Volunteer Department is a recording project led by Nashville-based songwriter Oliver Hopkins, which uses nylon guitar, vibraphone and bass/drumkit along with his distinctive “high-in-candor-low-in-bullshit lyrics” to create songs both wryly humorous and bitingly frank. Following several singles released last year—such as the anti-love song ‘Cows of Tomorrow’ or the paean to Monday morning angst that is ‘Shitten’—Volunteer Department today returns with a brand new single, ‘Make It Easy’. The first track from a forthcoming three-song EP, Clean Living, which will be released by Like You Mean It Records.
‘Make It Easy’ arrives with all the slinky, murky atmosphere of a late-night jazz club. With Hopkins leading on piano, the song sees Parker James (vibraphone), Tyler Summers (saxophone), Zac Farro (drums), Micah Tawlks (bass & percussion) Jake McMullen (synths) and Kayla Graninger (vocals) all offer their talents, the band coming together to create something understated. A jazz number scented with cigarette smoke and red wine. But amid this Hopkins’s vocals burn with quiet intensity, furthering the mixture of elegance and ugliness that forms the essence of the Volunteer Department aesthetic.
“You know when you can tell that something’s right?” begin the forthright lyrics. “I never got that feeling about you / from the day we met I knew it wouldn’t work.” Hopkins’ vocals are barely more than a whisper, almost unpalatably bitter in their acerbic tone. But there is good reason for the latent animosity, something Hopkins feels the need to explain further. “There was this man in my life for a few years who was a veritable alcoholic/narcissist and he would call me up and chew me out quite often when he was was feeling aggressive,” he describes. “I got really tired of that eventually, told him that respect was a two way street, and then wrote ‘Make it Easy’ a week or so after my final interaction with him.” A single which might not erase the experience entirely, but at least removes the tastes from his mouth.
Photo by Zac Farro, album art illustration by Grouch Bucket