Songs of the Times

In this essay I shall be discussing the bands Echosmith and High Valley.  Joining the two together as a single topic will probably seem rather peculiar to anyone familiar with both groups.  The former band hails from the city of Chino, thirty miles east of Los Angeles in the state of California’s San Bernardino County in the American republic.   It specializes in the kind of music that is called “indie pop” or “alt pop.”   The latter band is from the province of Alberta here in the Dominion of Canada.   Their home community is Blumenort, which like the Blumenorts in Manitoba and Saskatchewan is a small, unincorporated, farming community founded by Mennonites.   It is located in Mackenzie County in the north of the province, near the hamlet of La Crete which is also a Mennonite community.   To provide a more familiar landmark, this is about thirty miles north of Edmonton.   High Valley performs country and western music of various styles and varieties.  One might be tempted to say that in the universe of music, these bands come from completely different worlds.

 

The reason I have decided to write about the two bands together is that they have both released new songs this year.   In the case of Echosmith they released an entire album, their second studio album “Lonely Generation.”   High Valley has not released a full studio album this year yet, but they have released an EP with six tracks, including the single that shares its title “Grew Up On That” which has received a lot of playtime on country radio.    It is this single and the title song from the Echosmith album which I will be focusing on specifically.  Both songs strike me as saying something which, due to the times in which we live, is very important and relevant.   I do not mean that they are saying the same thing.  Indeed, the contrast between what the two songs are saying is possibly greater than the one drawn in the previous paragraph between the two bands. 

 

Before examining them at greater length, however, it might be interesting to note a few curious similarities between the two groups.

 

Both groups consist of siblings.   High Valley, the older of the two groups, is composed of the Rempel brothers, Brad and Curtis.   Echosmith is composed of the Sierota siblings, the brothers Noah and Graham as well as a sister Sydney who is the lead vocalist of the group.   Another similarity is that both groups saw the departure of a brother and founding member in the last few years.     In the case of High Valley it was Bryan Rempel about six years ago and in the case of Echosmith it was Jamie Sierota about two years ago.   

 

The most successful songs so far of both bands were released in 2013-2014.    Echosmith’s debut studio album came out in 2013.   The band had been formed about four years previously and they had originally performed covers of songs by other artists but this album, “Talking Dreams”, featured original songs written by the band members with their father Jeffrey David who is also their producer.   The best known song from the album was “Cool Kids”, which reached the thirteenth spot on Billboard’s Hot 100.   High Valley, which as mentioned is the older of the two groups having been formed in the late 1990s, released their fourth studio album the following year, entitled “Country Line”.   It contained ten tracks, six of which charted in the top ten for Canadian country as radio singles.   One of these, “Make You Mine”, in which they were joined by Ricky Skaggs, made the top five.  Both songs grew in popularity in the years after they were originally released, and both were certified Platinum – triple Platinum in the case of “Cool Kids”.

 

Now let us come back to the present year and take a look at the songs the bands have just released.   We will start with Echosmith.

 

As mentioned Echosmith’s “Lonely Generation” album was released earlier this year.   The title song was the first track on the album.   Like the songs on their first album, and the rest of the songs on this one for that matter, it was written by the siblings with their father and producer Jeffrey David.  

 

Here is the song’s chorus:

We’re the lonely generation
A pixelated version of ourselves
Empty conversations
I’ve disconnected, now I’m by myself

 

What jumps out about these words is how they well they describe what so many people have been experiencing since March of this year – the loneliness and isolation forced upon us all by the bat flu lockdowns.   Upon hearing those words for the first time, one could easily come to the conclusion that Mr. David and his children wrote the song during lockdown to express how they feeling about the whole thing.

 

The conclusion would be wrong, however.   Unlike “The Quarantine Song”, written by C. W. “Buddy” Kalb Jr. and performed by legendary country and western funny man Ray Stevens, containing the excellent lines “two more weeks of quarantine/will be the death of me” this song was not written about the lockdown or even in the lockdown.   The album was released in early January.  

 

The song was actually written as a commentary on social media, computers, smartphones, etc. and the culture, if it can be called that, surrounding them.   This is the band’s own explanation of the song.  Sidney Sierota said “It came out of a really interesting conversation about social media and how addicted we are to our phones” and “Conceptually, it felt really important. We always have a message in our music. For how connected we are, we end up feeling lonelier. Our generation needs to acknowledge it’s a problem and be more intentional in daily life”.

 

What I find very interesting about the lyrics and the explanation of them is the contrast with which the same phenomenon was been portrayed since the beginning of the bat flu lockdown.  The freedom-hating Communist swine who have placed us all under house arrest and lied to us about how it is all for our own good to keep us “safe” have presented social media to us as a lifeline, a savior to keep us from the loneliness and isolation that they have forced upon us with these unjust and wicked measures.   “Stay connected” we have been told, not meaning any kind of normal human connection since all of those have been banned, but plugging ourselves into what is essentially the Matrix and becoming, in the band’s words “pixelated versions of ourselves.”   Echosmith’s depiction of social media and its effects is by far the more honest and truthful of the two.  

 

Lockdowns produce loneliness, disconnect, and isolation.   Social media produces loneliness, disconnect, and isolation.   Does this not tell us that suggesting that we alleviate the isolation caused by lockdowns with social media is the equivalent of suggesting that we try to douse a fire with gasoline?   Of course, the reality is that it is the lockdown that is adding fuel to the fire of loneliness, disconnect, and isolation which, as the song, coming out when it did, demonstrates, was already present prior to the lockdown.

 

What we find in the Echosmith song, therefore, is commentary on one of the important social problems of the day which has been made doubly relevant by events that transpired shortly after the song was released.

 

High Valley’s “Grew Up On That” provides us with something extremely different.   It does not discuss the social problems of the present day but rather the good life of yesteryear.   Anyone who was raised on a farm in a small rural community in the prairie provinces of Canada, or, for that matter, the states of the American Midwest, will likely find something in this song’s nostalgic lyrics that he can relate to, especially if he had any sort of Christian upbringing.  

 

The lengthy chorus depicts the rural way of life in many of its aspects, from the sacred to the mundane and from the hard work to the equally hard play.    It goes:

 

Them Main Streets, them tractor seats
We put some country miles on
Them Friday nights, wide-open skies
Back Forty, gettin' wild on
Sweet by-and-by, I saw the light
In a little white church way in the back
Grew up, grew up, grew up on that

Ricky Skaggs on the vinyl
King James on the Bible
Feet on the dash with ourselves in the back
We grew up on that

 

 

(I call all of the above the chorus because that is how it is so designated in every copy of the lyrics that I have been able to find.   Just from listening to the song I would have taken the lines prior to the mention of Ricky Skaggs to be a bridge and everything that follows to be the actual chorus.)

 

 

There are also two short four-line verses.   The first which opens the song is a recital of parental injunctions that the Rempels undoubtedly heard repeatedly while growing up, about such things as showing reverence at meal time, treating their dates with respect, fiscal responsibility and social respectability.  The second verse references various staples of rural living such as “barbed wire” and “bonfires” and “one red light blinking.”

 

 

Obviously this song is not intended to be social commentary in the same way as the Echosmith song.   It is a very personal collection of reminiscences, autobiographical in nature and sentimental in tone.   The second verse, however, ends with a line that in expressing the nostalgic spirit of the song, does convey a message of sorts.  That line is:

 

 

Had it so good, didn’t know how good we had it, oh.

 

 

These words, removed from their context, can be understood in two rather different ways.   They can be taken in the eulogistic sense of “we didn’t realize what we had until it is gone” or they can be taken in the thankful sense of “in the wisdom that comes with age we have grown to appreciate all that was given us.”    Taken in context, of course, they can only have the latter sense.   The song is one of fond reminiscence not eulogy and gratitude is clearly the song writers’ intent here.    Now, with the Echosmith song, we saw how the events that followed almost immediately after the song’s release added to the meaning the writers had originally intended.    I think that is the case here too, but as with the words themselves there are two different ways to understand the additional meaning.

 

 

One way is to see the events of this year as having switched the sense from gratitude to eulogy.

 

 

This is the year in which C. S. Lewis’ insightful remark about how “a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive” has been confirmed.   With a few small, local, exceptions, tyranny of this very sort has been imposed all around the world.   The public health dictators have taken everything away from us – our basic freedoms and constitutional civil rights, the entire fabric of communities and institutions intermediate to the individual and the state that we call society, for many people their jobs and businesses, and basically our entire way of life.   While far too many people seem to be okay with sacrificing all of this, not only for themselves but for all other people as well, in the name of keeping people safe from the bat flu, it is difficult to imagine that there are many left who could not empathize with the sentiment “didn’t’ know how good we had it” even looking back only so far as January and February.

 

 

While all of this is true for people whether they are rural or urban, the particular way of life portrayed in the Rempels’ song is under especially severe attack by the public health dictatorship.   It is not exactly a secret that this way of life has been disappearing for decades.   That process has been accelerated by the public health dictatorship.   Think about it.   While the costly sanitation requirements, limited capacity restrictions, and lockdowns have made things difficult for all businesses, benefiting only internet based corporations like Amazon, they have been particularly hard on small local businesses, especially restaurants.   These are the businesses that have been driven into insolvency, or very close to it, by these measures.   In small towns, small local businesses are usually the only kind to be found.     In small, rural communities the churches have remained a much larger part of the life of the community than they have in large cities.   This year they have been ordered to close for most of the year, a move that has had no precedent in what was formerly Christendom except in the parts of it that succumbed to regimes with totalitarian ideologies like Communism.   While churches in small towns are probably more likely to be able to get away with disregarding public health orders to close than urban churches, they are also far less likely to be able to survive being shut down for a lengthy period.   Their loss due to the lockdown, whether temporary or permanent, will be a much bigger blow to the rural communities.   

 

Having said all of that, I don’t think that a switch from gratitude to eulogy is the best way of understanding what the song is saying to us in the context of the unfolding events of the year.     I think that the sense of thankful appreciation for having grown up in the kind of community where Edmund Burke’s “unbought grace of life” could still be found  should be understood as having been amplified by the sharp contrast with the opposite of all that which now surrounds us. 

 

Understood that way, its message in the context of the bat flu complements that of Echosmith’s “Lonely Generation.”    The latter by shining a light on the isolation caused by the “plugged in” culture of communications technology exposes the lie of the public health dictatorship that has been holding that very culture out to us as a lifeline to keep us from drowning in the loneliness that their mad experiment in universal quarantine has produced.   High Valley’s “Grew Up On That”, however, offers the real lifeline of a connection to the sanity which preceded the madness of these dark times in the grateful, appreciative, memory of good times and good places and the faith in God which made those times and places good.