Slightly Less Awkward People is a sequel to a piece I wrote back in college called Slightly Awkward People. Back then I was just getting into Shudder to Think's bizarre masterpiece Pony Express Record, and I was fascinated by the album’s ungainly irregular rhythms, lopsided song structures and abrupt shifts in tone. I wrote a piece that used the same ideas in a chamber-music context, and named it in tribute to the oddballs that I thought of (and still think of) as "my people."

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The sequel is not quite as disjointed as the original, but it has its share of awkward gestures: phrases that cut off too abruptly, notes repeated too many times, pauses that last too long. When I was working on it, one of the rules I followed was that if a rhythm made me laugh, I had to keep it. Much of the basic material alludes to Bach — listen for a melody based on the C minor prelude from The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I — but the sound is Space Age, full of shiny synths and reverb.