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From The Desk Of The Veils: Driving Mulholland At Night

VeilsLogoTime Stays, We Go (Pitch Beast)—the Veils‘ 10-track, fourth release—is both patiently restrained and wildly emotional. It’s full of lush brass and sing-along melodies, moments of surf-rock guitar and beachside ukulele, and essential personal queries within the struggles of the human endeavor. It’s a small dose of Pixies, and definitely reminiscent of Talking Heads, with a nod toward Jeff Buckley. In other words, Time Stays has a familiar quality despite its newness, and it’s instantly likeable, much like frontman Finn Andrews himself. Andrews and bassist Sophia Burn will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new Veils feature.

mulholland

Soph: People are very polite with me about this. I’m not sure whether it’s that I get a weird look in my eyes when I talk about how very, very important it is to me that we do it, or whether they like it, too, but I’ve managed to talk people into doing it really a lot of times, and I can’t even drive.

It’s so beautiful, and it’s not about Lynch, even though that helps. But I think it would feel Lynch-y anyway, even if he hadn’t claimed it. Maybe that’s why he claimed it. I just love every second of it. From either direction, though I think ideally I prefer coming from town, the way you kind of hit it unexpectedly quickly, even though someone’s been moaning at you about how it takes too long. I wonder how carefully it was planned. Did they mean the intervals between street lamps to be so perfect?

And thinking about the houses. The way none of them are really visible, and the whole time I’m thinking about the people who live in them, wondering what it’s like for that to be Where You Live, and coming home at night I feel like would feel like sinking into something, even though you’re on a mountain. Like going below.

Of course up top it’s marvelous, but I think I get more pleasure from the way the curves in the road throw you around a little bit as you go over the hill, and even though staring out across this lighted thing is great, it’s not so much the view as the ground around the view—the way it’s all dust and pebbles, and a slope that looks like the template for crumbling and sheer.

Plus, while the view is great, it is only my second favourite way to see that view, number one being on a plane, flying in the dark around 7-8 p.m., with the lights from cars making the whole city look like an estuary of lights.

It’s only sad to leave the view because that means its half over. It’s nice to put something bass-y on the stereo, at that point, I think. And besides, there are loads more twists in the road before you hit Ventura, at which point I always kind of hate Ventura, even though it’s not its fault the mountain is over.

Video after the jump.