Keegan DeWitt
The Current State Of Missing Love
Jul 13, 2010
Words by Sean Moeller
Illustration by Johnnie Cluney
Sound engineering by Mike Gentry
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Welcome to Daytrotter
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Say La La
original version appears on Nothing Shows
After spending two years pushing the "Islands" record, I was excited to really invest in finding new ways, sonically and lyrically, to portray some more vivid emotions. This track is a great example of that. In many ways, it's the sound of finally getting to record new material and play it. It's a mix of a lot of different things, Damon Albarn's "Mali Music," a little Ali Farke Toure, Amadou & Miriam... mainly, it was a way of breaking from the formality of "Islands" and really exploring whatever was most exciting creatively during the recording of the new EP. The lyrics are simple: the momentum and fearlessness of new love.
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Tired Of Love
original version appears on Nothing Shows
As much as I believe in that there is someone out there for everyone, I also believe that sometimes you meet that person when both of you are entirely incapable of being with one another. This song was a way for me to say: "What if this is the person for me, and even though it was impossible at the time, that was the opportunity?"
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Michel Bizot
original version appears on Nothing Shows
The majority of this record was written in Paris and Rome, and this song was specifically written in a small restaurant down an alleyway near the Spanish Steps. I had spent two months traveling, totally alone, and was experiencing all of these incredible sights and sounds and emotions and had no one to share them with. I started to think about who I might spend the rest of my life with. It started to rain and I sat down for a coffee and decided that I wanted to write a note to whoever that might be. This song is that letter.
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Hearts Beat Loud
original version appears on Nothing Shows
In Nashville, in the summer, it's not unusual for it to be hot and sticky, and then suddenly pour down rain for 30 minutes, only to clear up and be beautiful and breezy and quiet. This song is about that feeling you get when you're coasting down a huge hill on your bike and the road is wet and shiny with water and no one is out. You look around and it's just these selective city lights and you feel amazing.
The problem that we tend to have with a lot of our time is not knowing what parts of it we should spend more with or when all we're doing is either looking at the credits or staring at a prelude to what's about to be meaningful. There's so much filler out there and yet, it doesn't make what happens during that interim period wasteful or taunting, just less powerful and less likely to reap what's really in the mind's eye or tickling the soft skin of a ticking heart. One could look at that statement as a downer, suggesting that there are more junk minutes, hours and days than there are keepers, but if we're to rely on just what we're able to remember after a given amount of time, who is to argue with it? We have a certain amount of time to play with and most of it evaporates without a lasting memory tied to any of it, without a lasting person co-existing with any of it. We just spend our time. We spend and spend and spend. Most of it just falls right off the cliff. Keegan DeWitt, a Nashville musician with an epic voice and a tendency to make the most fleeting of moments sound like spectacular tension and heartache, seems to think a lot about his days and how they're getting shorter, even at the age of 28. Perhaps, it's because around this time in a man's life, things are supposed to be settling in a little bit and many of the concerning preoccupations of love, family and general sustenance (financial, nutritious and otherwise) have been dealt with, at least partially, even if unsuccessfully. He spends much of his time thinking about the things that he still needs, while looking around as friends and family members are checking those things off their lists, getting comfortable in their aging, that progression from spontaneous youth to that of willful responsibility and nesting somewhat. He has that need, to wake up in the middle of the night, crane his head up, look to the other side of the bed and see - depressing a peaceful oval in one side of a pillow - a great woman that he never believed he would ever find and then roll back into slumber, content with the scene. He'd like his wastebaskets to be half filled with soiled diapers and half filled with kinds of garbage that pile up now. He has that need to love, finally, that one person, that last love that has no equal. Thus far, as we hear on DeWitt's delightful and tragically grey new EP "Nothing Shows," these contemplations and yearnings are still at bay, still somewhere out there - or that's the hope. "Tired of Love" might be the most important song on the album, if we're looking for explanations as to the current state of Mr. DeWitt. He sings, "Sick of this feeling/I'm cutting up my heart/I'm tired of love/I'm tied to love/I lie to you/You lie to me too," and this is the sad truth of what he's up to his knees in - a place where no one's being quite who they are out of a need for self-protection, and that won't get them anywhere, so the nights complete themselves with lonely punctuation. We sense that DeWitt is feeling the pressure to figure it all out, to not feel so impoverished by chance and the sweetness of luck. We sense that he's tired of the trouble that it causes him, to have to be so alert to the moments that could be important and not to be glazed over or accidentally missed. He's come to question his hindsight and he things that he's beginning to see things in the wispy eves of the past that may have been, but mostly, he's planning for what's still to come. He's attentive and he's waiting for when he can finally feel as if the time has come, when the right love has come.
Keegan DeWitt's latest EP, "Nothing Shows," is available digitally exclusively on Daytrotter. It's available just to the right, by clicking on Buy Now. Enjoy the hell out of it! -- Daytrotter
Keegan DeWitt's Debut Daytrotter Session
