Max Bien Kahn – Saturday Night
Just take a look at all the rich and the beautiful sitting in front of an interviewer on late-night television and getting admired by millions of viewers. Would you really like to ring any of those people up and ask them how their day went? Just imagine being friends with them by some cosmic coincidence and having to sit through never-ending monologues about which clothes or cars they decided to get recently. What a bore!
The entertainment world notices the reticence of audiences to really want to interact with these celebrities. So, once in a while, they have to find a few people that are relatable. I guess there’s nothing wrong with seeing people who would otherwise work in a gas station make it on television, but would you want to ring those up, either? What exactly would you talk to them about? And who knows what kind of trouble a Saturday night out on the town with them would entail.
Max Bien Kahn writes songs in the same way that someone tries to start a conversation in a bus station or a bar. They’re polite, but now they have to say something interesting right away; otherwise, the next few minutes will be spent in an uncomfortable silence. “Saturday Night” is a country-rock tune that feels like a firm handshake and is Max’s quick life story. It’s an approach which works. You’ll want to track Max’s phone number down, call up on a Saturday afternoon and ask what he thought of the game. It’ll make Kahn want to abstain from giving his number away anymore, sure, but at least he’s the kind of person people would like to call up for no reason at all.
Chris Lively – A Reckoning
Most people will complain, in private, about leading unexciting lives. The vast majority of them will also confess that they’d like to have moments of euphoria or of great disappointment enter their existence. This, they hope, would change the way that they feel about the world. After they’d experienced them, they could go on an look for what is truly remarkable in life every single day.
Weirdly, however, a good deal of people have experienced precisely what they’re looking for. But these potentially life-alerting events don’t always last for long. Some pass like a comet blazing in the sky. All you’ve got once this has passed is the memory and your own imagination. It’s up to you whether you’ll actually use it in order to alter your life.
Songwriter Chris Lively is not only looking for the phenomenal but looking to make use of it once it appears. “A Reckoning” was written immediately after Lively was spooked during a dream in which he was convinced to have been dropped straight into the thick of The Apocalypse. Imagined or not, such things should not go to waste. “A Reckoning” is a folk-rock song of great intensity, one in which torment and the hope for absolution meet up and collide.
