Let’s Get Lifted

It’s storming mightily outside the studio, and I’m sweating just sitting here lazily in my chair, and that can only mean one thing…it’s summer in Atlanta. But it means something else too: “Lift” just dropped. Yessir, Single #1 leading up to “Intro to Astronomy” (LP3) is live as hell, so you might as well just accept the inevitable and go cue it up on Spotify (or Apple Music, if you need some Vitamin C).

This one rocks a little harder than most Wirelight output to date, which actually makes for a pretty solid preview of the album: it’s definitely got some finger-pickin’ weepies on it (I’ll never forsake my finger-pickin’ weepies, or The Weepies for that matter), but the upbeat stuff is a little stankier than, say, Paris Again, and all the more fun for it if you ask me (did anyone ask me? If no one asks me a question in the forest but I answer it anyway, did I answer a question at all, etc.?). The album is fully mastered and glorious and will probably drop sometime, hmm, late summer/early fall, but maybe earlier if I start getting itchy about it.

In the meantime, let’s dip into some fun facts about “Lift,” starting with, per usual, my sincere astonishment at exactly how long it’s been in the works.

::checking archives::

Looks like I worked up a really rudimentary demo sometime during the tracking sessions of The Perils of Small Mining (LP2), so 2021 or so. During Summer 2022, I assembled a crack team of musicians for ONE LAST JOB and took the demo to We Bought A Zoo Records in Athens, Georgia, where we built it out into a full song and recorded a vibey, quintessentially Athens version of it, which you’ll get to hear closer to the end of this year when we (teaser!) drop an album of unreleased B-sides, alt versions, and demos. Who was in that crack team, you ask? Let’s see…WBAZ is Tommy Trautwein’s studio, and he turned all the knobs and wrote and tracked a bunch of the bass, synth, and guitar parts; Gideon Johnston laid down drums; and Drew Beskin and Lana Sims were on hand for keys, auxiliary guitar, and general arrangement consulting.

In order to get it the song to fit nicely with the rest of the album, we ultimately rebuilt it here at Wise Red Lab Studio, but Version 2 (the one you can hear today on Spotify) still has most of the bones of that original Athens version. It gained additional bones too, though (is it cool if I start calling all contributing musicians “bones”?): Alec Wooden tracked the bass, and Emmanuel Echem hopped in to, as he does, elevate the song to the next level with a killer horn part. The outro to Lift, with its horns, guitar solos, and whoo-whoos, might be one of the most self-indulgent thirty seconds of music that the Wirelight has released to date, but hell - you won’t get any apologies from me. As Gretchen Wilson put it all the way back in 2004: I’m here for the party.

See you folks at Eddie’s Attic on 7/10, and check back in over here for more updates on singles, album release dates, and other goods. OR: just freakin’ sign up for our newsletter. That’s where the action is.

Cheers.