How you feeling?
Pent up. Helpless. Frustrated. Wanting to live. Ready to explode.
Well, you now have the perfect soundtrack by way of Get Small, the new tune from southern Alberta songwriter Luke Colborne and his band Lucky Sonne.
The track, which theYYSCENE is proud to exclusively premiere, somehow manages to encapsulate the mood of the times — a barely restrained, impossibly contained, slowly simmering, roots-rock rise up infused with soul and spit and spirit.
Locked down. But ready to rage.
“It’s very much a lockdown song,” Colborne admits. “Depressingly so.”
Surprisingly, it was actually recorded as a collective pre-COVID, early on in the process of putting together a new record, and originally completed first in order to enter into a song contest.
When that fell through, they decided it was too good to waste or hold for later, and so they teamed with first-time director, part-time artist and full-time student Quinn Goddard for a superb four-and-a-half-minute video that incorporates performances with some stop-action and other footage she shot independently.
Colborne calls Goddard “fucking brilliant,” her truly getting what he was going for with the song after only one phone call and some email collaboration.
As for what this region’s Jim James was trying to do with the equally fucking brilliant track, he said its genesis was a mass shooting in the States a couple of years ago, and the advice of a politician to “get small, don’t gather in groups, just stay out of the way, stay quiet and you’ll be safe.”
Colborne calls it a “crisis” song that is, again, perfect for the summer of 2020.
“The song itself is really a crisis,” he says of the tune which has three distinct and incredible parts to it, “the rejection of the system and also an acceptance of the system.”
It’s also, he says, a pretty good indicator as to where he and the rest of Lucky Sonne —Arran Fisher, Darren Young and Mark Race — are headed with their new material and album, which he’s hoping they can soon begin working on again together.
“I think Get Small sets the tone for the record,” he says. “It’ll be a rockin’ record, man. We’ll have our Lucky Sonne folky stuff on there, too, but it’s a rocker.”
So, without further ado, here’s the video for Get Small.
Play it loud. Repeat. And play it louder.