2015-06-22

Andrew Payne:"Burning Gasoline" EP

http://www.andrewpaynemusic.com/

 I got my hands on Andrew Payne's EP "Burning Gasoline" which just came out 2015-04-07.  I had a chance to talk to Andrew about it a little bit too.  He is from Aiken, South Carolina, and it shows in his art. 
 "Burning Gasoline" (the EP's title song) is about an actual motorboat trip he took as a child down a river.  His and his friend's dads planned an excursion.  This song make many local references to South Carolina and Georgia.  Most American kids get to take some kind of trip into national or state parks at some point in their childhood, and "Burning Gasoline" triggers some memories of my own.  It'll probably trigger some for you too, including the kinds of food dads take on a camping trip.  The song mentions stormy weather, but Andrew either didn't think there was much actual danger at the time, or was too young to know better.  This song makes me want to go kayaking again.
 "Locked Up" is loaded with double entendres.  Clever writing featuring misdirection between the protagonist's girlfriend & his guitar.  Most guitarists will enjoy this song.  I feel some ownership over it, like it belongs to me, to "just us guitarists", like non-players just won't understand a man's first true love is his axe.  You might like this song, but you probably won't experience it the same way I do, unless you too have spent 10,000 hours with a 6-string.  Combines some feelings of being unjustly wronged, having your property stolen too.  The chorus is strong & fun.  Maybe I'll learn to play it.
 It would be easy to make a good music video for this song.  It almost writes itself like a sit-com episode script.

 "Late Night Highway Blues" evokes the sad feelings of anyone who's ever been stranded on a interstate or lonely state highway far from any human improvements by vehicle malfunctions.  Your sudden change of plans for unexpected maintenance feels awful.  It makes you feel like things aren't going right in your life, even though the machine is not you.  If by some chance you've never been to America, our continent is huge.  There are large, sparsely populated areas of the old west where you can be on a road that stretches from one horizon to the other with no other humans in sight.  If you get stuck there, you might not see another person for days.  You can get stuck in a survival situation you didn't plan for.  This often happens in winter on I-80 when a blizzard can cover the road shutting down traffic for several states.  Our American sense of self-identity is wrapped up in our automobiles.
 Most of us ( the poor, working-class people ) have suffered this kind of break-down event more than once.  "Late Night Highway Blues" pegs this experience well.  The rhymes are comfortable and right for the subject.  The chorus could become a familiar sing-a-long if it gets the radio airplay it deserves.  This song would be perfect for radio, as nowadays people are usually in their cars when they flick on their radio, the perfect place to discover this song.
 This is perfect for compilations of "Road Trip" songs, summer vacation mixes, & all-automobile playlists.

 "The Company Kept" seems to lament the futility of the work-a-day rat race.  It mentions wasting time, and smoking cigarettes.  Andrew Payne used to smoke, but he got over it.  I respect that, the most attractive feature a person can display is the power to self-edit their own behavior to become a better person.  This song speaks somewhat to the death of the American dream, the correctly placed frustration of Generation X who knows they're screwed.  But it also seems to suggest that if the crowd you're running with has no ambition, you need to find a better social circle, even if the odds are against you.

 "The Company Kept" mentions a basement stage, and "Roll Credits" is all about Hollywood.  I asked Andrew if he's into acting, and he said these lyrics are more a metaphor in the Shakespearean sense of "All the world's a stage". 
 Andrew spent ~9 months in L.A. working for Snoop Dog's vanity record label.  He learned there is a big difference between music creation & performance and the business side of the music industry.  Andrew is interested more in a local, familiar music performance & reputation than that big-label kind of manufactured plastic fame.