“Run” is a murder ballad in the most literal sense.
“A guy visiting from England was confronted by a Bangladeshi restaurant owner after attempting to dine-and-dash in the town next to me,” says Ontario, Canada’s Odd Marshall. “He punched the owner in the head, killing him. The entire community came together in anger around this.”
Anger is a recurring theme on Odd Marshall’s new LP, Seconds—not as a destructive end unto itself but as a necessary ingredient for getting off your ass to meet reality where it lives and enact change. Produced by former Blind Melon guitarist Christopher Thorn at Fireside Studios in Joshua Tree, Calif., the album also features Foo Fighters’ Rami Jaffee on keys and Afghan Whigs’ Mathias Schneeberger on clavinet. Unbelievably, Seconds is the first recorded project Thorn and fellow Blind Melon guitarist Rogers Stevens have played on since the death of bandmate Shannon Hoon in 1995. And as you might expect, the album has a sturdy, sometimes intricate ’90s alt-rock foundation to its tightly wound folk/Americana framework.
Thankfully, the killer Odd Marshall sings about was finally arrested back in the U.K. three years later. In the meantime, “Run” has become something more for its creator. “This song isn’t entirely about that murder for me anymore,” says Marshall. “We’re a generation that’s been wronged. The life we’ve been promised isn’t available to us. It’s time to take down those motherfuckers who raised us on lies.”
“You can take the specific and turn it into the universal,” adds Stevens. “Say you’re in a conflict in your own life, and you’re driving down the road listening to this record. Well, that ‘run, motherfucker, run’ lyric lands for you, right? It’s no longer about some incident in a small town.”
We’re proud to premiere Odd Marshall’s “Run.” The self-released Seconds is out March 6.
See Odd Marshall live.
