Single Release: Heart Race
Capturing the sound of uncertainty
In March 2020, I fled New York City to live with my family in northern Massachusetts. I dragged my bass through Penn Station and drank too many IPAs on the train, wondering if an apocalypse was something, maybe, society needed.
My band, Job Creators, was set to release our album, Dream Harvest, in April 2020. As Zoom became the normal way of working and socializing, offering the noise of empathy without the essence, my bandmate Tim and I realized we were going to have release the album on Twitch. We streamed ourselves listening to ourselves to an audience of family and friends in lockdown. I wore a cowboy hat and, once again, drank too many IPAs.
Dream Harvest is about how the dreams that we plant come out a lot different when we pull them from the ground. COVID-19 made everyone reassess what dreams really meant and how they really looked like when we ripped them from the roots. In the end, the lockdown release seemed kind of fitting.
Over the next year, playlists picked up Dream Harvest on Spotify. To date, the album has about 50,000 streams. All these listeners, whatever the country or city, presumably, were also locked in lockdowns and wondering what was going to happen to their dream next.
What does that anticipation sound like?
In my dad’s basement, I tried to figure that out. I discovered a riff between work calls spent analyzing consumer transaction data showing how everyone from South Korea to Spain, the Middle East to the US, started buying loungewear, toilet paper, desks and monitors as if converted all at the same time by some overnight cult of chaos and comfort.
Another year passed.
By 2022, most lockdowns unlocked. Life went from “the new normal” to “forget-it-ever-happened normal.”
The riff I started during the lockdowns of 2020 became “Heart Race.” Last week, Job Creators released “Heart Race” to the world (artwork done by the imitable Alexander Naughton, who also did the art for “Love Monster” and “Waverunner.”)
You can listen on Spotify below or Apple Music here:
“Heart Race” starts slow and heavy with anxiety and determination swinging back and forth like a pendulum and ends with one powerful, primal beat.
As Tim explains it:
Heart Race is about the anxiety of uncertainty, especially about quarantine and how that feeling comes from the heart itself. We literally feel it like a beat.
In the song, we sample composer Leonard Bernstein, who wrote West Side Story and, in an interview about music, talks about how music, just like life, represents some kind of eternal pulse, an eternal beat that connects everything and everyone. As he says throughout the “Heart Race”:
The fundamental pulse of all life, whether it be our blood or our breath, is everywhere in our lives.
Turning Liquid to Stone
Karl Ove Knausgaard, author of My Struggle, the six-part epic of his own life, once explained in an interview that I can’t find and don’t care to confirm, that the purpose of the project was to become solid again. He had felt, in the digital age, that his life and his memories, his own history, had become liquid. Ever flowing, ever forgotten.
The pulsing history of “Heart Race” reminds me that music is a monument to the past, present, and future. To revisit old selves, we sometimes only need to play the right notes.
Read about the previous singles from our upcoming album:
This is an absolutely beautiful post and really rings TRUE.
Wow! Love to hear the meaning behind the songs.