Why Write? :: "Burning Holes"

Independent rock didn't necessarily sound like The Shins until 2003. Back in the late 1980s and 1990s, it sounded like Michael Stipe's R.E.M. and later, the efforts of early career Belle & Sebastian, Pavement and Built to Spill. This is certainly a reductionist analysis of the great ontological question posed best by David Byrne, "How did I get here?" Independent rock, this morning, is something different, and it's easy to forget, or perhaps challenging to remember, where it came from. But "indie rock," had its infancy in record store in Athens, Georgia in 1980s when Michael Stipe had a chance encounter with Peter Buck, and the soul contributors to R.E.M. found one another. If there exists a genesis moment for the movement, it was these creationist "six days" between this meeting in '80 and '82, when Stipe turned down a lucrative offer from RCA records to release his first EP independently. This was before music was supposed to necessarily change your life; it was just supposed to be yours.

Why Write? is the brain-child of Jacob Faurholt and returns us to those days where music sounded exactly like it was made. On "Burning Holes," Faurholt is channeling 1983 and the lo-fi, college radio sound of R.E.M. In fact, you could almost slip "Burning Holes" onto Murmur, like a secret castaway, and maybe no one would notice. The signature lyric is destructive and oblique, "my hearts been broken into pieces of you," followed with the title lyrics, "burning holes in the heart you made with your hands." It evokes something magic and something real, something like 1983.

Listen :: Why Write? - "Burning Holes"