Today’s Song: Peach Pit’s “Shampoo Bottles” Highlights the Entertaining Side to Lost Love

With “Shampoo Bottles”, the latest release off their forthcoming sophomore album, Peach Pit take life and a broken heart, and inject the air of a sitcom.

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Stream: “Shampoo Bottles” – Peach Pit

There are a lot of songs about breakups- too many songs about breakups- and they tend to address emotions in the same way, digging down into the heart where it hurts the most or pouring out the cliches associated with the heart. They may be genuine but they’re also so commonplace that we can end up feeling connected only in a loose way, like how we connect with a stranger next to us because we’re both humans breathing in the same air. How to really make light of a situation is to not think too deeply about it and to take the really boring but totally real parts that people, except those with a broken heart, wouldn’t usually acknowledge. Because, when you have a broken heart, the tiny details are magnified to laughable proportions.

The latest single by Vancouver four-piece Peach Pit, “Shampoo Bottles” does this. It’s easy-going and joyous in tone which, alongside an obsessive monologue about the things an ex has left behind, makes the whole thing seem fun and amusing.

I’ve been leaving your shampoo bottles
Over in the corner there
Sitting empty on the bathtub rail
Wishing they could wash your hair
Yeah, I keep them by that crumb of fancy soap
And your toothbrush at my bathroom sink
Your cell phone charger’s still hanging from the wall
Haven’t chucked it all, like you’d think
Though you haven’t been around in weeks

These things are small and somewhat meaningless but also representative: Soap and toothbrush in daily contact with the body, phone charger for keeping charged the extension of someone’s identity, and Speed Stick- ‘It’s freaking trash, all that organic hoo hah/ From one of your health food stores’- signifying shopping habits. When the narrator whines ‘waited long enough/ that I could never call you/ Baby how fucked is that’, it’s intended to be aimed at the ex but they never moved on- disappeared into the realm of life without any thoughts of him on her mind- and he knows this, speaking instead to himself. ‘Man why can’t I just let it go?’

Realisation of the obsession is confirmed in the second verse when the using of small belongings is elevated to the outside world in a sad desperation that borders on stalker-like observations. We can take pity but we can also roll our eyes, the catchy, straight-forward sound taking away any sincerity.

I‘ve been seeing that red Corolla parked
out on the corner there if it were yours
There’d be some hippie bull shit
hanging from the rear-view mirror
As I’m passing it every other day
I look in to see if this one’s yours
But the shape it’s in is giving it away
Yours is dented up and down the doors
Never wanted to see it more

“”Shampoo Bottles” is a song about the stuff my ex-girlfriend left at my apartment after we broke up and how even after I’d used up all the soap in the bottle and the deodorant in the stick, I still didn’t throw them out for a while,” explains frontman Neil Smith in the press release. “The video, directed by our longtime collaborator Lester Lyons-Hookham, has four protagonists each mourning the end of something. It shows how coping with a loss can make you do weird things.”

Those weird things include sniffing the left over belongings, trying on wigs, and breaking out into uncontrollable tears when trying to go about the day.

Peach Pit consists of Smith, Chris Vanderkooy on guitar, Peter Wilton on bass, and Mikey Pascuzzi on drums and “Shampoo Bottles” is the latest single off their next album due out in spring. It’s the follow-up to the debut, 2018’s Being So Normal, a chilled gathering of upbeat guitar melodies and relatable lyricism that reads like conversations.

Put into the context of the rest of Peach Pit’s songs, “Shampoo Bottles” is like another encounter between a friend or someone familiar. It has the air of a scene of a sitcom, turning the bitterness of life into something we can joke and smile about.