VIDEO PREMIERE // Butcher The Bar – Haunts

Post by Misha

I’ve been pretty vocal about my fantasy of someday learning to skateboard. Every year that ticks by makes it a little less likely to become a reality I guess, but that doesn’t stop me from looking on wistfully as the kids at my local skate park land their first ollie.

When I was in the seventh grade I had a crush on the class skater boy. He had black painted nails and a long skeletal frame accentuated by skinny jeans from the women’s section at Hot Topic. My crush was largely unreciprocated except for one day after school when he tried to teach me some skateboarding basics on the tennis court behind our school. I fell and scraped my knee bloody and then we held hands back to the parking lot.

So I suspect that what I mean when I say that I want to learn to skateboard is really, I want to return to a more youthful time, when I had crushes and held hands with them. When I was still figuring out what my thing was going to be and all of them were open possibilities.

In lieu of picking up a skateboard and finding a new crush with black fingernails and skinny jeans to teach me how to ride it, though, I like to find songs that take me back to that time. Or maybe not back to that time exactly, but to the place its memory represents which is somewhere sun-drenched and open like a flower.

‘Haunts’ takes me there for the obvious and non-metaphorical reasons (its video is literally the story of a 20-something dude learning to skate), but there’s something in the melody itself, too. It’s got that quality of summertime, but the end of summer. The quality of looking back through rose colored glasses and beckoning to that umami emotion that blends deep contentedness with profound sadness.

‘Haunts’ is from Butcher The Bar’s forthcoming record, III, which will be out June 14th on Bobo Integral. You can pre-order it here.