Barrooms have always occupied a special conflicted place in country music. With “Ladies’ Dart Night,” Very Old Morris submits its entry into the cluttered cry-in-your-beer cannon.
“It chronicles one of those hazy, chimerical nights spent simultaneously living and dying,” says Jerid Reed Morris, the Texas-based band’s undisputed leader and namesake. “Where reading your own expression in the pisser’s mirror reveals infinitely more about who’s inside you than any sober analysis ever could … God knows that’s why they call it a liver.”
“Ladies’ Dart Night” is the lead single from the self-released Boogedy Boogedy Boogedy Shoop, an album that affectionately dismantles the radio-friendly conventions of ’90s country and reassembles them into a vaguely hallucinatory template. Drawing inspiration from the likes of Garth Brooks, George Strait and Alan Jackson, the songs were tracked at Jett Bass Studio in Morris’ San Antonio hometown with a list of collaborators that includes members of former Sub Pop faves Rose Windows. The LP also features generously reimagined versions of Calexico/Iron & Wine’s “Sixteen, Maybe Less” and Smashing Pumpkins’ “Thirty-Three.”
The video for “Ladies Dart Night” is the work of Very Old Morris bandmember Nils Petersen. “There’s something surreal about hours spent in a bar,” says Petersen. “Somewhere between euphoria and dismay, the lines blur. Our memories offer dream scenarios where events are out of order and blank spaces are filled with hopes and fears.”
In keeping with that concept, Peterson transforms a night at a local watering hole into something strangely revealing. “Time can be distorted to the speed of molasses,” he says. “Thoughts linger, images imprint … and that which we try to escape becomes the life vest of our safety.”
We’re proud to premiere Very Old Morris’ “Ladies Dart Night.” Boogedy Boogedy Boogedy Shoop is out October 2.
—Hobart Rowland
