Bicoastal indie-pop duo EXES and LA-based synthpop duo JOME will release their collaborative EP, Nothing’s Out To Get You on March 8th. In anticipation, please listen to this advance single, “Stay Still,” a powerful ode to the feelings surrounding love, loss, and tragedy.
About “Stay Still,” Allie McDonald of EXES comments: “‘Stay Still’ was the first song we all wrote together while on our writing trip in Marin. Jesse had a copy of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking and began reading excerpts out loud to all of us. We instantly felt a deep emotional connection to her words and thoughts about grief and loss as we all have experienced this in some way or another. In one excerpt in particular, Didion discusses the devastation that follows months after everything returns to normal. The days are passing, the world is spinning and she lays completely still, believing that her husband has not passed away—in fact, he is lying next to her. She even keeps his boots in the closet just in case he needs them when he returns. ‘Everybody tells you that it’s something you get used to’ was one of the first lines we wrote. Time was a crucial element, lyrically for us. We were inspired by this sort of in between grief. The feeling that lingers months, and even years after immediate loss. The feeling of release—the slip that happens when for a brief, dreamlike moment you forget that he is gone.”
EXES is composed of Brooklyn-based Allie McDonald and Venice beach-based producer Mike Derenzo, while JOME is made up of LA-based songwriter Jesse Epstein and New Orleans-based writer and producer Christoph Andersson. The four writers and producers retreated to Marin County in Northern California in October 2018 to write a collection of meaningful songs together, documenting the entire trip by taking Polaroids. This collaboration of artists has resulted in a diary-like, happy-sad kind of musical moment – all created while in their living room-turned-studio, hanging with Mike’s dog Bella. While the lyrics hint at dark themes of death and loss, the production highlights an element of hope with soaring and cinematic instrumental sounds.
