Sy Somebody’s final single Ready To Go dropped recently. The song starts off with vibes akin to a garage rockers’ dreams of a tropical vacation, and ends with a journey to Mars a la Elon Musk. There’s a sci-fi inspired guitar breakdown, and druid-esque vocals provided by longtime friends and collaborators David Vandervelde (solo, Father John Misty) and Frank Lenz (solo, Richard Swift, Pedro The Lion). The track is a natural bookend to an album about how weird it is to be a human, and thinking back on the recording process the man behind the madness, Casey Meehan, said, “Dave has been a long time friend but it’s still amazing to watch him get deep into a trance in the studio.” Life Is Cruel, Let’s Be Friends, the album from which this single comes, is out now.
Listen / Share: “Ready To Go”
Sy Somebody began with a conversation between Casey Meehan and David Vandervelde backstage at Lollapalooza. Dave had just finished performing with Father John Misty, and introduced Casey to Eli Thomson and they slowly began discussing making a record together. Eventually, Casey began floating demos to Dave. As they recorded Casey flushed out Sy’s sound saying, “The demos were the canvas, everyone painted over them, then I painted over that and then we peeled back a bunch of layers in certain spots and painted a little more. Then, slowly this 3 dimensional thing started to appear, like one of those magic eye posters.”
Contemplating the mysteries and complexities of the human and cosmic condition prompted Casey to start writing the album as if a mystery person was in control, inspiring him to pick up the moniker of Sy Somebody. On the creative process he says, “I live for moments of brief insanity… It’s surprisingly cathartic to pop open the hood of the psyche and poke around at your primal emotions. I’ve always been fascinated at how closely linked extremely good feelings are to extremely bad feelings. On this album, I wanted to capture the feeling of when an acid trip turns from euphoria to paranoid freak-out.”
Catch Sy Somebody Live:
Feb 22: Chicago, IL @ Hideout
