TUNES // Great Grandpa – Bloom

Post by Misha

This is a shout of appreciation for songs that appear just when you need them the most– sunny and pleading, cutting through apathy with a good chorus and a winning smile. There’s a whole genre of music out there that feels like the only uncynical answer to self care instagram handles. They’re small morsels of encouragement, peppered with wisdom that’s fragile because it’s all a little untested, like a secondhand therapy session passed between friends, advice repeated stumblingly but with the brave confidence of hope and love.

The songs starts like a warm hand on a shoulder, with Alex Menne singing, “I get anxious on the weekends when I feel I’m wasting time, but then I think about Tom Petty, and how he wrote his best songs when he was 39.” But the next line turns plaintive rather than celebratory and suddenly they’re not singing to you anymore, but with you, in prayer to the god of uncertain futures: “Say I’m young enough to change, please say I’m young enough.”

Bloom is a triumphant tangle of ‘it’ll be all right‘s with the specter of a question mark floating in and out of its verses and leering over its chorus. It’s that uncertainty that is so inviting – that sense of being in the soup of it without answers, but all together all the same, nodding in agreement to the same song.

Buy Great Grandpa’s new album, Four of Arrows, here.