Prince Harming – Sister Siri
The good part about being miserable is that you might just make a great writer. That sounds cynical or cliche, but pick up a biography on just about any of the great writers of the last couple of centuries. Let me narrow them down for you. The majority of them were depressed, wrote, drank and had trouble falling asleep or building meaningful relationships.
Harvesting your very best experiences for your art is much more difficult, of course. To begin with, it’s doubtful you’ve lived enough great times to warrant writing music around them. Secondly, happy music is not really taken seriously most of the time, anyway.
Prince Harming’s blend of sad but clever indie-pop fits just perfectly in the category of depressed writer that I was mentioning earlier. The gently psychedelic tune explores the topic of insomnia and all of the problems that arise from this. Here’s to using your difficulties to your advantage.
The Deficits – Dawgs
They say that one of the hardest things to pull off as a songwriter is to write a sad song in a major key. Neil Young did that a few times, but ol’ Neil possesses the kind of visionary songwriting skills that most of us can only dream of.
One of the styles of music that did manage to turn a highly danceable, upbeat sound into something altogether angry, aggressive and capable of expressing the deepest of woes is ska-punk. I admit that I am rarely caught jumping about the room to these rhythms, but the honesty of The Deficits has me convinced.
Like Operation Ivy or The Flatliners, this is a group of songwriters masquerading as a punk band, pretending to be a ska group. Dawgs shines in its angry, melodic hooks over a bouncy rhythmic foundation.
