Matthew Squires and Sunk Coast’s Zach Totta met under circumstances that don’t exactly encourage collaboration. Assigned as roommates at a silent-meditation retreat shortly after Squires relocated from Austin to Ithaca, N.Y., the two didn’t exchange a syllable until the final day. What happened once they did converse eventually led to the self-released Easy Answers To Harder Questions, their upcoming collaborative EP.
Defined by his unique vocal delivery and philosophical approach to songwriting, Squires has been plugging away since 2012. Over the course of nine albums and a host of singles, he earned notable accolades in his former hometown, with one prominent music site naming him “successor to Austin’s late, great Daniel Johnston.” A skilled producer and engineer, Totta has been releasing music under the Sunk Coast brand since 2015.
For their latest single, the pair forgo mantras for the overwhelming noise of contemporary American life. Bolstered by Totta’s surreal production, Squires unveils an absurdist fever dream with visuals that include a golfing Moses, a Mount Rushmore made of Jell-O and a cameo from Jeffrey Epstein.
“I wrote ‘What’s Going On?’ as a response to the same chaos we’re all witnessing,” says Squires. “At the microcosmic level, it’s about how it feels to be an individual self under siege in a hyperreal society that simultaneously demands you be something while drowning you in so much data and noise that becoming anything feels impossible. At a more macrocosmic level, it’s about how the United States is having a kind of death-drive global temper tantrum. It’s a superpower that tried to be something special and ended up a fading copy of its own mythology.”
Squires also acknowledges that the song title cribs from one of the greatest protest songs ever written. “The title borrows from Marvin Gaye, but where his is a plea for understanding, mine is an exclamation of bewilderment and disorientation,” says Squires. “It’s the same three words, only with a question mark where an answer used to be.”
And as for the other elephant in the room: “Yes, it was largely inspired by the Epstein files—and I originally wrote it with the line, ‘Jeffrey Epstein’s ghost is playing trumpet among the ruins in my head.’ But I changed it to just Jeffrey to make it a little less on the nose.”
We’re proud to premiere Matthew Squires & Sunk Coast’s “What’s Going On?”
—Hobart Rowland
