Western Shout

About

New Jersey’s Philip Watts is Western Shout. "I've always been a band guy, plus I forget peoples' names." Philip says of the track and upcoming the album: “The Bird & The Cage is a song that came out of the retelling of a fever dream my wife had when she was sick as a child. Her father was this really knowing guy and when she relayed the dream to him about a bird and a cage and tormentors he stopped her and pointed out that she was of course the bird, the cage, and every other character in the little sleep drama. This was rattling around in my head during a time I happened to be experiencing terrible insomnia and the song was written in a few minutes in the middle of a particularly rough night. Ultimately, it’s about the hard truth; that with all the seemingly banal platitudes about how we hold the key to our own liberation, that means of course that we ourselves are the rap we’re trying to beat. It’s a ledger that’s never totally settled. Not with me anyway.” While the rest of Western Shout’s debut record comes from the same place of hard truths and confessions it also comes with a lot of levity and color. “The music I love most and what comes most readily from me is almost always full of mixed emotions and self-contradictions, tears with laughter, grandiose and totally basic, the high majors & low minors all smushed together. I’m always trying to make things as simple as possible, but the world is complicated and messy. So I just say yes to the mess.”

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