Track By Tracks: NeoRomantics - Homecoming (2018)

1. Gold Plated:

Gold Plated sort of picked up where the end of Dearly Beloved left off in a lot of ways. When the melodrama of The Dearly Beloved era wore off, for me, it took a while to discover who I was as a writer again. It's a song about learning how to live healthier mentally and letting go of relationships that aren't beneficial to your growth and progress as a person. It’s about how outgrowing friendships and relationships that aren't healthy is tough but being able to acknowledge that the things you found most valuable at one point in your life are the things keeping you from happiness now. It was the song I had to write before I could commit to the rest of the EP.

2. Concentrated:

Concentrated is about leaving space for growth and learning how to repair that sort of cynical view of relationships that seems to manifest. I kept encountering the same trends in relationships and the ways that a person can deny the love that they deserve because they are just too damaged. It's frustrating trying to nurture that because it's so easy to let your past experiences subconsciously dictate the way that you communicate and function in relationships.

I suppose it's just a reminder to open up to love and allow yourself to be vulnerable.

3. From Ella's:

I wrote bits and pieces of From Ella's on tour last year. We've toured a bit and I guess it's about the insecurity that sort of sets in after being away for a minute, from the person you are with.

Sometimes it feels overwhelming, that sort of disconnect, because for me, I don't naturally balance the two very well. I have to sort of commit mentally to one or the other and I guess it's all about learning how to nurture your relationships as well as your career, simultaneously. I set the song in Chicago, one of our favorite spots on tour and because I felt like the imagery would be really vibrant. We wrestled around with the song title quite a bit but landed on From Ella's.

Ella is our friend Casey's dachshund, who we stay with every time we are up in that area. It was an homage to Chicago and a really good dog.

4. TMBMIL:

This song is really unique because it was really a last minute call for us. We toyed around with the concept of an interlude but I figured that it was going to be more production than actual song writing. I had the line "worth paying attention to" sort of rolling through my head for a few weeks and when I explained that vision to Kyle, our engineer, we wound up diving right in. I think he and I tracked the entire song in an hour or so. He and I basically produced it together from scratch. It sort of brought the record back down to earth there in the middle and I think it gives some context to the more ambient production on the rest of the record.

5. Issues:

Issues was a little tricky in writing because I actually wrote it as an acoustic song over a year ago. It took us almost eight months to figure out what to do with it, but once we did, and I got the concept in front of the band, the song wrote itself in less than an hour. Lyrically, it's so heavy. I found myself encountering the same issues in relationships, and witnessing first hand the effect that your parents, in this case, your father in particular, can have on the way that you learn to love and trust people. I kept experiencing the same trends, but sort of from the outside looking in. I guess I felt like even though I had a different experience all together, it gave me sort of a rare opportunity to write about a really heavy, sensitive subject with complete objectivity. I touch on sort of the empathy that you feel in that situation as well as the frustration you feel being on the other side trying to help someone navigate it.

Parker Coffman, the guy who shot our EP photos and I went out and left the concept pretty open. I had liked some of the work that he had done shooting early twentieth century houses which we have loads of in Tulsa. I also I knew that I wanted to incorporate the roses, a theme that we've held onto for a moment. While we were out shooting we ran across an old house completely painted black and it contrasted so well with the white roses on the whiskey bottle. Parker grabbed some amazing shots and I felt like the imagery and symbolism there was really strong. It just sort of happened.