Brooklyn’s Del Water Gap makes us sing with his new punk rock bop, “Ode to a Conversation Stuck in Your Throat”
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“Ode to a Conversation Stuck in Your Throat” – Del Water Gap
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In most relationships – at least the ones that are scary enough to feel worth it, there comes a specific moment in time. This is the moment where you decide that your freedom and your willingness to risk being hurt are both up for grabs. It is the moment where you decide that being with this person outweighs every other thing that you want. It is also the moment where you pray they feel the same. S. Holden Jaffe of Del Water Gap put this into a song with a title to a song that is as apt as the feeling it encapsulates, “Ode to a Conversation Stuck in Your Throat.”
Released May 1, “Ode to a Conversation Stuck in Your Throat” arrives as Del Water Gap’s second single of 2020, following February’s “My Body.” As Jaffe puts it, “I was seeing someone at the time who I really liked, and we had both been walking up to the line of asking the other to be with each other and no one else. Finally, we were sitting together one day and it got all quiet and she goes, “I’ve had this stuck in my throat all day…” And that was the start of our togetherness.
Thumping bass and a ticking high hat with a soft melodic guitar riff energize our ears for the track we’re about to hear. Jaffe’s earnest, precise and calming vocals melt into the music,
I do not want to fight this anymore
I just want to lay back
and watch you pin me to the bed
I used to call you my best friend
way back before you were my everything
Now I’m sucking your neck
And you wrote my favorite song
Now I’m fucked up and carrying on
I do not know the words to it yet, oh
A drum riff rolls us into the pre-chorus, giving us the feeling of excitement that is felt when you are on that same page with someone and you know the feelings are reciprocated,
And it hits me
I don’t want anybody else
touching you like I do
Like I do, like me, is it ok?
That I don’t want anybody else
touching you like I do
Like I do, like me
The chorus pulls the punk rock energy through with lyrics as simple as they are powerful. It is amazing to see this time and time again. Artists come up with lines that are so vulnerable and so relatable to so many, but somehow by an actual miracle they manage to say them in a way that no one else has said them before. This is why music is what it is; powerful chorus’s like this one that strip it down to words that are as real and as simple as they are relatable. Words you can sing along with at the top of your lungs because you know you feel them too.
Tell me that nobody else
touches you like I do, like I do
Oh tell me that nobody else
touches you like me
Tell me that nobody else
touches you like I do, like I do
Oh tell me that nobody else
touches you like me
The song drives back into a verse and a chorus before breaking into the bridge that drives this song home. Musically it is a palpable energy of new-era punk rock that keeps your head nodding and toes tapping until it’s completion.
According to Jaffe, “‘Ode to a Conversation Stuck in Your Throat’ came out of a slow night in the studio with my friend Gabe Goodman. We had been in a secret boyband that broke up in 2017, and it was our first time really writing together since things ended. I programmed some drums, and Gabe put most of the music together – we were just getting into a flow when a friend invited us to dinner with one of our musical heroes. We looked at each other and said ‘should we go? do we stop now?’ ‘No, no, no we stay,’ we decided. So we kept writing and had a spiked seltzer or two. There was a lot of traffic and by the time we got to the restaurant, our hero had left. I came back to the studio the next day and moved a few things around and wrote most of the words.” You know it’s a song worth listening to when the creators couldn’t peel themselves away from the studio to meet one of their heroes.
Listen to this track, and remember a time (maybe it’s right now) that you felt this way – revel in it.
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:: stream/purchase “Ode to a Conversation…” here ::
“Ode to a Conversation Stuck in Your Throat” – Del Water Gap
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