Titus Andronicus Break Down New Album The Will to Live Track By Track: Exclusive
The post Titus Andronicus Break Down New Album The Will to Live Track By Track: Exclusive appeared first on Consequence.
Track by Track is a recurring feature offering artists the opportunity to dig into every song on their latest release. Today, Titus Andronicus break down their new album, The Will to Live.
New Jersey rock collective Titus Andronicus have returned with their seventh album, The Will to Live, on Friday (September 30th). Three years after the release of An Obelisk, the group’s latest effort wastes no time getting in your face with a grandiose array of heavy and emphatic instrumentals, which only amplify the thought-provoking and poignant songwriting.
The Will to Live doesn’t wait to establish itself. Titus Andronicus make it a point of diving in head first without warning, yielding a product that grips listeners off the rip. The seven-minute runtime of “An Anomaly” is far from long-winded, as frontman Patrick Stickles’ absorbing lyrics of God and the Devil sang with his raspy vocals are just as captivating as the powerful guitar solo halfway through.
The dynamic talent of Stickles is best exemplified with “Baby Crazy,” a meteoric-paced track that sees the frontman give a bleak yet realistic, sincere synopsis of the world around him. Rather than fail to rise to the song’s hurried tempo, Stickles matches it, adding even more weight to a promptly-delivered poem.
The liveliness of The Will to Live is its strength, as the energy of Titus Andronicus never manages to falter throughout the project’s anthemic tracks. The incorporation of saxophone on “Give Me Grief” adds a shade of blues to the punk sound established on the record. And with a verse from the band’s former drummer, Eric Harm, “Give Me Grief” is a moment that couples past and present.
Titus Andronicus Share New Single “Give Me Grief” Featuring Former Drummer Eric Harm: Stream
Amid a global pandemic and a politically-altered climate, there’s much on the minds of many, and Titus Andronicus addresses the thoughts of many. The angst felt throughout is palpable thanks in part to the effort’s focus on crafting a thematic project. With a cerebral approach to its songwriting united with bombastic and ambitious production, The Will to Live encapsulates 2022, a perfectly-timed release that may provide answers to those in need.
Titus Andronicus are currently on the road in support of The Will to Live, with the first gig of the tour taking place tonight (September 30th) in Carrboro, NC. See the full schedule here, and grab your tickets now via Ticketmaster.
Below, give The Will to Live a spin, and check out Stickles’ exclusive breakdown.
“My Mother Is Going to Kill Me”:
As we will learn throughout the album, the titular “mother” of this song is not my literal mother (who is a wonderful woman who has always only wanted the best for me), but our common mother, Mother Earth. When I say that she “is going to kill me,” I am only observing that all life on earth ends in some form of violence, whether it is one creature killing another out of hunger or anger, the body succumbing to a foreign pathogen or disease, or simply destroying itself with time. The joy of life and the preciousness of all that lives comes packaged with the inevitable terror of death — this is one of many thorny bargains that the album will discuss.
This track begins with a sound collage I created out of some of my own field recordings and other effects I sourced from the BBC Sound Effects Library, which is a great resource. You will first hear a peaceful night in the forest, happy frogs and bugs croaking and chirping away, when suddenly a distant siren disrupts the tranquility, awakening a throng of wailing cats (portrayed by the very cats with whom I live, Ghostface and the Chef), only for them to be interrupted by the unmistakable sound of a bomb (most likely an atomic bomb) plummeting to the earth — out from the flames of the ensuing explosion, the album begins in earnest.
This sonic tableau is meant to demonstrate a nightmare which haunts so many of us, one wherein the helpless and innocent creatures that we have sworn to protect become painfully aware of imminent danger and cry out for help, even as we know there is nothing we can do to save them. I have found, though, that loving any living thing requires accepting this sort of terror as a distinct possibility — again, a thorny bargain indeed.
Musically speaking, this track was intended to act as an overture, something to which we might raise the curtain on The Will to Live, which musically nods to the Who (who would occasionally do that very thing) but especially the extended intro to “Sweet Jane” from Lou Reed’s live Rock and Roll Animal album, one of my favorites. More than one person told me that our new album sounded like Alice Cooper, which perplexed me, as I have never been a particularly ardent fan of his, until I remembered that the Alice Cooper band backs Mr. Reed on that live album. Go figure!
“(I’m) Screwed”:
It is on this song that we properly meet our unnamed narrator, who is a fictional character that I invented, but it is admittedly not very different from the real me in many ways. I prefer to use this device of the narrator lately (I did it on 2015’s The Most Lamentable Tragedy and 2019’s An Obelisk also) because it allows me to faithfully represent and validate moments along my personal journey without presenting them as necessarily “how I feel” in the present moment, or worse, some sort of advice to the listener, my personal “guide to life.”
This song in particular finds the narrator in a place of great frustration and alienation, an emotional state I have occupied many times. By utilizing the narrator, it is my hope that I can tell the listener it is okay to be frustrated or alienated, but not necessarily that this is a permanent state of being to which one should aspire.
The narrator speaks to an ambiguous “father” figure, which could be some sort of divine entity, some universal creator, or it could be the larger societal institutions which dictate our lives. It is certainly not my own father (another great guy), who had to confirm with me that I was not calling him out with the lyric “Now I have to ask you Dad, if that’s how bad you be/ Then how you gonna turn the screws on me?” I told him what he already knew, that there’s levels to this shit. He did turn the screws on me fairly hard back when I was a trouble-making teen, but I lately thank heaven that he did, or who knows how I would have turned out.
Musically, this song was inspired by the great Philadelphia rock band the Hooters (perhaps the least remembered band to have performed at Live Aid), particularly their immortal classic “And We Danced.” “Black and White” by the dB’s was in there also, as was “Last Night” by the Scientists. There’s a lot of great songs out there, folks!
“I Can Not Be Satisfied”:
Here’s my first attempt to just really hammer the nail as far as explaining my symbology. Consider these lyrics, and tell me that I’m trying to be obscure: “Single mother/ Deadbeat dad/ Bastard baby/ Boy gone bad.” And then I say, “God the father/ Mother earth/ Nature’s temple/ Satan’s church.”
You can’t accuse me of talking about just any old mother and father here — it’s only the third song and I’m doing all the unpacking like I just moved in the place.
Cinema fans will remember the scene from Lars Von Trier’s 2009 masterpiece Anti Christ, where Charlotte Gainsbourg says “nature is Satan’s church.” Including that phrase here is both a tip of the hat to one of my very favorite films, and also another indicator that we are going to spend some time discussing the brutal realities of our natural world.
The title, “I Can Not Be Satisfied,” is of course a nod to the Rolling Stones, the Replacements, and innumerable pre-war blues legends, but it also speaks to an element of the titular “will to live.” If complacency is death, then the unquenchable thirst which so bothers our narrator must be working to keep him alive. “That’s why I don’t lay down and die,” I sing, and it’s true — in part, I keep going because I don’t have everything I want yet, though hopefully after this album cycle is over, I will, and then some.
“Bridge and Tunnel”:
Along with “69 Stones” (which we will discuss later), “Bridge and Tunnel” is one of the oldest songs on the record — we very briefly made a halfhearted attempt at recording it for our last album, which was a good idea to abandon, as it serves a more useful purpose here. Sometimes at the beginning of the writing of an album, I will look around me and see which songs I have on hand, and any thematic commonalities they share can end up guiding me through the rest of the process. In this case, the two songs I had shared an interest in (you guessed it) the violent and brutal qualities of the natural world.
You will notice the narrator speaks here in more of an antiquated tongue, sort of an Olde English thing (not the malt liquor), throwing around words like “thee” that I don’t usually utilize in my everyday conversations. I felt this was appropriate given the Celtic-derived qualities of the music (Thin Lizzy did a version of this on songs like “Black Rose (A Rock Legend)” and “Whiskey in the Jar”), but it also allowed me to do one of the “past life regression” songs I sometimes enjoy — The Most Lamentable Tragedy had a few of these also.
I permit myself this indulgence in the hopes that I can illustrate that the issues and themes I discuss are not always unique to modern times, that they very often precede it by centuries. 2010’s The Monitor did this also with all of its talk about the Civil War, a conflict which often seems very far in the past but whose underlying causes are very much at work today.
The narrator (or perhaps his ancestor) sees evil everywhere he looks in whatever “modern day” is to him, and wishes to escape to a more idyllic natural world, some sort of Garden of Eden, outside the confines and constrictions of society — he even hopes that he can entice a love interest to accompany him. This love interest, however, being far more practical and realistic than he is, points out to him that the natural world of which he dreams has been destroyed by the unstoppable advance of industry. It is then that the narrator realizes there is truly no escape, and so we conclude Part One.
I had the pleasure on this song of singing it as a duet with the fabulously talented Josée Caron of the great Canadian rock band Partner. We did about 30 shows with them in the autumn of 2019 and they are one of my favorite bands working today. We’ll hear a little more about her later on…
“Grey Goo”:
“Grey goo” is an apocalypse hypothesis which supposes the eventual creation of a self-replicating nanobot which will be given the direct to self-replicate as many times as it possibly can, eventual resulting in the whole Earth being covered and, indeed, consumed by these nanobots, this “goo” — they call this process “ecophagy,” which our friends at Wikipedia describe as “the literal consumption of the ecosystem.” Scary stuff, huh?
In the previous track, it was pointed out to our narrator that there is no longer (if ever there was) some untouched paradise to which he can flee the society which chaffs him so — similarly, if ever they create this sort of nanobot, we will have nowhere to hide from it either.
Musically, this song was inspired by those giants of Japanese psychedelia, Flower Travellin’ Band — particularly the opening title track of their astounding 1971 album Satori, truly an incredible achievement in rock music.
“Dead Meat”:
I’ll start off by stating the obvious and getting it right out of the way: this song is a tribute to the music of Nirvana.
There is a popular preconception in rock criticism that the rise of Nirvana “killed hair metal,” the rock genre exemplified by Motley Crüe/Poison/etc. I would argue that, by the time Nevermind rocketed to the top of the charts, “hair metal” was already dead, and that Nirvana actually killed the very thing which killed “hair metal,” something which I call “Ultimate Rock.”
“Ultimate Rock” is a strain of rock music which is completely devoid of modesty. It strives towards cinematic grandeur and Wagnerian bombast, seeking to expand the boundaries of rock music even as it lusts after mass appeal. Who’s Next was the Big Bang of “Ultimate Rock,” but figures such as Jim Steinman (author of “Total Eclipse of the Heart” as well as all your favorite Meat Loaf songs) and Robert “Mutt” Lange (producer of Def Leppard’s Hysteria, AC/DC’s Back in Black, Shania Twain’s Come On Over, and so many others) made their own significant breakthroughs in the ‘70s and ‘80s, respectively.
“Ultimate Rock” reached its apex in the early ‘90s with releases such as Metallica’s self-titled “black” album and Guns N’ Roses’ Use Your Illusion 1 & 2, as well as Waking Up the Neighbours by Bryan Adams (another “Mutt” Lange production), an album which had the misfortune of sharing a release date (September 24th, 1991) with Nevermind, the album which made sure it would never be “cool” again for rock stars to view themselves as semi-divine beings with the ability to change the world if only they would take a big enough swing.
All that being said, Nirvana is one of the greatest bands ever, so if Titus Andronicus was going to make an album which called back to a pre-Nirvana set of standards for rock musicians, it was only fitting that we set a “Drain You” style chord progression to the tempo of “Territorial Pissings” and scream over it until we coughed blood (figuratively speaking). I hoped that putting in a bunch of key changes and an instrumental bridge indebted to Trans-Siberian Orchestra would balance things out and keep the song from being a total ripoff.
Lyrically, “Dead Meat” finds the narrator wishing desperately for the escape that he knows is impossible. Here, he is at his most fearful, and the terror he perceives all around him has driven him to the brink of madness.
I sing this song as a duet with my dear friend Liam Betson, who is the other guitarist in Titus Andronicus besides myself, who also puts out excellent albums under the name Liam the Younger, which you can find on Bandcamp or any of your preferred DSPs. Though he is very prolific, his catalog is far from redundant, and all of his releases are well worth a listen.
“An Anomaly”:
When I wrote the lyrics to this song back in the summer of 2019, I was listening extensively to the then-new Purple Mountains album, the final statement from the great David Berman, and I elected to attempt writing a song with the sort of cadence he would use and the gravitas for which he was so beloved. To offset that strong influence, I put it to the sort of four-on-the-floor drumbeat ZZ Top utilized so well on Eliminator and had the aforementioned Josée Caron of Partner (one of the great guitar-slingers of our time) rip a righteous solo in the middle of it.
The titular “anomaly” refers once again to the violence of our natural world, which we must recognize as being part of “God’s Plan,” for lack of a better term. The spider who catches the fly in its web does not do so out of malice, any more than the lion who stalks the wildebeest. These are not evil deeds — they are natural and necessary. We humans, too, are programmed towards violence, since it was, at one time, advantageous to our survival, but that is no longer the world we occupy. Freed from the “food chain,” our violent impulses now become more and more insidious in their obsolescence.
Even worse, we are emboldened and enabled by the technological advances which continue to enhance our destructive capabilities, up to and including the atom bomb. We have become the singular animal that kills when it doesn’t have to. If that weren’t frightening enough, we are the only animal which has the capacity to literally destroy the Earth and all life that calls it home. That’s fairly anomalous, wouldn’t you say?
“Give Me Grief”:
I’ll keep these last few explanations short and sweet, because I have to be up early tomorrow to take the van to yet another mechanic before our record release show in Carrboro, NC. I’ve also had a few beers and I intend to have a few more.
The third and last final of the record was written following the unexpected death of my cousin Matt Miller in March of 2021, and it was one attempt that I made to process the terrible loss of my dearest friend, a truly cataclysmic event in our family.
“Give Me Grief” is a song which reckons with another one of those thorny bargains I mentioned, and the pricks of this one cut deeper than any other. It is a cruel paradox of life that, when you open your heart to the good things like love, family, and joy, you also make yourself vulnerable to the worst pain imaginable. This unavoidable truth leads you to a crossroads where you can either choose to close yourself off to the good things in life to avoid that horrible pain (a lonely and empty existence, I would imagine), or you open yourself to all that life offers, with the faith that you get the better end of the bargain when you do so.
I have chosen the latter whenever possible, and not for one second would I consider trading away the wonderful memories I have of Matt from our 34 years together so that I might have avoided the agony of his sudden loss. Thusly do I ask, “God to give me grief,” as I sing, knowing that “it’s needed for the recipe.”
To that same end, this song is a duet between myself and Eric Harm, who is the former drummer of Titus Andronicus (2007-2015). Though he is not a credentialed member of the band anymore, he remains a treasured friend, and I have been reminded recently that, at my age, old friends are not so much of a renewable resource. When you have a friend like Eric, you should take every opportunity to chase a shared bliss, and there’s no better medium for that than that old time rock and roll, as far as we’re concerned. Be on the lookout for music soon from his new project, Eric Harm & the $100.
“Baby Crazy”:
This song requires no explaining, as the lyrics are my best attempt to explain all the other songs on the album. I sing: “When I say the baby’s going crazy, you should know that I’m the baby/ You’re the baby too, in that way, we’re the same/ And the father is a conception that’s beyond my comprehension/ But it’s one I gotta mention ‘cuz its influence is evident.”
What more can I say? We’ll get to “the mother” in a moment, but that should properly close the book on two of the three major symbols I utilize throughout the album.
For some reason, a scene from the first episode of Time of Your Life, the short-lived late-’90s TV drama starring Jennifer Love Hewitt, has always stuck with me. Her character Sarah is thrust unwittingly onto a karaoke stage and is made to sing “It’s the End of the World as We Know It” by REM. Because there are so many lyrics in such quick succession, she is unable to keep up, giving everyone a good laugh at the tight spot in which she’s been put, herself included. “Baby Crazy” was my attempt at creating such a song that would baffle karaoke singers in years hence, or, more ideally, give the boldest among them the chance to really knock them dead.
“All Through the Night”:
“All Through the Night” is where I try to explicate the meaning of “the mother,” and to my mind, she is the font from which we derive “the will to live” which gives the album its name. That same will is that which is “calling all through the night,” calling on each of us to survive, to carry on, to endure the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
I borrowed this title from Lou Reed, who has a wonderful song called “All Through the Night” on his fantastic and criminally under-appreciated 1979 album The Bells. We then borrowed the temp from “In a Big Country” by (who else?) Big Country, and hey, the rest is history. This rock music stuff is really as easy as combining chocolate and peanut butter.
“We’re Coming Back”:
I just felt the first drops of rain down here in North Carolina, with the knowledge that in mere moments, we will begin to feel the force of Hurricane Ian, so I really better wrap this up. I didn’t even write this song — it comes from the incredible 1982 album Shock Troops by the second-wave English punk (or “oi”) band Cock Sparrer, home to very possibly the strongest a-side in all of punk, with this particular song batting cleanup in the five spot.
Titus Andronicus has been covering this song all the way back to 2009, but I wanted to include it with this album for its sentiment “remember: out there, somewhere, you’ve got a friend and you’ll never walk alone again.” My experiences these last several years, both joyful and sorrowful, have led me to the realization that, as much as we think of ourselves as individuals, we are also merely component cells in a larger organism, which is life on Earth. One day, however many billion years ago, there was no life on Earth, and the next day, there was. No one knows how it happened, but it did, and it continues to happen now. Each of us is the tiniest of footnotes in a far more massive story than the ones in which we cast ourselves as we go about our business.
One could cite this self-evident truth to argue for the meaninglessness of our lives, but I find it very comforting, especially when I think of my loved ones who have left us. They were cells in the larger organism, much like you and me, and though they are gone, the organism endures, so are they really gone at all? In my more tender-hearted hours, I like to think not, and to allow myself to believe that I too, as Cock Sparrer promised, will never walk alone.
“69 Stones”:
The Will to Live is the first Titus Andronicus album to derive its title from the lyrics to one of its component songs, and that song is “69 Stones,” the oldest composition here, which you may have heard on our 2016 live album Stadium Rock, or our 2018 demos compilation A Reductive Scoff. I’ve been looking for the proper place to slot this song for many years, and I am pleased that it’s finally found it’s “forever home,” as we adopters of animals sometimes say.
This is the first song Titus Andronicus has ever released which is entirely live, with no overdubs or edits. We did it late one night at the lavishly appointed Hotel 2 Tango recording studio in Montreal, with our producer Howard Bilerman playing the brushed snare (in an effort to approximate “Androgynous” by the Replacements, another one of my very favorite songs), Jake Clemons of the world-famous E Street Band on piano, R.J. Gordon and Liam Betson of Titus Andronicus fame singing harmonies, and of course myself singing lead and playing a bit of harmonica on the coda. It was quite the magical evening in the studio, even if what you hear on the record is probably “take 17” or something close to it, which is not always a fun phrase to hear over the talkback mic.
Titus Andronicus Break Down New Album The Will to Live Track By Track: Exclusive
Joe Eckstein
Popular Posts
Post Malone in Hospital After Experiencing "Stabbing Pain" on Side of Body
Foo Fighters Complete Lineup for Taylor Hawkins Los Angeles Tribute Concert
Foo Fighters Honor Taylor Hawkins with a Second Six-Hour Musical Lovefest in L.A.: Review
Shakira Facing Eight Years in Prison, $24 Million Fine for Tax Fraud in Spain
