Keyboardist/lead vocalist Katie Von Schleicher’s swan song with Wilder Maker, “Love So Well” is a country rock song with traces of Neil Young and Big Star. It’s about giving up on the greatest love you’ve had in your life, and the strange calm that follows. A dream of losing yourself on the great American equalizer — the highway, as you can hear in the lines “I aim my future with my hands / I am no one now.”
Crackling with anxiety and defiance, “Rose Room” sounds something like Spoon if they were more desperate and less cool, with flashes in a few choice moments of the brashness and humor of AC/DC. It is a song about the intersection of two truths: First, the tightrope we all walk to stay sane in a completely insane environment. Second, the moment when you understand that you’re the only one steering the ship and if you do nothing, you will crash. No saviors waiting in the wings.
Birnbaum, who mixed both songs himself, explains: “To me both songs are sort of an extension of the Zion universe. For example, the character “Cal” appears in “Rose Room” and he’s also the character that the narrator is talking to in “Cocaine Man” off the LP. I like the idea of the same characters reappearing over and over so that I can create a whole universe that’s full of its own connections and clues and locations, the way some authors do. You can get into a single song, but the further you go into the music the more of these trails you can find, and the more the experience can expand, spilling over the edges of the songs into the world.”
