By Annette Hansen
Albums postponed. Concerts canceled. Those nights in sweaty venues, bass booming, traded for acoustic Instagram Live sets played while cooking dinner. The world of music looks wildly different than it did two months ago. No one feels the weight of that more than the artists putting their tours and even their careers on hold with the rest of the world.
“I feel like I’m in that situation where like if you’re with two people and one person loses their mind the other one gets strangely calm,” Spanish Love Songs vocalist Dylan Slocum describes.
Spanish Love Songs saw a strong start to 2020. With the release of their well received sophomore album Brave Faces Everyone via Pure Noise Records, the year was well on its way to being a big year for the band. So when the coronavirus came to the US and crippled the live music industry the blow was undoubtedly devastating.
“There’s no reason for my optimism to be up, but I think as soon as I let it down I’m going to sink into a very deep pit,” Slocom says. “I really don’t want that to happen. I’m trying my best to work through it, and just like if I stay busy, then it can’t get me in that situation [laughs]because things were going really well for us.”
When live music was struck with a wave of cancelations and postponements, Spanish Love Songs were in the middle of a tour with The Wonder Years and looking forward to their upcoming headline tour. Like so many other touring acts, the band was forced to pack up, go home, and face an uncertain future.
“I had joked around with my mom, I was like it’s pretty on brand for me like that as soon as we start getting a taste of success, everything shuts down,” Slocum recalls. “It’s just been like keep our heads and, you know, put on a brave face. What else can you do? It’s not like we’re staying home because I’m afraid I’m going to get it. We’re staying home so that we don’t give it to other people who will die from it.”
Slocum expresses that despite personal disappointments, it’s hard not to have empathy for the larger impact to even more people, “We’ve been trying to find a way to use our skills and stay afloat,” Slocum says. “We have so many friends who are bartenders or servers or who do sound at venues and stuff like that, people who just can’t recoup anyway, so it’s like hard to be upset. It’s easy to be angry, but it’s hard to be upset or act like too ‘woe is me’ because I know people who are just straight-up out of work for the next four months.”
It’s fitting then that Braves Faces Everyone captures the hardships of everyday situations for those in financial and social constraints. There is an urgent frustration throughout the record that feels more relevant than ever as more and more people face a cold and lonely isolation in the midst of economic collapse.
“We did the last record and it was about me and my shortcomings and feeling like a loser,” Slocum explains. “It’s like, it’s not disingenuous, but we don’t need a lot of that when it’s like I’m struggling, but so many other people are struggling. To me that’s the most fascinating thing is that, for how different we all assume we are, we are all sad and miserable, and oftentimes we don’t have any money or we don’t have any power or we don’t feel like we have a voice.”
At its core, Slocum wanted Brave Faces Everyone to be able to speak aloud the struggles so many feel silenced by, “I feel like it was important for me to kind of capture the world that I grew up in and the people that I know and the people that are still hurting especially in the age of, in my mind, a persistent lack of empathy,” Slocum says. “It’s very easy to not care about your neighbor, and the world has made it even easier and has encouraged it. I think as we head into [this pandemic]we’re seeing that society won’t survive like that.”
The current state of the world in many ways has served as a megaphone for many of the issues addressed on the record. Issues that have been brewing in the background long before the pandemic brought them to the surface.
“It’s just a crazy thing because [the pandemic]highlights all these problems that we’re talking about on the album, which is, when it gets down to it, the need for access to healthcare and the need for, in my lifetime, the need for a universal basic income,” Slocum says. “We never outright say that on the album, but like that’s what’s at the heart of all these things. It’s lack of access, lack of access to wellness and lack of access to being able to survive without killing yourself both like physically and mentally.”
Dylan Slocom
It’s no surprise that the album has been a cathartic work for listeners who’ve found a piece of themselves in the stories being told. But personal relatability is not all Slocum hopes listeners discover as they listen to these songs.
“I mean honestly, I hope that they’re just thinking about other people,” Slocum urges. “I can tend to get way down on stuff like that, just thinking about other people and what they’re doing, trying to keep your judgement out of it. I think that’s a big thing about a lot of the songs on the album is that they’re honestly free of judgement, and if you want to bring any judgement to that, that’s on you.”
Listening to the music of Spanish Love Songs is not escapist. It’s not the sort of music that drifts delicately in the background. It’s the sort of music that has something to say loudly and desperately. It demands to be heard. For Slocum this is an element worth embracing, “We’re meant to be sought out,” Slocum says. “We have really passionate fans for that reason. That keeps us afloat and that keeps us sustained.”
In an online driven world where your next favorite song or artist is only a click away, it’s easy to get lost in the rat race and let the artistic integrity become a secondary aspect to what you’re creating. Spanish Love Songs wants nothing to do with that mentality.
“We’re not flashy,” Slocum states. “I’ve kind of leaned into that. I shouldn’t say things like ‘I don’t care if people listen to us on Spotify’, but I’d rather you buy the album and sit with it. We still believe in the album, which is maybe the dumbest thing you can do in the year 2020 when everyone’s about singles and this and that.”
Slocum says the band has more to offer with the music they’re creating, “I’ve never once listened to a single that a band puts out and am like ‘oh, cool’. I’ll listen to it once and then be like ‘alright fun, but where’s the story, where’s the context, what’s the experience’,” Slocum explains. “ As we just crowd more and more stuff into the muddied pool of content, I think the only way to stand out is to create an experience. I think that’s what we’re trying to do, is be an experiential band versus just a band that you put on when you want to, I don’t know, put on your Spotify running playlist.”
The band are going on tour with Future Teens and Dollar Signs in July. Get tickets here.
