Peasant
Lost Loves Are Kept For The Complete Sound
Dec 2, 2008
Words by Sean Moeller
Illustration by Johnnie Cluney
Sound engineering by Mike Gentry
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Welcome to Daytrotter
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The End
unreleased
All of my songs are a little bit like this one. In that, almost all of the lyrics have several meanings, intentionally or unintentionally. The song's about the final thoughts someone, not naming names, seems to have in reflection of a long and arduous relationship that's finally a part of history. The last feelings of love are escaping as He or She imagines the other person, alone, finally. Their relationship was fraught with codependence and strife, often causing more hurt than love, but in the end, this song was written as I cried my last tears for said couple. Now I only cry when I hear the song, it makes me happy because everyone survived and no one was really hurt more than you'd expect in one of these things.
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Prescription
unreleased
Ah! This little number has "social commentary" written all over the little pill bottle it came in. I will only say that there are times when we can all be our worst. Moments when we just get overcome with something and give in a few of our principles. I've felt that feeling before and this is a song about that, and about what I'm running away from, not so much how I do it.
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Raise Today
unreleased
; original version will appear on the forthcoming On The Ground A song written during the story of the aforementioned couple. Perhaps there is a bit of foreshadowing regarding the unhealthy nature and possible sad ending to this tumultuous adventure in true love. The ups and downs are detailed, but for the most part, it's written from the downs. I think there's something to the lyrics that one shouldn't take too seriously, there are faulty perceptions and desires, and there will eventually be an important lesson learned from it all.
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We're Good
unreleased
This is a "tidal wave of emotion" song. When it all hit the wall. There was no pondering anymore, conjecturing, loving. That was all dead. I think this song is exactly how one of the parties must have felt in this breakup story or whatever the hell you want to coin it as. Betrayal, confusion, fear, lying, were all part of the storm that shook the two apartments in Doylestown, PA. This is the moment when all hell broke loose and realization began to set in that things would never be the same. They weren't good. Somebody sure wanted to believe they would. Not getting out of bed was real, a real sense of guilt and sadness underlies a serious inability to keep other things in anymore. Blame and anger are coming out and it's really all crashing down.
We tend to be lucklessly drawn to the very situations that are proven landmines, which have been documented to blow hands and legs right and clean off of people, to lighten them of a heart or their sensibilities - the things that they use all the time. On the other sides of these common afflictions, these landmines that make vile congress with hope and pure love, are broken down sad bastards swearing off ever getting caught up in the hindrance ever again.
We, however, - and that pronoun is used because Aaron Neville's assertion that everyone plays the fool sometime can be counted on - find that relationships, in the long run are worth it. We find that we're exponentially happier when we're in a good one than when we're without. The real issue, which we get a good dose of in Peasant's drafty and encompassing sliver of the mechanics of dealing with and ultimately washing free of the static and the cold shivers that all finality brings, is that of going back so often that the scar tissue just piles on until it's as thick as a highway and weird feeling.
The grieving process, the rending of the self, through negativity, pulling back out of society and mental mutilation is all undertaken with the express goal of filling in the cracks, healing, fixing what went wrong, learning from the valuable and messy mistakes that were made on both sides and then getting back out there onto the cold, merciless hunting grounds to likely restart the cycle. The man and the woman pose so many dangers to the other that the ritual and the dance are the most excruciating fascinations that writers and gossipers have to roll in. We spend more words and more breathy talk - hushed and/or exalting - on the travails of matters gone wrong or matters crippled by the impending doom that neither the lights nor the faces can hide.
Damien Derose, who operates as Peasant out of a rurally suburban Philadelphian township, has tasked himself with the idea of getting under the skin of these conundrums of affection and amour and trying to make hide and hair of them, as difficult as that is. He's allowed himself the time and the material to be meticulous about his studies, not rushing into conclusions or settling for the easy answers that could be accepted as the salve and the decisiveness. Derose gives himself the luxury of a full autopsy, which means that a relationship is looked at closely, the way that John Darnielle has spent his songwriting career following the rocky and ever-evolving lives of his Alpha couple, watching as they implode, reassemble, and implode again.
Derose does a similar thing with a couple that may or may not include a very autobiographical figure. These two are hot and then they're cold, meant for each other and then replaceable, though there's never a strong position by either and both involved play all of the parts, like some long-ago Shakespearean play acted out at the Globe - the men are the women and the men are the men, one and the same in their duality. What becomes so beautifully clear in listening to Derose sing - in that clear mountain stream, weepy-voiced way of his - is that none of his characters and none of us are ever rid of any of the people that we've shared the dark or a kiss with. They fade into the woodwork a little, but they never leave the building. The wrestling with them and the time that they shared an occupation of will continue on and on. He sings, "I've been thinking a lot and I'm still getting old," and this line has a myriad of meanings, all of them reasonably correct. Age will one day stop us dead in our tracks, but until then, our thoughts are the chorus and those lost loves and the ones that are kept, the fitful intrusions of stress and our personal frustrations and fires will be the choir to round it all out.
Peasant MySpace Page
Paper Garden Records
