You know I love the Good Graces. If you don’t love the Good Graces yet, here’s another entrant on the list of reasons why you should. On “Story To Tell,” Kim Ware gets “raw and rocking” as she delves into anxiety and the toll it takes. Ware’s punk rock snarl gives the song an edge — reminding us that even if anxiety is something a lot of people live with, that doesn’t mean it has to be easy.
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| Photo by John McNicholas |
Ware was inspired by Anthony Bourdain’s death. “I remember acknowledging, for the first time really, that I’ve dealt with anxiety pretty much my whole life. And when you’ve had something like that for so long, you just normalize it. Or at least I did.People would be surprised when I’d tell them. They were under the impression that I kept my ‘shit together’ pretty well. I’m pretty functional with it because I’ve always just had to be (I guess that’s one of the upsides to dealing with it for so long!) So I was thinking of all that when I wrote the song, how I put on a brave face.”
“Story to Tell” almost didn’t make it on the collective’s new album, Prose and Consciousness. “I felt like it was an outlier, more raw and rocking but also was worried it would come off as too ‘woe is me.’ But then realized that was exactly why I should include it. I think it occupies a different space than a lot of the others; it hits that 90s thing with the quiet verse / loud chorus, and I really love that stuff. But Jonny’s pedal steel also makes it a little more rootsy sounding than it would have otherwise. I liked how it merges the two styles, and it’s super fun and cathartic to sing the loud parts.”
Prose and Consciousness will be out on October 11th. Notably, the band made an effort to make an album without any breakup and love songs. And if you avoid those two go-to’s, dealing with the shit you have to keep together is what inevitably comes up.