Writing in a Stereogum feature celebrating the eightieth birthday of Bob Dylan, David Byrne describes the magic of Dylan’s “epic songs”—tracks like ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’, ’Desolation Row’ and more recently ‘Murder Most Foul’. A form “lifted from old folk ballads with their many many verses,” as Bryne writes, “but then [Dylan] added a genetic mutation to the form—surreal imagery and metaphors rather than the traditional narratives of the old ballads.” ‘Murder Most Foul’ is a salient example of this hybrid style. A song which opens as a classic narrative (“Twas a dark day in Dallas, November ’63…”), pivots towards a more conspiratorial recollection of events at Dealey Plaza, before spiralling out across a series of ostensibly disparate topics. Woodstock, Gone with the Wind, Harry Houdini, and the Birdman of Alcatraz, any number of songs and musicians from John Lee Hooker to Stevie Nicks and Etta James. But having been established early on in the track, the image of Kennedy’s death sits at the centre. A great body holding everything in orbit, connecting the subjects in subtle, intuitive ways. As though the JFK assassination was not another point in a long sequential history but the fracture through which all manner of things came pouring. A wound in the nation itself which, thanks to Dylan’s ever unspooling style, seems like it will never stop bleeding. “[The song] could go on forever,” as Bryne writes, “and it almost does.”
Today we have the pleasure of sharing ‘Bad Energy’, the latest single from Little Kid’s forthcoming album A Million Easy Payments on Orindal Records and Gold Day Recordings and a song that follows Dylan’s ‘epic song’ tradition. And not only that. It also holds a similar gravitational body at its centre. However, as the title suggests, the uniting force here is not a specific event but instead pervasive mood. The evil seam which has always run through the centre of the American or Western project. “Each verse talks about the concept of “bad energy” from a different angle,” lead Kenny Boothby explains. “My overall goal with this song was to implicate Christianity—or, at least, the twisted, Americanized version of it that I grew up with—in a lot of the evil going on in our world.”
Following Dylan’s lead, as well as that of other ‘epic song’ practitioners like Gillian Welch, ‘Bad Energy’ performs this process of implication with a careful balance of intuition and precision. Backed by band members Brodie Germain (drums, guitar), Paul Vroom (bass), Megan Lunn (vocals, banjo, keyboard) and Liam Cole (drums, percussion), Boothby lays down the wide-ranging subject matter with a careful hand, drawing on universal themes via a personal perspective to deepen every topic beyond its simple surface. Take the opening verse, a timely reflection on war (near the birth site of Christ / caught some footage that you wouldn’t believe / that night on Channel 7 / ran a slanted segment / through the Midwest on the mid-Middle East”) which by way of its telling becomes a wider comment on mass media and its complicity in contemporary conflict—both via stoking partisan fires and the callous indifference of a desensitised audience. “But you’ve told me how / you keep your volume down, as Boothby continues, “cause all that’s coming from your humming tv / is bad energy.”
This ability to vary the focal length of its perspective so gracefully is a signature of A Million Easy Payments. “The urgency in Kenny Boothby’s voice matches the stakes of his lyrics,” writes Dan Wriggins in the liner notes, “epic ballads and reveries that come at life from all angles and exposures, driving at and a little over the limits of self-reflection.” The sense of an artist never quite satisfied with the scene they have captured, always looking to widen the lens to better represent the truth before them, or else zoom in closer in search of the missing detail which might click everything else into place. Call it a search for meaning, or even God Himself. In other hands, songs reaching for such things with the expansive style of Dylan and Welch at their most ambitious might feel like novelty or pastiche. But in this context it seems the only logical outcome for Little Kid’s specific way of working.
Which is partly how ‘Bad Energy’ can reference such a multitude. Family history as a mitochondrial curse or blessing, childhood memories of pastors in casual dress. Uneasy portents appearing in numbers. Toxic men lurking in the shadows of your local music scene. The climate crisis and capitalism itself, forces at once Lovecraftian and banal. And, ultimately, the sensation of faith lapsed and faith rebounding. A sprawl of subject matter supported by a precision on the sentence level. An attention to rhythm and rhyme which looks to outdo The Bard himself. “Dylan paints some incredible pictures in those long folk songs, but I often find his rhymes unsatisfying, or maybe too satisfying,” Boothby continues:
I don’t like perfect rhymes. I spent a lot of time working as many imperfect internal rhymes as possible into each line of this song. It was a rewarding process, but it may have ruined songwriting for me because I no longer feel content rhyming only the last word of each line. Finishing songs has become much harder since I wrote ‘Bad Energy’. But I’m proud of what I was able to do with this one, and it’s generally the first song people talk about when they hear the new album.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=SROle0DiiAQ%3Fsi%3D5iijuUCBerFLCmMx
A Million Easy Payments is out on the 23rd February via Orindal Records (US) & Gold Day Recordings (UK) and you can pre-order it now.
Photo by Aisha Ghali, album artwork painting by James Lee Chiahan