Brooklyn’s Tumblers are a folk band with some serious punk aspirations. And they’re living that out with their raucous live shows and unfettered approach to the genre. Jack Crawford-Brown and Emerson Sieverts had been playing together in various bands around the Washington, D.C., area for about a decade before reuniting in New York to form the Tumblers three years ago. The band’s debut LP, Tangerine, is out now on the Summit label.
“This album asks over and over again, ‘Why are we alive?’” says Crawford-Brown. “Ultimately, these songs are about persisting through loss, growing up and smiling at the memories—even the hardest ones.”
Crawford-Brown breaks down Tangerine’s 14 tracks.
—Hobart Rowland
1) “Jenny”
“I wrote this after hearing that my friend’s teenage daughter was depressed and on suicide watch. She’s doing a lot better now. I wanted to picture young love through that lens. In the song, the boy is sitting on a blanket in the cemetery talking to Jenny after the fact, as if she’s still there.”
2) “Hocus Pocus”
“This is a breakup-from-everything song. I’ve always had a philosophy of throwing away people, places and things. Sometimes, you need to throw the picture into the fire … leave it all behind.”
3) “Rally”
“A song about rebellion, but the real crux of it is the chorus: ‘There’s something pretty in your hair.’ Any movement is made up of people with all sorts of weird eccentricities.”
4) “Bell Tower”
“We always start ‘Light Of A Home’ with this little intro when we play it live. The beauty of making a record is we can do that and keep it a separate track. ‘Bell Tower’ is a stanza about melting into the arms of another after a long day.”
5) “Light Of A Home”
“This was recorded live in a barn in the middle of a storm. It’s an upbeat, foot-stomping song about the swiftness of love’s bloom and the endlessness of love lost.”
6) “Crystal Ball”
“‘My baby’s got this crystal ball she don’t know how to read at all.’ She can see that he cheated on her if she wants to—but sometimes we don’t want to look.”
7) “Wild Weather”
“The rain signifies making it last … stopping everything else from happening and just being stuck in that moment.”
8) “Voice Inside”
“I’ve always been obsessed with heroes in any form: soldiers, athletes, these incredible people able to do amazing things. When you’re young, you look up to them in awe. When you’re older, you’re still in awe, but you see the difficulty more clearly. Fear and doubt are what makes something extraordinary. Overcoming that—that’s the voice inside.”
9) “Sleepy Lion”
“I took acid last year in a pretty remote forest near Woodstock, N.Y. I decided I wanted to be a cat, so I ran around the woods on all fours. In a low moment some weeks later, I recalled this experience, and it was amazing how much power I found in this cat. He gave me something I didn’t have before … maybe courage, maybe just a will to run wild.”
10) “Lovers And Criers”
“Where do all the people go when the night ends? When the bar closes? When they board up the doors for good?”
11) “Tastes Like June”
“A silly breakup tune. Sometimes there’s nothing left to say but goodbye.”
12) “Cathy’s Song”
“My ex’s father died of cancer. It came on fast and ended fast—all in a blur of four months. How do you comfort someone who’s lost a parent? What do you say to them? It’s an impossible task bound to fail.”
13) “Starlight”
“When we wrote ‘Starlight,’ we had this singular image of a car lifting off after blasting over a steep hill. We’re suspended in the air, and then we fall.”
14) “Tangerine”
“We close every show with this. The song is based on the Yeats poem ‘When You Are Old.’ It’s all about love and regret at the end of life. Yeats was a bit of an odd character. He proposed to his muse, Maud Gonne, four times and got rejected each time. The poem is basically saying, ‘You’ll regret rejecting me.’ ‘Tangerine’ takes a more hopeful view, as if to say, ‘I’d come back to you still, if only you’d call my name out loud.’”
