San Francisco four piece I the Mighty take us on a road trip in their new single “Where the Mind Wants to Go”.
We’re in the car with frontman Brent Walsh as he contemplates life’s unravelings and finds that his mind slips into a ‘sick little daydream‘ of turning the steering wheel and ending it all. He shares that “Where the Mind Wants to Go” came to him while driving along the California coast:
“It’s commonplace for my mind to wander about how fragile life is. Sometimes my subconscious slips into the realm of morbid curiosity, and I think about how it would take all but a slight move of my arm to send myself cascading into oblivion. There’s something about that thin red line between normalcy and mortality that has always seemed almost romantic to me. This song toys with the analogy of drifting off in thought and drifting off the road and was written at a time when I was beginning to see faults in my relationship as a splintering crack in my windshield. It’s a deeply personal song for me on the record, and its writing was a form of self therapy for me at the time.”
Lyrically “Where the Mind Wants to Go” captures that zoning out connection-wise as well as physically zoning out into ‘what if’s. Heavy beats and rapid-fire riffs are a bombardment of overwhelm, before an electronic-tinted moment of presence. It’s skin-crawling in its calm desperation.
“Take this away, the burden of us. It’s too heavy to hold it up.”
This is such a beautiful track to take time with, seeing a full spectrum of emotion which bleeds out in the face of a connection crumbling, and being alone with the processing of that.
I the Mighty bring distorted yet tender aches they’ve observed, really bringing the title to life in this stream of consciousness of a track. It flows from the beginning with no constraints on its sound, going to unexpected places, such as a drop into a screamed frustration in what also seems like a resolution (‘Still we try to pick up the pieces. You shouldn’t have to change yourself to make us work. I just want you to be happy regardless. I will love you even if we’re just energy.’).
I the Mighty’s upcoming album Where the Mind Wants to Go / Where You Let it Go comes out October 20, 2017.
Physical: https://ithemighty.lnk.to/wherethemin… Download/Stream: https://ithemighty.lnk.to/wherethemindID
