February Motel cover shot.
Siena Burgess
The FADER’s “Songs You Need” are the tracks we can’t stop playing. Check back every day for new music and follow along on our Spotify playlist.
This past Friday (October 28), Lucy and Gods Wisdom dropped their debut collaborative LP, February Motel. It follows the Western Mass eccentrics’ Christmas 2016 EP On Thin Ice, which featured the unhinged earworm “Beep Beep.” Since then, Lucy has shared a wealth of solo material, including five installments of his Cooper B. Handy’s Album series and a debut studio project, The Music Industry Is Poisonous, via Dots Per Inch. And Gods Wisdom has released his own string of singles and EPs without fanfare in the interim.
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Following in this tradition of spontaneity, the new record was released without warning. A succinct quote from Gods Wisdom — “Recorded in rural motels while society was shut down. Blessed with self expression; the full range of emotion. Reliving a pastel grey morning in February ’94; mood and poetry.” — and both artists’ Instagram captions (below) are all the background we’re likely to get on the mysterious project.
What we do know — due to some diligent reporting from our massive and well-funded investigative team — is that the “legendary producers” Lucy refers to in his post are Encii (“Ooh La La”), Hi-C (“Peace By Peace”), and Surf Gang’s Evilgiane, who laid the groundwork for three of February Motel’s cuts: “X Marks the Spot,” “Love Me Hate Me,” and “If The Stars Align.”
The rest of the record is produced by Lucy himself, who — though he may be too bashful to admit it — is at least as legendary as any of the three guest beat makers. And it’s one of his own instrumentals — a signature mix of plunky piano, saturated sub bass, and machine gun hi-hats —that sits behind the unsettling standout track “Walt Disney’s Grave.”
“Take a walk down to Walt Disney’s grave / Just a mile down the way,” Gods Wisdom growls in the song’s first moments, before the drums come in. He returns later on to add some disturbing grunts and howls to the chorus. But mostly, its Lucy’s track. “To give and to try / Born ready to live and to die,” he begins, his sing-song stylings a welcome contrast to his creative partner’s gruff accompaniment. “Don’t get me wrong, yeah, I love to be alive / Though I know that there are bigger fish to fry.”
He moves on to the track’s subject, a headstone he claims to be visiting “just to check in if [Disney is] still dead” because “finders keepers, that’s what the will said.” What deeper meaning may lie behind these lyrics is not immediately clear. (Walt Disney was not only the creator of some of America’s most beloved cartoons and amusements, but also a notorious racist and Nazi sympathizer who allegedly had his body cryogenically frozen upon his death to preserve it for a time when the technology exists to reanimate it, though the latter legend remains speculative.) Like the rest of February Motel, the song’s intention is left for the listener to decode. Listen to the album in full below.
