Born to Hurt/Make Me Lose Control on Bandcamp
Born to Hurt on Spotify
Make Me Lose Control on Spotify
Today I’m releasing a two new songs from our upcoming album The Wisconsin Polka, The songs are our first studio release in four years and are being released earlier than intended in wake of and as a reaction to the recent Presidential election.
The songs I’ve spent three years working on were written as a commentary on the divide in our nation made apparent long before the election and now, the election’s results The song “Born to Hurt” was imagined at the time of its writing to be a depiction of the worst possible outcome of events, which have tragically now come to pass. It attempts to examine the need on both sides of the divide to have a voice heard without obsoleteness that can convey the desire for change, relevance and recognition.
I grew up in a blue-collar, working-class environment with my dad working two jobs and my mom working one so our family could make ends meet. In the wake of the election as people talk about “understanding the other side” or there being “two Americas,” I hear the same realizations and struggling to empathize that I have had for most of my adult life while residing in the very liberal city of Seattle and reconciling my home here with the home I was born into of Kenosha, WI
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I felt from a very young age that I didn’t fit in or belong where I was born. Very early on, I developed a dark, ironic sense of humor to deal with the day-to-day frustration I perceived in the adults around me, and the attitudes handed down to their children. In 1980’s Wisconsin, racism was still very much present, in jokes passed around recess at school or in the infectious natural way of seeing people of different colors as mere stereotypes that those jokes reinforced.
By the time I got to high school, I felt utterly alone, everyday banging my head against a philosophical wall thinking what was around me might be all there is. I had music, I had songs to write but the same frustrations that the adults around me had were starting to creep in and in the years to come, as I left home, came back again and worked and got drunk in the bars then left home again, I felt myself becoming one of the people that made me feel out of place as a kid. I wasn’t trying to do what I really wanted to do, I wasn’t where I really wanted to be.
When I started, like I had in high school, lashing out at the people around me because I didn’t understand why they could be satisfied with such confining surroundings and lives, I knew it was time to leave again. I learned then, and keep relearning now, that acts of judgement on how other people choose to live their lives are often based in self-loathing and one’s own frustration.
After moving again out to Seattle and being in a place where the people around me were more in line with the way I carried myself, I began to miss the elements of my home that I had taken for granted when I was there and recognize more clearly that not all the folks I grew up around could be so easily classified and lumped together.
In my adult life since and as a songwriter, I’ve spent the last ten years writing songs swimming in the grey area where universal values and moral centers are passed along and shaped while overlapping with the corruption of those same values and centers. A lot of my songs, and most of those I’ve worked on the past three years, have been an examination of what, as a progressive-leaning adult, elements I have kept and which I have fought and still fight against from my childhood to purge.
“Born to Hurt” was a song started by my best friend and Harborrat co-founder Sean Lambrecht a long time ago. He wrote the original version as an apocalyptic break-up ballad and a couple years ago I started trying to turn it into a more political metaphor and incorporate that ol’ ironic, black-humor and by song’s end, make a sincere sentiment that would reflect my own outlook as it has progressed over my adult life.
"Make Me Lose Control” is a cover of a very-cheesy but awesome 1988 ballad by Eric Carmen of "Hungry Eyes" and The Raspberries-fame. I’ll have more to say about this in another post but this version was recorded in one take with the band having never having played the song prior. While the song itself is not tied into my own past or current events, the weary delivery certainly is
These are not the most explicit of the songs myself and the band have recorded that address right vs. left or red vs. blue divides in our country and selves but I hope sharing them now helps in some way and paves the way for more efforts to come. The anxieties reflected within these songs are but a mere fraction of the anxiety I, and I am quite sure others, currently hold.