A crisp Fall evening walk in the Northeast smells a little like smoke, sounds like leaves crunching under your feet, and looks like you’re drowning in a sea of reds, oranges, and browns. The leaves haven’t completely abandoned the trees yet, and the air is cold enough that it stings, but only just a little bit, to breathe in. It’s a beautiful headspace to lose yourself in; a sort of in-between moment of the fullness of life brought on by Summer and the cold, biting death brought on by winter. With his new project, Case Bolles was able to capture everything that makes Autumnal abandon feel so safe. The music of Gardenhead comes from a similar place; it’s emotionally wrought but only enough that it stings a little bit.
When talking about Gardenhead, Casey says that he started the project because he was in dire need of a fresh start. He wasn’t feeling inspired, hadn’t put out any new music, and had spent enough time growing while on the road that he was starting to pull influence from places that he wasn’t used to pulling from. With Gardenhead, Bolles has swapped his angsty and loud brand of acoustic-punk for something more intimate and subtle. The same prowess and emotional punch are packed into these songs, it just has a newfound sense of maturity.
Today, I’m excited to share a brand new Gardenhead song with Y’all called “Perpetual Motion.” It’s this finger-picked, subdued moment that feels like everything that I described earlier. Waves of smoke begin to fill your lungs and the low-end feels so much like the sounds of a nature walk in mid-October that you’ll be left seeing shades of orange for days on end. Lyrically, the track touches on moving forward and how the world never stops. You need to pick yourself up, brush yourself off, and do whatever is necessary to keep going because the world isn’t going to wait for you.
When asked about the track, vocalist Casey Bolles said: “I wrote Perpetual Motion when I was staying with some friends in Philly at a time in my life when I felt like I had nowhere that really felt like home and I was spending a lot of time wasting time. I recorded a few different versions, most of which were pretty bare bones. Eventually, I took the song to a studio session in MA. Alan and I spent a lot of time trying to come up with interesting drum sounds and eventually decided to just make the exact sounds we were looking for which resulted in us standing in a kitchen with microphones, rhythmically throwing a set of keys around and slapping books together. This ended up being what we used for the final version.”
You can stream this incredible song above.
