Nashville indie band The Cancellations originated as a studio project in the Midwest in 2017. The lineup featured Ellie Maybe on vocals and guitar, Joe Golemb on bass, and Derek Brady on lead guitar. Maybe had vowed to quit performing music, while Brady, a former bandmate, nagged her to keep playing. It mostly worked, and The Cancellations—named for their rigorous practice schedule—became a band, if an unreliable one.
Brady passed away suddenly in the fall of 2018, and his celebration of life concert became the band’s first live gig. Marsden, a friend of Brady’s and The Cancellations’ current guitarist, stepped in to play his parts for the show. After Brady’s passing and a cross-country relocation for two thirds of the band, music sat on the back burner for a year. Slowly, Maybe began working up The Cancellations set again. She played some writer’s rounds and started looking at studios to record. Then Covid put a stop to everything.
During the pandemic, Maybe and Golemb participated in a virtual songwriting festival where they met violinist Sarah Blick, who contributed a theatrical violin performance to the band’s first fully produced single “All My Heroes” and cemented her own role in The Cancellations.
The solitude and frustration of 2020 became a creative funnel for the distance-challenged group, who recorded an album’s worth of material from their separate lockdowns across the country. Those songs are scheduled for release throughout 2022, including a posthumous performance and co-write from Brady.
The band’s new song “We Don’t Make Each Other Cry Anymore” is a coolly rational view of a relationship on the skids. Maybe brings a weathered dryness to her approach, while the crisp drums make the song feel like a brittle — and effective — hybrid of post-punk and country. If the song feels natural, that’s because it all fell into place over a late-night conversation.
“Romantic entanglements rarely end with a defined victor or a clear battlefield, which is why I’ve always loved breakup songs that take a more varied approach than ‘you’ll suffer without me’ or ‘I’ll suffer without you,'” writes Maybe. “So when my friend Jessica serendipitously blurted out the hook lyric over cocktails and lamentations of terrible past relationships, I looked her dead in the eyes and said, ‘You just wrote a country song.’ It was such a concise and evocative way of explaining the fizzling passion of a relationship that thrived on little more than conflict, and it evolved into one of the most cathartic songs I’ve ever co-written.””
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