It’s interesting that through the many years and changes that have shaped Fayetteville, Arkansas band Brother Moses, this quartet hasn’t marked major creative milestones in cities like Los Angeles or Miami. The way the group’s early music and now latest single, “Sam & Diane” sounds, one would understandably presume some influence from places inundated with sunshine and a laid back atmosphere.
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“Sam & Diane” comes just ahead of Brother Moses’s next album, Desperation Pop, which is due for release tomorrow, March 6, 2020, pre-save it here.
“Sam & Diane” is
initially propelled forward by the steady double thump of a defined kick drum
beat. However, the song is ultimately
left to its own gradually unfolding devices, thanks to contrast from an
electric guitar tone that’s been given a bright, clean sound and been doused in
phrase-sustaining reverb. The added effect of occasional bent notes further
pushes the song even beyond indie pop and toward the character of classic surf
pop. As fate would have it however, front vocalist and songwriter, James
Lockhart, was much closer to a cold mountain top than a wave-filled shoreline
when the idea for the song hit him.“I was writing the lyrics to [“Sam &
Diane”] when we on a trip to Colorado as a band, [and I was] just sitting up in
the top room of this cabin thinking about a big cyclical relationship I had
ended a couple years prior,” says Lockhart.
Frankly though, the song’s carefree treatment of its guitar melodies are where
the imaginings of surfy beach life start and end. In reality, the song’s
looseness with melody and the application of an effect that delays the fade of
notes, comes across as a brilliant, non-verbal nod toward Lockhart’s desire to
delay the ending of a relationship that never seems to fully settle down.
I don’t
think this is how love works
But we’re beautiful and young
So we can let a little time go
“I wrote [“Sam & Diane’s] words from the perspective of the late stages of
the dying connection between two people, where you start to realize that it’s
over but you’re not quite ready to accept it yet, Lockhart says.
In turn, the
singer’s own life experiences then parallel the history of the song’s namesake
couple from a different piece of
Lockhart’s past.
“[While songwriting,] for some reason, my brain immediately made the connection
between that relationship and the one from Cheers – the
will-they won’t-they Sam & Diane relationship that drives the show’s plot
for the early seasons.”
The culmination
of “Sam & Diane” really brings together all the emotions that impacted
Lockhart as a young kid watching Cheers, a young man in a struggling
relationship, and ultimately the person he is today, able to see the past for
what it was and how it influenced him moving forward. At first listening
glance, “Sam & Diane” sounds like music meant to reflect ease and fun but
look just a little closer and its layers of autobiographical introspection show
there’s plenty of deeper purpose to Brother Moses’s music. For Lockhart, what
“Sam & Diane” does for him is crystal clear.
“Writing this song felt like the final step in closing that loop and giving myself that final bit of closure.”
