Sometimes the most mundane, time-sensitive activity can act as therapy. Let’s take watching coffee brew. The water heats. It may bubble. Drip by drip, coffee forms and expands in volume. It all moves at just the right pace. Life is no different. In time, grief and trauma may subside. Heartbreak finds relief, and there’s an ultimate awareness that, in life, things just have a way of happening in their own time.
Videos by American Songwriter
Nashville’s Desert Noises work this brewing concept around love, from its heartache through its recovery on latest single “Coffee.” Written by vocalist and guitarist Kyle Henderson and bassist Tyler Osmond as the two sat on a porch one evening, “Coffee” slow brews through all the phases of a relationship—the highs, the lows, the breakdowns, the rebound, and the realization that some things are out of our control.
Off the band’s upcoming fourth album Everything Always, out August 21, and a follow up to 2014’s 27 Ways, “Coffee” takes a trip into a more alt-psyche realm, breaching a more melodic, lo-fi-fueled narrative with Henderson’s vocals piercing through Nothing ever stays the same / I was hoping that you’d stay / Forever’s just a thing they say… We were rolling on a different wave / Nobody to blame / Because nothing ever stays the same / I know now.
“It’s talking about failed relationships and the emotions that happen with that, the weird things you do while in the depression of losing something that you had,” says Henderson. “It felt like a release to let go and therapeutic in a way, feeling like nothing ever stays the same, and realizing you do the same things over and over.”
Following a nearly six-year hiatus, Henderson, Osmond, and drummer Brennan Allen Lethbridge eventually reconvened for Everything Always. Since 27 Ways, Osmond and Lethbridge continued touring with artists like Cage the Elephant and Liz Cooper, while Henderson worked through some personal issues. At one point Henderson, who returned to the band’s native Utah following a divorce, thought he was finished making music before dipping back into writing and reconnecting with Osmond and Lethbridge in Nashville.
“I was kind of done with music and really struggling,” he says. “I’d gone through this divorce and was having a lot of drug problems and substance issues. I started a band out there, which was a solo project. I started writing and trying to bring myself out of this heavy time. Some of those songs started from there. Then I ended up going to rehab and cleaning up and came back out and was really excited to do music again.”
Produced by Bill Reynolds (Band of Horses), who helped co-write and was also very instrumental in the band’s more expansive sound, Everything Always is a new chapter in the Desert Noises story, a collection of tracks that are more melodic and sonically expand around each reflection.
“Coffee” is one of its parts. An open and raw revelation of love, “Coffee” also speaks to a more universal sense of deeply assessing and accepting one’s circumstances and that, ultimately, life can be savored again.
“It’s who you are or who we are rather,” says Henderson. “It’s the honesty and truth of what we’ve done, backed by the relaxed feel, careless and reflective, like watching a pot of coffee brew with nothing else to do.”
