The Swimmers
A Crispy Saturday Draped Over A Night Out
Dec 6, 2008
Words by Sean Moeller
Illustration by Johnnie Cluney
Sound engineering by Patrick Stolley
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Welcome to Daytrotter
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Pocket Full Of Gold
original version appears on Fighting Trees
The idea came from the feeling of disconnection walking around the city with music playing in the earphones. With a soundtrack, even crazy things happening right in front of you can seem normal since it feels like a movie. The lyrics are about how wealth/security/power/consumerism can allow people to be unconcerned by disasters and other people's struggles happening all around them.
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In The Park
unreleased
I grew up next to a park and cemetery and they both freaked me out after dark, so that imagery shows up in a lot of songs. This is your basic 'find it, lose it, try to get it back' kind of love song, with tambourine. Sonically it feels caught in the gaping chasm between our last record and what I imagine to be our next.
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Heaven
original version appears on Fighting Trees
I think of this song as giving birth to the band, though I think we have all moved past it by now. Struggling with an earlier version of this song, I pounded out a quick demo on a clanky piano which gave Scott the idea for some swinging double-tracked drums [on the album version], then Rick followed with the McCartney bass. The arrangement wasn't where I thought we had been heading, but it worked and after that the clanky piano stayed with us for a bunch of songs. We recently rolled that piano down our street and played this song live for a DIY video we just posted.
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St. Cecilia
original version appears on Fighting Trees
Scott [drums] wrote this one. He and I used to drive around tuning and repairing old pipe organs in churches. A portrait of St. Cecilia often hangs somewhere near the organs. These lyrics are full of obscure pipe organ references. I see the song as a musical apology to the saint about the futility of keeping the ancient instruments in working condition while not being allowed the time and resources to do the kind of job they deserve. He would probably disagree.
A first has come to Daytrotter this morning and this is how it will begin, so aptly and with all of the femurs and follicles and bed head in place, where it needs to be. It's a Saturday morning and we're slamming down with a skid against your stoop, like a minty, inky and frosty newspaper, beseeching you to spend a few minutes of one of your two valuable days of leisure, giving some more worthwhile music a shot. This will only take a few minutes, come the whispers. You can stay in your slippers and pajama bottoms.
You don't even have to brush your teeth or put your contact lenses in. Just come as you are, slide in front of the screen (as you seem to have already done) and start the weekend with us and see how it treats you. We're hoping well. For a momentous day like this one, in which we're unveiling a new seven-sessions-a-week effort and working overtime to be your never boring companion, we're breaking out a session that has been held onto for quite some time now, waiting for a day such as this, when its effects would not only be appreciated, but properly aligned with a morning of suitable nature.
The Swimmers, via the city of Philadelphia and makers of the kind of indie pop music that all the smitten like to call "infectious," are here on this day because they are Saturday morning, while still being a little bit of Friday night. It's a crossing over sort of transition that they make a musical reality, embodying the rambunctious electricity of a night out, of getting out the dance that's just been pooling up in the legs and eyes, and also the slow-moving, getting the joints oiled back up morning. It is a band that seems to do its best work on the days when there's no specific time that they need to get up and stretch, when the sleeping can just do whatever it needs to get done and jerk the shades up with a noisy raveling whenever that is complete.
"Heaven," for instance, is a simmering, crispy get out of bed, throw some comfy clothes on, go outside and just start moving as if there's nothing really pressing or urgent about anything that's going to take place after this and a clear and refreshed mind is thinking about the cute family of bird chicks in the nest in the tree, admiring the neighbor's well-kempt yard and recognizing that you might actually be glowing. It captures the mood that moving parts create swooshes of air and active circulation and stimulate further moving when it all works right. It's a music that forces you out of a prone position and as a handy bonus, hands you your sunglasses as it pushes you out the door, just to suck in the fresh air and get right down to those little things that we've heard need to be appreciated. Oh, sure, it's not all cherry blossoms, flower petals and shiny happy faces in the music that Steve Yutzy-Burkey, Krista Yutzy-Burkey, Scott French and Rick Sieber design, but it's the overall it's going to reinforce why we ever decide to leave the four walls and the mattress of the bedroom.
The Swimmers Official Site
