- Welcome to Daytrotter
- The Party
- The Birds
- Irrelevant Roads
- The Beginning
It seems like there’s a restless that we forget about sometimes, something that just dwells within us that goes away for a good long while and then it comes back and when it does, it hits us hard. We get disoriented and lose track of the things that we’ve just taken as the norm for the longest of times. It’s when we decide that we’re going to sell or give away all of our earthly possessions, trim down the fat to a near nothing level. It’s when we quit our jobs, pull our kids out of the school that they’ve known their whole lives, uprooted them and ourselves from all the friends that we’ve accrued for decades and decided to move to Alabama or some arbitrary place, for no real reason. It’s as if the restlessness inside made all of those key decisions and even started packing the rental truck with all of the belongings – for those who decided to keep theirs and continue to live with them. The restlessness decides that it wants to own the day, or the next few years, because it’s just tired of the sludge that you’ve planted yourself in for far too long. You get to the point where you start questioning who your real friends are and even looking at those real friends and considering whether or not you even need them, or want them, no matter how good they are to you. You get to the point where you think about just getting to that finish line – and doing it in a slow, but non-methodical way – with as little baggage and as little to worry about as possible. You start to think that maybe you should be getting to bed earlier and up earlier the next day. Maybe that will do it for you. Maybe the parties that you’re missing aren’t any good anyway. You think that you’re not getting as much out of your 24-hour allotments as you’re entitled or encouraged to get out of them.
Folklore, the group led by Elf Power member and recently relocated Philadelphia musician Jimmy Hughes, made a new record – entitled “Home Church Road” – that celebrates the time when so many things just begin to feel out of character, or that the guiding principles that you had set for yourself (or those set by the deer and the birds and the ants and more) were coming back around to give you a cold shower. They would be remiss to forget to point out to you that the people you’ve been hanging around with are shitheads, or that you’ve got your eyes on the wrong prizes. You’re doing it all wrong and the sad thing is that you’ve felt that you’ve been doing it all wrong for a long time now. Hughes, as a writer, taps into the intuitive parts of the head and the spirit that should be the loudest, but are often told to pipe down because that’s how everyone’s told to work: fit in a little bit more than you’re doing right now. “The Party,” an especially great song on the record, is a take on where society stands in its current murkiness, following false idols and creating new, false idols by the second. It takes on a society that wants to be involved, but doing so blindly, with the greatest desire to stay connected only lightly, but to everything imaginable – people, places, things, faith and themselves. Hughes sings, “And now the old folks can’t imagine why their kids have gone crazy/And their children don’t know what to do with their babies/And their children will be let down/Because the truth is just a lie that’s been passed down through the ages/To manipulate the thought that the world isn’t changing.” Most of the time, we’re just dealing with our own glassy eyes and the glazed qualities in others, there, but just barely. This, amongst other things, need to be changed.