Track-by-track: Overo - Overo

Overo is a new band with members of football, etc. and Perfect Future. Last month they released their debut self-titled album. Brendan, who plays guitar and sings in the band shared with us insights of the album's lyrics.  

 

“The Dead” speaks to two different traumatic events in places I was living—the Pulse shooting in Orlando and Hurricane Harvey in Houston. In both cases I was relatively new to living in the area and still didn’t feel at home. It was only through communal trauma and the outpouring from the community in all facets that I came found a home.

With “Constellations” I tell about a moment that I shared with someone who was briefly in my life in a way that was resoundingly negative. Yet I still have positive associations with these memories, which in some ways makes it more painful.

I was raised really religious. But even though I was incredibly involved even into my twenties, I never really heard the voice of God which made me feel like something was wrong with me. So in “Pact” I’m sort of ruminating on reconciling that.

“Summer Wheat” looks at growing up. In a lot of ways, I’ve remained pretty consistent as people I am close to have changed their aspirations, aesthetics, morals. I don’t think that it’s wrong to grow up. But I spend a lot of time thinking about those people who have totally changed.

I can’t really speak to the poem read on “Interlude” since I didn’t write it. A very close poet friend of mine named Devereux Fortuna agreed to read a poem for the album during a short instrumental piece we wanted to include to introduce the B side of the album. She read a bunch of great poems, but there was something about this performance and the imagery that really worked.

In “Pine and Black Oak” I wrote about returning to a place that I used to feel like was really important to my life but after all this time it felt alien. It is an experience that I really think is worrying—that something can become so diminished.

“Dark Eyes” is one of the more hopeful songs on the record even if it doesn’t seem like it. I wanted for there to be a song about looking at senselessness and rather than resigning, using that feeling to inspire moving forward - making our own meaning.

There are times where I feel like there is so much unintentional beauty in the world that it shocks me into grasping something that I can’t really explain. “Diffraction” is about that feeling.

“Joseph” is about the death of a friend. At his funeral his family played music that he had recorded that hadn’t been released. This song is about the experience of loss juxtaposed with the life that his music still brought.