The power of friendship.
Videos by American Songwriter
It can buoy, it can bond and enliven and it can, if the friendship ends on bad terms, feel devastating.
These are the components of the Seattle-born band THEM, and their newest single and accompanying music video, “She Says.”
“The song ‘She Says’ is about losing a friend,” says THEM co-founder Ellie Vann, “and how that can be just as painful as a breakup. It touches on the emotions of betrayal, love, and broken trust.”
The four-piece’s new song delivers this idea well and does so with rich harmonies and rollicking indie rock sensibilities. It’s a track composed by friends about friendship that indeed leads to new discoveries. And since its writing, it’s been a “good luck charm” for the group.
“Hudson wrote most of the song during 8th grade after having sort of fall out with one of her closest friends,” explains Vann. “It was a really hard situation for her and writing the song really helped her get through it. After writing the song on her own in her bedroom, she brought it to the band and Maia wrote the drum part, I wrote the piano melody and Thompson hopped on bass. Since then, we have played ‘She Says’ as the first song in our set for every single show because it’s kinda our good luck charm.”
THEM, which formed organically in the basement studio of a Seattle music school, coalesced naturally and even had the support of a local rock hero.
“After spending a couple of years jamming on cover songs in the basement of Mode Music Studios with our instructor, Eva Walker of The Black Tones, we finally started experimenting with writing our OWN songs,” says Vann. “We then immediately fell in love with writing songs both on our own and as a group. We’ve kinda naturally just been banging out original songs ever since.”
And perhaps the best part of the group is that they know themselves and know what they want to create. They know their audience and they’re authentic to it all.
“The music our band creates together is very relatable, especially to the average teenage girl experiencing the life of growing up with crushes, friends, and frenemies,” says Vann. “We feel like our music has definitely grown through the aging of our teenage years but our fans have too so it’s kinda perfect.”
Vann continues, “We really want to convey a relatable situation that happens in friendships, especially growing up. Although Hudson wrote the lyrics and story behind it, when she brought it to the band, we all fell in love with the song because we related to it so much in our individual lives with friendships we had at the time.”
Check out THEM’s new single and video below:
Photo courtesy THEM
