The Everyday Visuals
A Grab Bag Of Poetry Given Some Crookedness
Apr 21, 2009
Words by Sean Moeller
Illustration by Johnnie Cluney
Sound engineering by Patrick Stolley
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Welcome to Daytrotter
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Boom! Boom! Boom!
original version appears on The Everyday Visuals
Even though it has a skippy, happy beat, this song actually deals with facing my own mortality, in a way. It's about being fed up with your surroundings, and surrounded by your regrets, and regretting all the songs you didn't write, the things you didn't say. It's about taking all that and putting it into a powder keg...then realizing that your life is going to end, and when it does - no matter what comes next, heaven, hell, or blackness - it won't satisfy you. So you take that and light it and place it to the keg....and BOOM!
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Dance and Holler (with …
original version appears on Things Will Look Up
The intro is a play off an old folk song that I learned. It's traditionally thought that these kid songs and such like "Shoo fly don't bother me" were always just songs that kids sang, but in truth, they used to be the traditional songs of the Ozarks and Appalachia. The second verse of "Shoo fly" is "I feel, oh I feel - I feel like your morning star." I thought that it was such a sad song, as silly as it was -- here was someone singing "Shoo, get away from me - I already have someone." But then the person responds: "But I feel like your morning star..." Unrequited love. So the intro is about a love that is never going to become more than inside the author's head. Yet, "Dance and Holler," is about that rush of meeting someone new -- how, even as temporary as it may be, someone can make you feel like things are going to get better. Ah such a circle, human emotion is.
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Daydream Ghosts
original version appears on The Everyday Visuals
This song is about being haunted by this nagging feeling that you aren't living right. I feel a lot of the new record focuses on this theme -- the idea of the finite time we have on this earth and having this anxiety that you want to explore the far reaching corners of life, and take it all in. Yet this is juxtaposed on top of this town that you feel just suffocates you and traps you. Thus, when you sleep -- all the things that you daydream about during the day come to haunt you at night. Wouldn't that be the scariest of haunted houses? Showing what you could have done with your life, but didn't?
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Sloop John B
unreleased
I wrote this tune in the early 19th century, while swashbuckling with some rogues off the coast of the Carolinas -- back when I sailed around the world in 80 days. Which Brian Wilson then arranged, for his monumental Pet Sounds record. But actually -- The Beach boys were the first concert I ever went to. It wasn't 'Brian Wilson' Beach Boys -- it was the Mike Love atrocity that he toured for a while supporting "Cocomo." However, I was eight -- I had no discerning taste back then. My folks brought me to it with my cousin, and Chicago opened the night. I fell asleep halfway through the Beach Boys' set but awoke to when the band started in on "Sloop John B" -- it was my favorite song at the time, and for good reason, it's that old sort of traditional pretty song, that I feel is almost appreciated on some level in all our collective unconscious. When I met the drummer for my band many years later, coincidentally, this had been his first concert too. I wonder if we had even passed each other in the massive crowd.
The first words that Christopher Pappas sings on his band The Everyday Visuals' last album, Things Will Look Up, are, "There's something bout the way you shake your hips - it's like poetry," and from that point on, we're hearing about that poetry, that very same poetry, in numerous fashions, many different talking points that are constructs of couplets and graceful imagery. The poetry is the creamy center of all that interests this Boston, Massachusetts, band throughout its gray-skied, wet-eyed actions. There's an undeniable intent to treat the minutiae of all the sweet cheeks, cute bangs, tender hearts and comely touches with a kind of rosiness, with all of the heightened appreciation one would give to a treasure that burns a light through one's eyes. The sounds that they're making as a score to these feelings are ones that take an afternoon - one of great likeability - and then lets it just get a little softer, lets it take on a sudden, but casually falling rain. It lets the day go ahead and take a bath, to rid the grounds of any caked up grime, to give the animals and people reason to take cover and stay indoors for some time, to hear themselves think again, as it sometimes needs to be. It's a sound that's as invested in the way the greens in the trees and the new blossoms pop out even stronger once the stormy skies have evaporated away into the forgotten past as it is in the needed showers that are tasked to bring that all out. The Everyday Visuals are hooked on the simplicity of emotions and the directions that those emotions tend to take a person when they start feeling their tingles. They're hooked on the very basic ways that certain ladies make them straighten their posture on first look and turn them into compliment factories or miserable hopefuls, whichever it might be with that particular lady on that particular day. The music gazes at the stars and the darkness and doesn't know exactly what to make of it other than it's glad to have it to look upon. These girls that make things difficult, these examples of life getting crooked or ornery - not to mention fundamentally unpredictable, these stark and abysmal trappings to everything from the cheerful to the bottomed out are the seeds that group's founded planted inside them, taking roots and accepting nourishment.
The Everyday Visuals Official Site
