This article will mark one year of me writing for Start-Track. Over all this time, I’ve asked myself about the relation I have with music and making content about it. Have I contributed to the continuous destruction of people’s attention spans? Have I clung too tight to the digital tether? Is my dedication to this blog contributing to the detriment of art, further saturating the market and therefore making music more disposable?
I have to keep telling myself that’s not the case. The writers here choose the music they want to write about, both because it speaks to them and because they want to share it with the world. Everything we do comes from somewhere deeply human, and we rebuke any practice that would remove us from that place. After all, we sprung from a cassette label. We love the tangible, the shareable, anything that’s real.
That’s why young friend’s album New Entertainment is speaking to me right now: There’s a lot of sincerity behind the indie folk style of Drew Tarves, the Vancouver-based singer-songwriter. There’s also a lot of anxiety and fear about the changing tides of the world, particularly around what we consume and how we consume it with regard to our mental nourishment. New Entertaiment‘s title refers not only to the rapid changes in the media landscape — AI-generated nonsense, rapid-fire Instagram reels, and articles stripped down to their SEO-friendly bare essentials — but also to the entertainment we might seek as a rebuking against these changes.
What is that new entertainment we might seek? In young friends’ twelve new songs, Tarves argues for a shift towards the real versus the fake, towards talking with friends and neighbors instead of chatting with Claude, towards doing things with our hands and hearts instead of letting a machine make everything for us, allowing our own minds to melt. In that spirit, not a single part of New Entertainment sounds overproduced or digitally retouched: It all feels like the work of real humans putting all of their blood, sweet, and tears into their work. According to Tarves, all of the album’s songs were recorded live in studio, with very little editing. He says:
“We got together with my band, I taught them all the songs that I’d written and we expanded on them and built them out and wrote new parts, and then we went to the studio for two weeks… It was all very what we play live is what the album is, very hands on. If you make a mistake you have to do it again. We were taking the “Let’s just get it right in real time” approach.”
Of course, there is a little mixing and mastering on the album, but only to enhance the natural vibes of the music. Aside from some vocal doubling and reverb, you can feel like you’re in the studio with the band as you listen to New Entertainment. More importantly, you can feel the joy of Tarves and his collaborators as they recorded each track. Tarves’ longtime friend and collaborator David Marinelli came in to produce, making the process of creation even more genuine (at least in my mind, as I find it’s always more of a thrill to make art when you do it with friends.)
New Entertainment has a touch of Wilco and Del Water Gap, mostly in how the tracks balance between moments of soft reflection and explosive emotion. “The Yard”, a track about being among community (particularly at the local dive), showcases this musicianship well. There’s also “Michael Wakes Up”, the penultimate track, which has a long buildup that introduces us to characters on the verge of major life change; this drops into an extended no-holds-barred jam on the repeated phrase “You’ll do everything you wanted to.”
“Michael Wakes Up” shows little vignettes of folks, a common theme in Tarves’ writing: Michael’s partner tells him that she’s not all the way in love with him, while down the street in a convenience store, John realizes he’s won the lottery. Jackson and Jane ride down the streets of New Jersey in a car with a sign that says “Just Hitched”. Damien dances outside his workplace, following his bliss. These little stories seek to form a greater connection between the listener and the music; they’re all real and relatable tales that tie into the soul of the song and the hearts of those who hear them.
Of course, along with the songs celebrating what’s real, there are also plenty of songs rebuking the unreal. A lot of the lyrics rail against artificial intelligence, such as on “Grand Canyon” which questions if seeing really is believing, or on “Hard Rock” which takes a jab at those who dabble in misinformation (especially our main opp, Elon Musk). The title track wonders about a post-online future in the most explicit terms: “And if one day, when the Internet is gone, we can make new entertainment. Isn’t that what you want?”
That question in the title track is both rhetorical and not rhetorical. It is not rhetorical, in that Tarves directly asks listeners if they would rather take matters into their own hands instead of letting corporations and digital platforms run their lives and ruin their mental health. But it is rhetorical because Tarves doesn’t intend for anyone to answer. He is asking the question as a wake-up call, urging listeners to turn their eyes away from TikToks and Instagram reels and Netflix murder documentaries, and to cast them at the sky and trees and their neighbors and friends, and see all of the beauty that truly surrounds them.
New Entertainment is solid work from young friend, a straightforward indie folk record that makes for an excellent soundtrack to everything from a summer day at the beach to a cold winter night around the fireplace. It is a testament to staying mindful of the world around us and not getting too sucked into derealization or disassociation. It is a work that both is fully present and asks us to be fully present. That should be the goal of any work of art: To make its beholder understand the beauty of not just the art, but the life that inspired it.
In my first write-up for Start-Track, I wrote this about Lord Jane’s EP The Lifting of the Fog:
“…Even if we get through it, the fog lingers, waiting to drop back down in one form or another. Perhaps… the only way to deal with the fog is to address it at a loud volume, realizing it, not in acceptance, but rather in defiance of it.”
On young friends’ new album, the defiance against the fog shines: It takes real effort to create something to fight through the haze in which the world often attempts to trap us. Similarly, writing for Start-Track over the past year has allowed me to connect with so many other incredible artists, writers, and music lovers, and it has made everything shine just a little bit brighter. I thank you for reading these strange little screeds, and I hope they’ve made your day brighter too.
Take a look at the music video for “Michael Wakes Up” below.
Written by Will Sisskind
