Changing Seasons: Grandaddy brings their odd rock to Seattle’s Showbox
Changing Seasons: Grandaddy brings their odd rock to Seattle’s Showbox
By Todd Arkley, West Coast Kickball League Commissioner
The sound of Grandaddy brings you to an odd summer – it’s a dreamy and very, very hazy green field with a blue, sparsely clouded sky. Plenty of washed guitar, a lazy pace, and the element of deep electronic/studio manipulations. Within the band’s beautiful music, however, you start to pick out the lyrics and voice of Jason Lytle, vocalist and songwriter, and the mood changes. The more you listen, the odder this summer vibe becomes. In fact, the singing begins to add tones of displacement and melancholy to both the songs and to a weird summer.
Changing Seasons: Grandaddy brings their odd rock to Seattle’s Showbox
By Todd Arkley, West Coast Kickball League Commissioner
The sound of Grandaddy brings you to an odd summer – it’s a dreamy and very, very hazy green field with a blue, sparsely clouded sky. Plenty of washed guitar, a lazy pace, and the element of deep electronic/studio manipulations. Within the band’s beautiful music, however, you start to pick out the lyrics and voice of Jason Lytle, vocalist and songwriter, and the mood changes. The more you listen, the odder this summer vibe becomes. In fact, the singing begins to add tones of displacement and melancholy to both the songs and to a weird summer.
Beautiful and sad? Not quite. It’s closer to beautiful and disconnected. Grandaddy thinks too much and cannot explain the world in simple, easy terms. So, if you live and love in Seattle, and your summer is slowly fading away, Grandaddy might provide you with a strange comfort.
Here’s this, from “The Final Push to the Sum” – “Most everything I see, becomes a blur to me, and I’m wasted because the fast pace is too much”. The lyrics, especially on their new album, Sumday, are meditations on confusion and sadness. “Trouble with people like me, tie ‘em down and then they vanish instantly” – “Lost on Yer Merry Way”.
Grandaddy aren’t simply depressed about politics, nature, or war. Something more fundamental concerns them – you could call it spirituality or maybe just plain existence. How does this world work? How do its people make it from one day to the next despite increasingly complex technology that enables escalating and more refined methods of insuring that none of us ever have to truly interact, with each other or, more importantly, with the conditions that make up our lives? Grandaddy sings and sings and sings about this disconnect, this loss of soul.
So why see them now? In Seattle, as you know, fall and winter are inexorably coming back. These seasons don’t give each other much space – they bleed into each other enough to simply create the “grey days” (to borrow an expression from my dad). We really only have two seasons here, sun and grey. So as we move between seasons, our music must change as well – more melancholia, more texture, more of a rained-out pace. On Friday, October 17th, at the Showbox, Grandaddy will be there to help you through the gloom, along with Elbow and the Starlight Mints.
Listen to their music carefully, remember sunnier times, and think of the grey days ahead. Take the complicated thoughts of Grandaddy and let the midpaced, misplaced music flow, and let it prepare you for the cold Seattle season that lies ahead. 