Young Coyotes
Calling The Bloody Sun And All Fires
Mar 18, 2009
Words by Sean Moeller
Illustration by Johnnie Cluney
Sound engineering by Mike Gentry
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Welcome to Daytrotter
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Momentary Drowning
Unreleased
This was the first song we ever wrote together. I remember the both of us waking up very slowly from a long night. After grabbing his suitcase to use as a bass drum, Adam asked me to go grab my acoustic because we couldn't be too loud. We had no idea what kind of music we wanted to play so I randomly started strumming this one chord and singing this hook over and over. I kind of feel like we cheated people into liking this because it may be the simplest song (to play) of all time. I guess the easiest way to describe this would be that every once in a while, or every day depending on who you are, there are these moments of static so jumbled together with confusion and anger and fear and pain and even slight euphoria blanketing everything around you, that it feels inescapable, if only for a moment...the ultimate existential crisis song for those who equally care and don't care about everything, all at once.
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When I Was In The Fire
Unreleased
This was the second song we ever wrote together and it might be the most personal (meaning something specific) to me yet. It has a lot of different translations as almost all of our songs do, depending on which one I feel like describing at the time. The one I'm thinking of now is about the inability stay calm under extremely stressful situations. When things start to go awry, I often wonder if destroying everything around me is the best way to go about things, if only to clear my mind. At the same time, you're looking for support after you actually go through with it, realizing you got rid of any chance of that happening as well.
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Buried
Unreleased
Adam told me about this dream he had about being stuck on this island and seeing his loved ones out on the beach, but he was unable to swim out to see them. I thought about why he would be stuck out there and that's where the lyrics come in. the words turned into a sort of game for me as I imagined what would happen if someone buried me (title!) in the sand like I always see others do at the beach, but you were unable to escape. After a while, I would start to get used to it, watching everything around me fade away, including my body. Of course, there's a lot more in the actual interpretation of the song, but where's the mystery in that?
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Untitled
Unreleased
I still haven't got a name for this, although I'm thinking of "In My House", just to make it easier for people to recognize it. Titles were never really important to me because I rarely come up with anything clever enough. I think this song originally started out as a "treat me like dirt, I don't care" type of thing, which I guess it still has, but it eventually evolved into a sort of "I've seen something I wasn't supposed to see" jingle. Sometimes, when we witness something very shocking we revert back to this child mentality where you want to forget everything and try to imagine people being so cruel. The fact is humanity will always try to "one up" itself, whether in compassion or, unfortunately, cruelty. Happy, right?
For a good period of time this afternoon, there was a blaring streak of sunlight ripping through the window and causing the right eye of this weary traveler some grief, but now, everything's changed. Off to the same side of the van is the same falling sun, this time calmed down and able to be stared almost directly at without taking a brush dipped into white latex paint and coating over both of my eyes. It makes a silhouette out of the weakly turning Oklahoma windmill and the halo of deepened, red-orange glow fades itself out slowly as it crescents upward to meet the faint gray and gray-blue. There are three airplanes heading somewhere west of here, writing like never-moving pieces of white chalk across the sky, causing the slightest scars as a handful of lost deer plod through the ditches for dinner. It's a Young Coyotes setting, the one that's now happening and will soon be replaced by dark blindness and only the thought of what's still out there in the stillness, still moving around, still looking for dinner, still flying through the air and still coloring perspectives elsewhere. The Denver, Colorado two-piece made up of Adam Halferty and Zach Tipton makes a kind of music that can be of the most serene and idyllic faculties or it can summon such hungry and animalistic urges as wanting to shake out some gasoline or whatever combustible and angry is available onto something or a big pile of flammable somethings. All that would be needed at that point to instigate the most glorious scene that they could envision would be a tiny little match and a flick from the wrist to send the fire down to do its job. It could wind up being that bloody sun out in the distance. Hopefully, it would be as there's nothing better than a fire in the deepest part of the night if it's not causing any fatal harm. It's a beautiful sight to see. It's the feeling that the Young Coyotes gift us with their as-yet unreleased music, all of which puts a person under a spectacular spell that feels like a massage and a cool beverage in hand, just looking out over a classic view of things so far away from your resting point - a massive mountain range or anything that can make a man feel a little diminished in stature. It can also bring on a puffed out heart, a sense of not necessarily being in the shadows of bigger things, but being a part of them - as if the mountains were relatives. It still would be nice to see those mountains on fire, just blazing up to the heavens, to get the full effect of what Halferty and Tipton might think about every so often when they're cooking up these reverb-ready songs of tuneful meanderings and drips. The songs are feathered with airy utterances and the glistening crispness of an apple or a too-cold shower. It's a mood and a tone that don't explain at all the way we met these two, coming off the road, just days after getting a pounding on their hotel room door from a local sheriff ready to bust them for the counterfeiting that he just KNEW they'd done. The two Coyotes played coy, and even slippery with the officer and eventually learned that the club owner from the night before had paid them with bogus bills - reported when hotel owner tattled on them after accepting the currency for the room. They obviously skirted trouble that night and yet there's nothing so innocent about either of these guys. Never trust a coyote, but listen to them when they mention the fires that they're longing to set and admire.
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Young Coyotes Official Site
