding* (Jagwar Twin's debut, 2018) — **track 9 of 13** · 0:42 · a spoken-word interlude, not a song > **Canonical title:** *Roy Voice Memo: S1 Arrowhead* (styled with a colon; filed here with a hyphen) > **Written by** Roy English & S1 · **Produced by** Roy English · **Executive producer** S1 · mixed by Jeff Ellis, mastered by Chris Gehringer > **Full text:** streaming (Spotify) > **▶ Listen:** [Official audio (YouTube)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMq7LRqy9u4) Most of *Subject to Flooding* is built. This one isn't — it's a real studio conversation, left on the record instead of edited out. The producer S1 catches Roy mid-fear and talks him through it, and somewhere in those forty-two seconds he happens to say the truest thing anyone says on the album, without knowing that's what he's doing. It's the one track with no persona, no orchestration, no bit — just two people, one of them scared. On a record about flooding, keeping the raw feeling *in* is the thesis enacted: he didn't dam it. ## At a glance - **Era / release** — Track 9 on *Subject to Flooding* (2018), the debut. A ~0:42 captured voice memo. (Streaming sometimes stamps it 2019 — that's an Atlantic re-release artifact, not a second recording.) - **In one line** — A producer clears away every rational fear one by one, and what's left standing is the only fear that matters. - **Who speaks** — **S1** (the album's executive producer) is the only audible voice; **Roy** is the "you" being reassured, silent in the official lyric. No Lucius, no Mary, no Crowd — this predates all of them. - **Key symbols** — [[Concepts/The House and the Vessel|the vessel]] (the team/vision that must hold the flood) · **pieces** ("trying to find pieces") · **the bubble** · **the flood** (inherited from the album title) · **the threshold** ("when it happens"). ## The song, mapped There are no verses or chorus here — it's one continuous monologue, a single argument delivered as a chain of reassurances. But the argument has a shape, and the shape *is* the reading. S1 clears the table in six moves: | Move | What S1 does | What it does to the fear | |---|---|---| | **1 · Grant** | Concedes the premise — you *are* preparing. | Takes laziness off the table. The fear isn't sloth. | | **2 · The resource** | Points to the relational foundation: a *"super solid team,"* *"Ryan, who's been with you."* | Names a specific real person. Not money, not reach — people. | | **3 · The alignment** | Adds that the team is learning each other and understands the vision. | Shared agreement as the load-bearing asset, not resources. | | **4 · The stakes** | Names the negative pole once — the bubble bursting, then *"trying to find pieces."* | Collapse, and the scramble to reassemble afterward. | | **5 · The reframe** | Turns it around: in retrospect, you're already doing the preparing. | Dissolves unreadiness — *you're already the thing you fear you're not.* | | **6 · The residue** | Lands on what's left: *"the fear of… of when it happens."* | One fear survives, unnamed and unresolved. The memo **stops here.** | The whole forty-two seconds is a subtraction argument. S1 removes readiness, resources, competence, foundation — and isolates the single irreducible fear that no reassurance touches, then leaves it audible. He argues Roy all the way down to the threshold, and the track ends *on* the threshold, unarmored. That last line has no object. Not "the fear of failing," not "the fear of losing it" — just the fear of *when it happens.* The crossing itself. ## What it means A few claims that cut across the whole memo. **The remaining fear is the fear of transformation, not failure.** Notice what's *left* after S1 clears the table: not "what if we're not good enough," not "what if it flops." What survives is dread of the crossing — of becoming someone the current self hasn't met yet. This may be the earliest documented instance of the exact dread the whole catalogue later builds its monsters out of, caught completely raw, years before it had any mythological costume. The wound, visible before it learned to defend itself. **It states the album's thesis in plain speech: build the vessel before the flood.** S1's framing — *hold the team, hold the vision, before the bubble bursts* — is the container principle stated flat, which is exactly why a 42-second memo earns a spot on a record called *Subject to Flooding* ([[Concepts/The House and the Vessel]]). The flood — overwhelm, success, forces larger than the self — is coming regardless; the only open question is whether the vessel can *hold* it. It's the law this whole guide keeps restating: every blessing arrives disguised as a capacity problem. Success, power, love, insight — none of them ask *can you get me,* they ask *can you hold me.* And S1's answer — *you're already building the thing that can hold it* — is what makes the closing fear so devastatingly simple. The future is fine. The remaining obstacle is the threshold in the psyche. **The preparation is relational, never commercial.** This is easy to miss and it changes everything. S1 never says money, streams, labels, or reach. He says *the team.* He says *Ryan.* He says the people who *understand the vision.* The thing being built to survive the flood is a set of relationships, not a business plan — which is why the fear that outlasts every reassurance can't be answered by any resource. You can staff up against failure. You can't staff up against the crossing. **It is the one unmasked track — the inverse of the armor.** Everywhere else the album (and the decade that follows) performs some version of invulnerability. Here there's nothing to perform: no character, no pop production, no martial cadence, just a man talked down off a fear by a friend. It reads as the precise photo-negative of [[Superhuman]] (track 6, three tracks earlier), which stages the sealed "we" and the armor. Crucially, the memo does *not* build the armor or generate any later persona — it shows the bare fear *before* any [[Concepts/The Protector|Protector]] machinery exists. That matters for the whole mythology: the later compensations (the persona, the shadow, the whole defended architecture) are what happens when *this* threshold fear goes unmet. The memo is the fear itself, not the thing that grows up to guard it. **Roy chose to leave it in — which makes it an authorial act, not incidental tape.** Track 9 is where the album's *we* briefly becomes two real people talking about breaking. Someone decided that belonged on the record. On an album whose genesis was, literally, voice memos (Roy has described hearing the songs "all at once" and scrambling to voice-memo the music and melodies out), keeping an actual voice memo *on* the album is the method made visible — the making-of left inside the made thing. ## Characters - **[[Roy]]** — present only as the addressed *"you,"* and with no persona whatsoever: the bare threshold-fear before any mask, armor, or defense. He's silent as quoted; the memo captures S1's side of the conversation. This is as close to unmediated Roy as the catalogue gets. - **S1** (Symbolyc One / Larry Darnell Griffin Jr.) — the speaker, and the memo's only audible voice. The album's executive producer, here just as a friend talking Roy through a fear. He co-wrote [[Move To You]] (track 7, two tracks earlier) — the same collaborator relationship this memo happens to document from the inside. - **"Ryan"** — a real, named collaborator (*"Ryan, who's been with you"*). Because this is a released lyric, the name is public. *Which* Ryan stays genuinely open (see Source notes). - **Adjacent, not on the track** — the album's other producers and the co-writers present at the same wilderness sessions, including Michael Morgan, whose public account of the cabin corroborates the whole scene (below). ## Symbols - **[[Concepts/The House and the Vessel|The vessel / container]]** — the team and the shared vision as the container that has to hold the coming flood. This is the album's central image, and S1 states it in plain speech without reaching for a single metaphor. - **Pieces** — *"trying to find pieces."* At the literal level, a career collapsing and being reassembled. But the vocabulary of fragments, division, and reintegration ends up everywhere downstream — twins, mirrors, the dispersed self gathered back home. It enters the catalogue *here*, in a producer's offhand reassurance, and never leaves ([[Concepts/Keilim - The Breaking of the Vessels]]). - **The bubble** — a career's fragile enclosure; *"the bubble bursting"* is both the market collapse (literal) and, read forward, the perimeter of the self at the edge of dissolution. - **The flood** — inherited from the album title. Overwhelm, success, forces larger than the self. The memo names the container that must hold the flood without ever naming the flood by name — the whole album title is the missing word. - **The threshold** — *"when it happens."* The unnamed crossing the entire memo narrows down to and then stops at. ## Connected songs - **[[Superhuman]]** (track 6, three tracks earlier) — the inverse. Superhuman performs invulnerability — the sealed *we,* the armor. The memo leaves the bare fear audible and unarmored. The wound, before the armor. - **[[Move To You]]** (track 7, two tracks earlier) — the same collaborator (S1); both unguarded, relational, anti-metric. The memo's "vision and team" is the *Move To You* ethic said out loud. - **[[Subject to Flooding]]** — the memo states the album's title-thesis directly: build the vessel before the flood. - **[[Concepts/Jacob and Esau]]** — the threshold-fear as the fear of *crossing*, not of any opponent (Jacob at the ford, afraid of the crossing rather than the brother). - **[[Concepts/The Protector]]** — the memo is the fear that *precedes* the Protector; it doesn't cause the later defenses, it's what they later form around. - **[[Bananas]]** / [[Happy Face]] — the "pieces" vocabulary S1 seeds here surfaces across the catalogue, and Roy fuses both of its registers in a 2026 line, *"I'm in pieces, looking for pieces of one piece"* (see the Advanced reading below). > [!note]- Advanced reading — the two "pieces": the shattered self and the participatory self > The word S1 drops here — *pieces* — turns out to be load-bearing across the whole catalogue, and it splits into two opposite registers that Roy only fuses much later. > > **The fear-pole** is S1's — the bubble bursting, then *"trying to find pieces"* — the self that shatters and has to hunt for its own fragments. **The grace-pole** is Roy's, from the very same 2018 press run (Ones to Watch): *"we were all just one little piece of the puzzle being used to create this whole thing"* — the self as a willing fragment of something larger. Same noun, opposite emotional charge: the piece that broke off, versus the piece that belongs. > > In 2026 Roy collapses the two into a single line — *"I'm in pieces, looking for pieces of one piece"* — which holds the shattering and the belonging at once. The point worth keeping: the "pieces" vocabulary has been native to the catalogue since the *debut,* and it enters through **S1's** voice, on the album's own documentary track. Roy *chose* to put the find-your-pieces fear on the record. The plainest early statement of a theme that runs for a decade is a producer telling his friend not to explode upward and then scramble for his own pieces. > [!note]- Advanced reading — the Shattering of the Vessels (Shevirat ha-Kelim) > S1's anxiety — *the bubble bursting, then trying to find pieces* — rhymes almost exactly with the Lurianic Kabbalah's founding catastrophe, **Shevirat ha-Kelim**, the Shattering of the Vessels: divine light poured into containers too fragile to hold it, so the vessels break and the sparks scatter. In that frame, the "preparation" S1 names is precisely the work of building a vessel strong enough to *receive* the light without breaking, and the scattered pieces awaiting re-gathering are the *tikkun*, the repair ([[Concepts/Keilim - The Breaking of the Vessels]]). > > Hold this as **correspondence, not intent.** It's an inherited-substrate resonance — the shape is genuinely there in the language, but it is neither S1's nor Roy's stated meaning. S1 is talking about a music career. The vessel-and-sparks reading is a frame the material *permits,* not a claim it makes. > [!note]- Advanced reading — the ego at the threshold (Jung) > Read in Jungian terms, the *bubble* is the perimeter of the conscious ego before integration, and the fear of it bursting and leaving the self to "find pieces" is the threat of dissociation or inflation — the ego sensing it isn't yet structured to survive a direct encounter with a field larger than itself. On that reading the memo records something very specific: pure *anticipatory* threshold-anxiety, the psyche bracing at a door it hasn't yet walked through. Same caution as above — a resonance the system allows, not Roy's stated method. > [!note]- Advanced reading — the threshold-fear that scales the whole catalogue > The fear left standing at the end of the memo is a *kind* of fear, and once you can name it, you start seeing it everywhere. It's the fear of the aspirant, not the fear of the monster: Hercules dreading the labor rather than the beast; Jacob at the ford, afraid of the crossing rather than the brother ([[Concepts/Jacob and Esau]]); Roy afraid of being *seen*; even, much later, the shadow-figure afraid of irrelevance. All threshold fears — dread of the crossing that changes who you are. > > This is why the memo functions as a kind of Rosetta stone for everything after it. The later mythology dresses this dread in costume after costume — gives it a mask, a name, an antagonist. Track 9 is the dread *before* any of the costumes, which is exactly what makes it so useful: it shows you the raw shape the whole catalogue keeps re-clothing. ## Spoken text ``` And you're preparing, like, okay. And you got like, your super solid team too. Like Ryan, who's been with you. And you guy's learnin' each other and you know that he Understands the vision and like, all that is important. As opposed to the bubble bursting and Then you're trying to find pieces, you know? So, you know I think in retrospect, you're already doing that. You're already preparing for it. It's just the fear of... Of when it happens. ``` ## Source notes - **Grounded (released music, credits, public interviews).** The track itself and its spoken text; the credits (writers Roy English and S1; Roy producing, S1 as executive producer; Jeff Ellis mixing, Chris Gehringer mastering); the 0:42 runtime and track-9 placement; Lake Arrowhead, CA as one of the album's real recording sites. Most important of all: **Roy's own narration of this exact conversation**, in a 2018 Ones to Watch Q&A — *"at the end of it, we were up in Arrowhead, and I was talking with S1, and we were just like, This is big. This is not about us anymore. This is something else. So, I didn't feel right putting it out as a Roy English album… because it's not."* That's the naming-of-Jagwar-Twin moment, in Roy's voice — and the memo is a captured slice of the very session it describes. - **Corroboration (public).** Michael Morgan's public account of the Lake Arrowhead cabin (2024) lines up with all of it: writing for the next album around the fire, trying out project names, the next-morning song, a producer's remark that it felt "more of a Rock project," and — his words — *"Jagwar Twin was born."* (One rejected candidate name that season: *Rat Boy.* Morgan is glad it didn't stick, and so, presumably, is everyone.) - **Strong readings (interpretation, grounded in the material).** The subtraction-argument structure and the threshold-fear it isolates; the container/vessel thesis; the "one unmasked track" and its inverse-of-the-armor relationship to Superhuman; the memo-as-authorial-act framing; the "pieces" thread running forward through the catalogue. Built on the text, but interpretation — labeled as such. - **Framework (esoteric, syncretic — never authorial intent).** The Shevirat ha-Kelim correspondence and the Jungian ego-at-the-threshold reading. The material permits these harmonics; it does not assert them, and neither S1 nor Roy has claimed them. - **Open questions.** **"Arrowhead"** is grounded as Lake Arrowhead, CA (a real session site), but whether the *title* denotes the place, a session name, or something else pointed is genuinely unresolved — not guessed at here. **Which "Ryan"?** — a real collaborator, but which one is unconfirmed; pinning it would date a collaborator continuity that likely runs into the later production unit, so the identification stays inferential. The **2018-vs-2019** streaming date is treated as an Atlantic re-release artifact. A handful of ad-libs audible on some transcriptions (a "man" here, a background "everybody" there) are omitted from the official lyric; the official text governs quotes here. - **The honest floor.** Strip everything away and this is a pep talk about a music career. S1 means a team, a label situation, a bubble bursting — *business, not metaphysics* — and nothing here is Roy-authored doctrine; it's a captured conversation. The container-law, threshold-fear, and Kabbalistic readings are this guide's overlay on a friend's reassurance. If the plain reading accounts for the whole track, the analytical weight is our framing. This is the one page where that caveat carries the most weight, and it's kept in view on purpose. ## Read next - [[Subject to Flooding]] — the album this memo quietly explains. - [[Superhuman]] — the armor, three tracks earlier (track 6); this memo is its negative. - [[Move To You]] — the same collaborator (track 7), the same unguarded register. - [[Concepts/The House and the Vessel]] — the container law the memo states in plain speech. - [[Concepts/The Protector]] — what the unmet threshold-fear eventually grows into.