LISTEN: Animalweapon Offers A Somber Reflection In “Summer’s Over”
LISTEN: Animalweapon Offers A Somber Reflection In “Summer’s Over”
Bedroom electronic artist, Animalweapon [real name Patrick Cortes] recently released his latest somber track, “Summer’s Over.” A relaxing mystical track, inspired by the natural music produced by the world around us. Speaking on the track’s production and inspiration, Patrick shares, “The original inspiration for ‘Summer’s Over’ was a lot more nebulous than what the song turned into. Originally I was aiming for capturing the feeling you get when summer is ending and it starts getting cooler and the days start getting shorter, and just the general bummer that time of year can be. I started that at the end of last summer and wound up stuck on it (as I often am) and shelved it for a while until this year when suddenly we’ve had the most tumultuous summer ever and I had a way better way to explore it.
It started kind of out of nowhere last summer. Late in the summer of 2019 I was visiting a friend in Texas who had just undergone her first chemo treatment for breast cancer (sidebar: happy to report that she’s cancer-free and perfectly healthy as of right now) and one night after everyone had gone to bed I was sitting by myself in their backyard and wound up recording a bunch of cool nighttime ambience – dead air, crickets, cicadas, etc. – and since I always travel with a laptop and a portable MIDI controller keyboard I went right inside and started playing around with piano melodies with that “found sound” stuff as a backdrop. I was always going for a lo-fi kind of feel, using the found-sound stuff and little foley sounds I recorded around my apartment for percussion, but after a long break from it I didn’t really settle on lyrics for it until this summer, having seen everything we’ve been through. It just kind of felt like the right time to take this song the rest of the way, so I tightened up the piano by settling on a detuned, warbly sound and melody, kept the drums really basic, and then I expanded it with just a little bit of synth (I was listening to Taylor Swift’s “Wildest Dreams” on repeat, believe it or not, and the synth pad in this song was meant as a bit of an homage) and a deep bass drop. The lyrics came fairly quickly once I started reflecting on everything we’ve been through this year and I was able to get the vocals in a pretty reasonable amount of takes in my living room.
Lyrically, I write all my songs to be somewhat vague, because I like to say what I need to say but it’s also not important to me that anyone understands exactly what I mean. My general rule is to leave room for interpretation. This one feels maybe a little bit more clear as far as what it’s trying to say, but I still tried not to put too fine a point on anything, so at the end of the day, I hope it’s something that people will listen to and understand that it’s about a feeling of loss and lament this year, and then project their own personal experience onto it. And clearly a pandemic and a deep reckoning with racial injustice are the two biggest things Americans have dealt with this year. But that said, if you’ve had a tough year personally (maybe a bad breakup, or stuff with family, or death or some other kind of loss) and this song resonates with you, it’s supposed to do that, too. There isn’t a wrong way to interpret it as long as it means something to you. Regular human events like that don’t stop happening just because the rest of the world is on fire, so if it applies to you on a more personal level, that’s valid.”
Originally released in the early weeks of October via Polychromatic Records, “Summer’s Over” lives as an intimate reflection of all that we’ve been through, yet too caught up in the wrong things we lose sight of what truly matters. “How much time did we lose” echoes on repeat as it fades into the abyss.
While many of us found ourselves feeling lost for much of 2020, Patrick found himself reflecting on natural and ‘found’ sounds around him. Filled with lyrics soaked in raw emotion, Patrick’s vision of Animalweapon is just beginning to take flight with this breakthrough track. Listeners will be sure to connect to the passion driven words that Patrick soulfully performs.
With plans to release his new EP next year, Animalweapon has been keeping busy not only in his own project but in composing the otherworldly theme song for the highly anticipated new podcast, The Hidden Djinn that debuted September 1, exclusively on iHeartMedia.
