Sometimes there's no better way to capture what a song sounds like in words than to let the band tell you themselves. Songwriter, Gary McClure, of this week's Music Monday artist, American Wrestlers, says of their new single: "I wrote Give Up in the basement of our two room house, in the murder inducing heat of a Saint Louis night, half a mile from the Mississippi river. It came out in one shot after I plugged in and hit a chord that rang out with a middle-era Clash jangle. I followed that chord into Strummerland and ended up going via some first-album-Foo-Fighters deal to somewhere else. The descending guitar lead line came much later when I wanted to add something in the vain of the clean-chorus-reverb guitar runs of contemporary indieists. A friend told me that it's a song about feeling trapped. I don't know. He's probably right." American Wrestlers' follow-up to their critically acclaimed self-titled debut is called Goodbye Terrible Youth, and will be released on November 4th on Fat Possum. Now listen to the first single, Give Up!
