Premiere: Good Service’s Fuzzy “Summer Muses” Reflects on Drugs, Friendship, and Fulfillment

A tale of drugs and friendship, Good Service’s second single “Summer Muses” bridges the intimate and bombastic with its dynamic psych-rock blend and unrelenting verve.

Stream: “Summer Muses” – Good Service

The song explores that terribly rare, highly liminal space where substance abuse and personal progress might safely and effectively become one and the same.

Savage electric guitars riff and rollick over fuzzed out chords in Good Service’s eclectic, energizing sophomore single. A tale of drugs and friendship, “Summer Muses” bridges the intimate and bombastic with its dynamic psych-rock blend and unrelenting verve.

Mel laid a line
while muttering something
about the way he’s gotten
tired of friending
off domestic silence
and drinking every night.

We smoked another cigarette.
I know I’ve got to quit sometime
and that I never have an answer,
but, Mel, we’re gonna be fine.

Atwood Magazine is proud to be premiering “Summer Muses,” the second single off Good Service’s forthcoming debut album, Please (independently out July 26, 2019). The moniker for 24-year-old Nashville-based Noah Fardon, Good Service is a free-for-all exploration of sound sculpture, psych-rock, and poetic license. Between May’s debut single “MaPaw” and today’s follow-up “Summer Muses,” Good Service displays a penchant for full-bodied sonics and propulsive soundscapes that ebb and flow like the tides of the ocean.

In other words: Good Service is raw and unapologetic in his approach to song creation. This is the real deal.

These drugs are a waste of time
and that’s the money
I drop on dime bags,
which until they subside
will do just fine at
tossing a rope to ease my mind.

Wha’d’you know, Mel!
I’m awake and wired
on those pills
we shouldn’t have taken.
Yet, here we are
(our luck, again;
it probably should be worse).

True to its name, “Summer Muses” feels quite like a hazed-out musing on life, with perspectives shifting over the course of the song and Fardon’s lyrics forever maintaining a quizzical, philosophical edge. “Summer Muses is a real good drug you just took with an even better friend (…who also just so happens to be your dealer…which may or may not say a lot about you),” the artist tells Atwood Magazine. “Summer Muses introduces the character of Mel, my fictional drug dealer and a composite of two real-life friends, as well as the character Lord Sebastian Flyte from Evelyn Waugh’s novel, Brideshead Revisited. The song explores that terribly rare, highly liminal space where substance abuse and personal progress might safely and effectively become one and the same; certain brief moments of genuinely rejuvenating levity that are fated to disappear, just like the weed tends to vanish all too quickly from that dime bag, once full of so many other potential shimmering, somnific revelations you could have had.”

He continues, “Definitively transient, these moments are capable yet of truly uplifting and invigorating, especially when you’re lucky enough to have a Mel riding by your side on that sweeping wave of existential uncertainties. Summer Muses is less the panicked breath you take before disappearing beneath the water, and more the subsequent realization that the water actually ain’t half bad once your head’s been under (just don’t stay down there too long).”

Fardon’s self-awareness proves key to his success not only in deconstructing his own creation, but also in the song itself: “Summer Muses” is so much fun specifically because of its conscious back-and-forth between exploration and existential reflection. Fardon’s last lines underscore the search for meaning and purpose that took him to this space in the first place, and is keeping him in a state of uncertainty (tinged with discovery):

Wanna be brought to summer muses,
not to be a carpet on your floor.
…Not to say these hours
have been useless;
wish I could do this more.

Directed, edited, and produced by Henry Austin with help from Cody Stack, Wilder Nicholson, Hector Magana, and Noah Fardon, the “Summer Music” music video exemplifies the disparate feelings rumbling together in Good Service’s song. This is the part of summer where you’re done with the heat; where you’re ready for those cold autumnal winds to finally come lick your face, despite the fact that it’s only July and summer has another solid two months.

It’s an expression of stagnation, but also one of movement. Each of us will take from it what we want, and if that isn’t the point of art overall, what is?

Stream Good Service’s “Summer Muses” exclusively on Atwood Magazine, and stay tuned for more as the band prepares to release debut album Please on July 26!

Stream: “Summer Muses” – Good Service

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