Spanish Love Songs: We’re A Part Of The Equation
“On a good day we’re dying alone, so we might as well just embrace it and enjoy it.” Trust Dylan Slocum to say the bleakest thing ever and make it sound vaguely hopeful. This is, after all, how he and SPANISH LOVE SONGS have operated for the best part of a decade, his lyrics vulnerable and devastating and sure to bring a tear or two to your eye even as the band’s soaring heart-on-sleeve anthems hold an inexplicably uplifting quality. In 2020 they released the outstanding Brave Faces Everyone – an uncannily-timed career best that seemed almost to have inside knowledge of the tumult the world was in for – and while the years that followed have hardly gone according to plan, they have brought the five-piece to a new way of thinking that informs their stunning new album No Joy.
“We had just started doing well as a band and were starting to see this thing we’d been chasing come into view, and that disappeared,” explains Slocum of the circumstances in which No Joy took shape. “My home disappeared, my friends disappeared, but at the same time I made a new home, I got married, I found stuff that works for me and I honestly think it’s part of getting older. You kind of make peace with what you have and don’t have, and I can sit here and complain all day about things I don’t have but that’s not going to get me anywhere, so I might as well appreciate the people and the things that I do have while they are around me, because they are not going to be around me forever.”
And so, despite its title, No Joy actually finds Slocum and co. actively seeking out life’s silver linings, however small and fleeting they may be. It may still prompt a few snot-bubble ugly cries with hooks like “Stay alive out of spite” and “Wish I could live my life until I got it right”, but ultimately it is about making peace with your circumstances, accepting the things you can’t control and embracing your part in the equation of your own life. It’s not naïve either; Slocum’s lyrics are vivid, grounded, his tales of suburbs and preachers and ambulances and life on the road, and yes, still a healthy dose of despair and loneliness and existential dread remaining the most effective and affecting tool in the band’s arsenal.
“We’re not a band who’s out here to tell you an answer or how to feel,” offers Slocum, specifically when pressed on the record’s multiple brushes with religion – a product, he explains, of growing up in a “semi-religious household” and now living in what he calls the Bible Belt of southern California. “We’re just a band who’s here to point something out and go ‘that makes me feel a certain way’, and maybe it makes you feel that way. Maybe it makes you feel the opposite of how I feel, but something is weird about it, something is incongruous about it, so let me point it out and tell you that it makes me feel weird, whether it’s good or bad.”
Of course, a lot of people do feel the same way – can you blame them? – but even as SPANISH LOVE SONGS continue to mean so much to so many, Slocum says that he tries not to think too much about that sort of thing. “I always like it when people come up. I don’t feel any pressure, I get uncomfortable sometimes just with the fact that I’m not a licensed therapist. I’m just some dude who feels the same way that you do and also doesn’t know how to fix it. I think that’s kind of the cool part of it, being able to bond and connect with people that I wouldn’t otherwise connect with. It’s not pressure, it’s a privilege, but also, seek professional help too, don’t just listen to our band!”
It’s natural that we spend a lot of time on lyrics and themes and all that, but truth be told No Joy has just as much to write home about purely on a sonic level. With keyboardist Meredith Van Woert taking on a particularly prominent role this time around, the album sees the band steer away from the guitar-driven emo of their previous records and into more new wave territory that lines up closer with the likes of THE KILLERS than it does with many of the bands one might previously have thrown them in with.
It’s actually what Slocum has always wanted SPANISH LOVE SONGS to sound like, the band having used last year’s reimagined version of Brave Faces – if anything something of an overcorrection – to fully develop the skills and the confidence they needed to pull it off. “From my recording philosophy I love layering and making things sound bigger and stronger and interesting and sort of destroying it in a way,” elaborates Slocum. “Everything’s been done so let’s find a way to do it in a way that interests us at least, even if it’s the same synth line that was written 40 years ago, what’s our interesting way of doing it.”
With bigger songs comes talk of bigger stages, and as we come to conclude it’s clear that Slocum isn’t really interested in anything less. “I don’t understand wanting to do this and not wanting to be the biggest band imaginable. Whatever that means, whatever your ceiling is, hitting that ceiling or trying to break through that ceiling, I think is why we do this. I’m not content to just do the same thing for the next 15 years. That sounds boring, and if it works for you, it works for you, but it doesn’t work for us. We’re a band who constantly wants to take a swing at something and if it works great, and if it doesn’t work, then we’ll just stop, and we took the swing!”
No Joy is out now via Pure Noise Records.
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