Yahoo Entertainment Water from Your Eyes Break Down New Album Everyone’s Crushed Track by Track: Exclusive
The post Water from Your Eyes Break Down New Album Everyone’s Crushed Track by Track: Exclusive appeared first on Consequence.
Track by Track is our recurring feature series in which artists guide readers through each song on their latest release. Today, our May 2023 CoSign Water from Your Eyes give us insight into their Matado Records debut, Everyone’s Crushed.
New York City-based indie duo Water from Your Eyes (Consequence‘s May CoSign!) have released their latest album, the excellent Everyone’s Crushed. A record defined by perfectly constructed contradictions, Everyone’s Crushed finds Nate Amos and Rachel Brown at their best.
The album’s nine songs are the product of Amos and Brown working closer together than ever before, and the result is noticeable. From its clear pop sensibilities to its creative, wild experimentation, each song brims with exciting ideas, subtle humor, and sheer personality.
“Some of the older albums, a handful of songs were done, lyrics and all, by the time we got together to work on it,” Amos told Consequence in our CoSign profile. “Whereas this time, I would finish the instrumentals and maybe have like a single lyric or just an idea of what the lyrics could be, and then Rachel would kind of take the reins from there.”
Over Amos’ unflinching compositions, Brown delivers abstract musings that are sometimes deadpan and at other times, starkly beautiful. They present a unique perspective, one that forgoes both pessimism and optimism outright.
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“I also genuinely believe that there are no happy endings, there are only things that happen,” Brown explains. “I was at my parents’ house watching cable and there was a commercial that came on. I texted Nate that I wanted to write a song called ‘Buy My Product,’ and he texted me back that he had found an unused instrumental from months and months prior. This proves that there are perhaps happy-adjacent in-between moments after you’re born and before you die, which is probably the most you can hope for and what I plan on spending the rest of my life seeking out.”
Listen to Water from Your Eyes’ Everyone’s Crushed below, followed by Amos and Brown’s Track by Track breakdown of the record.
Water from Your Eyes are currently touring across the UK, Europe, and North America in support of Everyone’s Crushed. Grab your tickets here.
“Structure”:
“Structure” is a prelude, and since our 2021 album Structure preludes this album, I thought it would be quite funny and fitting to name it as such. It was originally a snippet of a larger sound art track called “16:17” and was written within the first week of lockdown, which one can imagine would lead to a lot of thoughts on hope, despair, God, man, etc. I feel like seeing it in its original context will do much more than whatever I can type on my phone at the airport right now. (See the entire text below.) — Rachel Brown
“Barley”:
If “Structure” is the “come inside” track, “Barley” is the “welcome to the party” track. It’s designed to be a hype-up piece, but ended up being more complicated than I initially set out to make it. The original idea was to make a one-chord/no-melody song with harmonic/dynamic implications relying entirely on a variety of different elements floating in and out of the mix. Most of the indicating elements are based on a randomly generated quarter-tone series presented at multiple speeds. I finalized the instrumental and vocal structure in February of 2020, but Rachel and I didn’t hash out the words and record their performance until late 2021. — Nate Amos
“Out There”:
The song started out with Nate’s phrase, “She plays the piano/ She stole it from the mall,” which was nice because then it was this character that I could flesh out. To me, “she” represents this woman who is stuck inside of a decaying suburban life that she resents and has since disappeared. It’s like she’s not even making enough money to get by in a place she doesn’t even want to be.
Nate tried to get me to change the word “sprawl,” but I fought him on it because it seemed like such an integral concept to the song. When we play it live and I’m feeling particularly bogged down by it all, it feels like it’s about me. Not that I’m stuck or anything, but when you don’t really want to be perceived by people, it does kind of feel like you’re drowning in them when you’re in front of a crowd night after night. That one little part always reminds me of the news. — R. Brown
“Open”:
For “Open,” Nate had a bunch of words where my words are now, and I tried to figure out what he was saying because I couldn’t hear very well, but ultimately I probably heard what I wanted to: things that validated my own perceptions. To be honest, I can’t really even hear what I’m saying as I am trying to listen back right now, but I remember at the time I was making some incredibly nebulous observations about it all, whatever they may be. I think the one thing I actually kept from Nate was the counting part, he sure loves his numbers. — R. Brown
“Everyone’s Crushed”:
In Summer 2020, I was dealing with some severe substance dependencies that were beginning to take a toll on my health that was obvious to me and the people around me. At a certain point, I attempted to quit everything except for weed and cigarettes cold turkey. I made it three days, and it sucked, but in that time I made the song “Everyone’s Crushed” (I wrote the first/last verse and in my demo, the same words were repeated throughout, Rachel expanded that stanza into the lyrics that appear on the album).
It was the first time I’d written any music without alcohol in more than a decade. While making it I was in a fair amount of physical pain coming down from and withdrawing from alcohol and the other drugs in my system. That song was the only one I made before I relapsed. — N. Amos
“True Life”:
“True Life” was my favorite to write because Nate had the instrumental and the Neil Young interpolation bridge and the rest of it he said he wanted it to be our “Short Skirt, Long Jacket” by Cake. I was just murmuring sounds in his room for like an hour.
To me, it’s about trying to understand the present reality at every level, from our social behaviors to stories we’ve been told to quantum mechanics. I guess it’s about trying to reach “true life,” if that’s even possible in this world that’s been created. I don’t really know if any of that comes through, but I think it’s a really fun song, especially to perform. Neil Young’s lawyers didn’t let us use the “Cinnamon Girl” interpolation but we got to keep “she dreams of pictures” which still references the song. — R. Brown
“Remember Not My Name”:
I made the tracks for “Open,” “True Life,” and “Remember Not My Name” over the course of a few days (or one day or a few weeks, can’t remember). To me, those tracks (4-7) are the most important on the album. Everything else serves to enhance that core movement. — N. Amos
“Remember Not My Name” is the funniest song on the album to me. Nate had the title and I filled everything else in with my unfortunately sappy feelings informed by having a crush. How embarrassing! — R. Brown
“14”:
“14” is from April/May 2020 and serves as a sort of epilogue to the main 4 tracks. It was originally written as a song for my solo project, but I was unhappy with it and thought it could drastically improve if Rachel overhauled the lyrics and sang the vocal part. They made it a lot better. The only lyric of mine that remains is the refrain, “I’m ready to throw you up.” — N. Amos
It’s probably my favorite song on the entire album. Nate had “I’m ready to throw you up” and the rest we wrote on a piece of paper which you can hear crinkle at the beginning. It’s about having conflict whether internal or external and deciding to finally let go. For me, it’s taken on so many more meanings since we wrote it. We started to play it live and it’s become attached to all of these memories I have from the last year. I think once you cry during a song, you can’t really let that go. — R. Brown
“Buy My Product”:
“Buy My Product” is, at a surface level, a jest at consumerism and an awkward attempt to get a commercial placement. But I also genuinely believe that there are no happy endings, there are only things that happen. I was at my parents’ house watching cable and there was a commercial that came on. I texted Nate that I wanted to write a song called “Buy My Product,” and he texted me back that he had found an unused instrumental from months and months prior.
This proves that there are perhaps happy-adjacent in-between moments after you’re born and before you die, which is probably the most you can hope for and what I plan on spending the rest of my life seeking out. — R. Brown
Original “Structure” Text:
one singular idea that does not exist outside of itself
my skeleton is dancing on its own
the structure of my form
i didn’t think it would end up like this
in here
so sweet
i wait
in fear
in the distance there is a soft steady stream of emergency vehicles singing their songs
reminding us that we are standing on the brink of imminent danger
and behind us there are men in powdered wigs waiting to push us off into a certainty i would rather not say
and so we will fly, or we will fall, or in the best case scenario we will fight them to the death and we will live
of serenity or solitude
to be subjugated by the indefinite
peace has never felt so violent here in my room
i just wanted to pray for the rain
wishful thinking
for sunny days
once upon a time there was a town next to a river
and on the other side of the river stood four people
their arms were crossed and their chins were pointed up towards the skies and they said
“i have heard the words spoken by he himself”
and so the townspeople ran out of their homes, their doors flung wide open, letting the flies in to devour their fruits and their children
to hear the words spoken by he himself translated by the mouths of strangers
and in time the townspeople went back to their homes to find their homes had been replaced by factories
their food had perished and their children, abandoned in their youth, were now grown and haggard, manning the machines
please don’t take it all away
i have always been an angry person and i can finally understand the rest of the world
have we ever considered communicating with each other at an emotional level?
there are no language barriers to see when someone is in pain or in love or deeply disappointed
i believe we can come to some global conclusions regarding the fate of our species through our shared tears and laughter
a mother with no mother mothers a mother i call my own
a father with no father leaves my father for months as a child all alone
my mother and my father mother and father myself
when i was 22 i lost myself and when i was 23 it was the whole wide world
there is nothing quite as beautiful as something you cannot describe
in the event of an event in which the earth as we know it stops spinning i will attempt to illustrate said object
i will use only the deepest core of my being which no one else can directly witness and i cannot tolerate to express in its most outward direction
sheepishly, i will fail and in this transit from trying to an indisputable defeat, i will realize what must be done
i will sit front and center and fully accept that i did not accomplish what i had set out to do
no one will clap and no one will understand the story that i had fumbled with my futile organs and that which holds them together and forces them to dance
i will stand up and try again until the room is empty and everyone has gone home
the closest i will ever get to my initial purpose is perfectly describing a memory of a beauty i once observed with all of my senses
and that night, after a long walk home from an inconsequential congregation, someone else, in the quiet darkness, will experience something in which there are no accurate words to articulate at a later date
and yet they will feel galvanized into pursuing the impossible in a moment of temporal ambiguity in order to make sense of what has been lost and what we can find in the residue
Water from Your Eyes Break Down New Album Everyone’s Crushed Track by Track: Exclusive
Jonah Krueger
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