The Last Batch
We’ve made it to the final friday of 2023. We released our last three songs of the year today. Two by The New Hippies and one more from Roe’s Garden. A quick thought on the music.
“If You Were Mine” feels like a dream to me. It’s based on a riff that Understanding has played for a while. We actually put the whole instrumental together long before I wrote any of the lyrics. I would listen to the instrumental while I walked my dog every now and again, and the only words that came to mind were “If you were mine.” I would just sing it over and over and over. Then I got the first line, which is a sentiment I feel often. “Wake up, different day, same shit.” Nothing else came for a while. It sat for months while we got some other work out of the way, until I finally just sat in the sun one day and hammered it out. When I listen to the final version, I think the sunlight is captured in that recording, if I’m being honest. The song sits in a really nice register for Erica to sing. Every time we did a Roe’s Garden song this year, I would always like the demo, but when she finally snag it really took the song to the next level. Hope you’ve enjoyed the ride of singles from Roe’s Garden. It was a lot of fun to explore a style that was a little new for us, and writing for a female vocalist has always been on bucket list.
As for the New Hippies, we’re leaving you with a little double single. Simply put, I think “Spaceman” might be my favorite song we’ve ever done. Easily top three. It makes me feel that good. And really, that’s all this is about for me. Whatever happens with the art we make is whatever happens, I just want it to make people feel good. That’s the real value to me.
Zane gave Understanding and I a batch of demos to choose from and these last two songs came from that batch. Not so much is changed from the originals. Spaceman has all four of us on the record and I asked Zane to add the strings at the end, which I think made it pretty epic. I really freaking love that song.
Finally, hidden behind Spaceman is a cool groove called “I Want You,” which I also like. I think we ended the year pretty well with all our artists. The instrumental is pretty simple, and so I tried to keep that theme in the lyrics. There’s a whole bunch of shit going on around us, but at the end of the day I think everybody just wants somebody to love.
It’s been a wild ride, making all this music this year and sharing with anyone who would listen. Tomorrow and Sunday, I’ll do a little more reflecting on what I’ve learned, and then we’ll leave it there for a little while. I want to say thank you, sincerely, to anyone who took the time to listen to our music, to share it with somebody, or danced to a tune, maybe learned some words, bobbed their head along to the beat, whatever a person does with music. It means a lot to us Beautiful Idiots that you spent some time with us in 2023, when there’s always something else to do. I hope we helped you feel good this year.
-J.P.