Back in May we introduced the self-titled EP from Tyler Costolo’s Ghost Fan Club with single ‘Shoulders’. Set at the dead of night, the song began the EP’s themes of depression, grief and the passing of time with a decidedly lonely air. Told from those hours where sleep will not arrive and your life feels at once too slow to bear and always slipping away. “I wrote these songs during a point of major turmoil in my life,” Costolo explains. “I was mostly drifting along, trying to make peace with so much of my existence being out of my control and time slipping by while I was trying to catch up.”
Though the songs were written in 2021, it wasn’t until later Costolo felt in a position to record them, and some of this frustration and unease works its way into the very sound. The sense of the ground being unstable beneath you, of being unable to rely on anything to take your weight. But with Tom Morris (Swim Camp) joining on drums, Costolo embraced these feelings and ushered in a new stage of the Ghost Fan Club project. One which didn’t look to solve the things holding it back but instead understand them as key components to its artistic process. Songwriting not as a method of escape from dark emotions but a canvas upon which they might be laid out and examined from a new perspective.
New single ‘Now and Then’ pushes further into these emotions. Brighter in tone than the previous single, the song is nevertheless caught within a mournful air. But in keeping with the spirit of the release, the sound is more than Ghost Fan Club bemoaning present circumstances. “I’m tired of hearing it’ll get better,” as Costolo sings “And maybe one day I’ll look back at all this and laugh.” As though to commit to the optimism of change is to in some deny a part of yourself. To render the present as a kind of meaningless void. A sentiment, it bears pointing out, which differs from fatalism. Because a life predicated entirely on some future transformation is not a life at all. Why not instead embrace the present on its own terms, at least for now?
