- Welcome to Daytrotter
- Speed of Sound
- City Love
- Ghosts
- Avery
It’s funny. When you have had the winters that we’ve had around here – which is close enough to the Minnesota homes of the hearty people in the band Communist Daughter – you continue thinking that you can go on living on the edge, that you’re going to get blessed with one more mild and unseasonable day, even when you don’t rightly deserve one. You’ve already had plenty of them. You’re nearly to February already and you’ve had two days of significant snow, but only a handful of days that were truly blustery, that lived up to any kind of nasty, wintry descriptive. Still, a chilly clipper system from Canada droops down on us for a few days and we all go bonkers, spewing our distaste for the cold and bemoaning how it seems like it’s never going to end – all of it coming from people who never took advantage of the mild days when they were here. We squander a lot, when we get to thinking about it. We’re miserable about just enjoying what we’ve gotten ourselves into, taking it all in and savoring it for whatever it’s worth. We’re too busy scrolling, our minds in a thousand different digital places, splintered to the point that everything’s just a giant wash.
The songs that Johnny Solomon writes for Communist Daughter seem to come from the land of a grain belt, of rusty towns with graveyards that fill up slowly and churches that will never be abandoned. They choose to focus on the wavering emotions of people who are stuck in these places, thinking about the lives that they wanted years ago and how they’ve shifted or been forgotten about altogether. They think of their many wasted nights and days, but they’re well aware that they weren’t victims in much of any sense. They allowed for most of what happened or didn’t happen to them. Their hopes proved to be porous and so did the heart that they were putting so much stock in, for so many things. Solomon takes us down some cold fucking streets, where the knock and the scratch of his steps on the pavement are booming and evidence of a ghost town in the making, of a ghostly person in the making – unless something changes soon. There are arms that need to be filled that, for now, are just stuffed into the puffy arms of a coat. The elements are invading and the beautiful doubts and memories are swirling like predicted flurries.