Have Heart and Fiddlehead howler Pat Flynn surprised the punk world by launching yet another new band, How Much Art, last summer. The band also features Flynn's Have Heart/Fiddlehead bandmate Shawn Costa plus Maddi Nave (GEL), Darrin Thompson and Justin Mantell (Qualms), and original Fiddlehead bassist Adam Gonsalves (So Automatic).
Today they're following up debut single "PR" with the synth-powered punk anthem "XO." The song incorporates five different languages, but its native tongue is New Order. Here's Flynn with more:
There’s five different languages featured in this song (English, French, Chinese, Irish and Spanish) - with native speakers each singing about love or reciting it from a poet in the native tongue of both speaker and poet. It's a love song about the ineffable nature of true, marrow-deep love and the frustration that comes from realizing just how badly words fail when trying to express such a concept to the actual source of one's feelings and thoughts.
Our French friends from Paris in the duo, Copycat, sing in their native tongue, as do close friends and family members, reciting famous love poems from the like of Li Bai, Antoine O' Rafteiri and the great Cesar Vallejo - each in their native tongue, all love poems from each poet, in a failed attempt to capture that impossible emotion we sense deep in our bones for that beloved person in our life. When Darin and I first put the music together for this song I felt like it was the sound of a dark, meditative state of reflection on only the most intense of experiences in life. So, I decided to try and communicate in five different languages all the ways in which I love my wife / my best friend / lifelong traveller / etc. I think the music and lyrics capture this attempt.
Below, surrender to "XO."
