Premiere: Rue Snider wants to ‘Run Away with You’

I’ve been thinking a lot about running away lately. I know it’s a silly, albeit blissful, fantasy, but one which often weighs heavily on my day-to-day. It’s a notion that leaves a bleached imprint on the heart like a sun burn that never heals on the skin. Indie-rockstar Rue Snider doses up generously with this sentiment on a heavenly-sedating new song called “Run Away with You,” which galvanizes the lush ripples of classic rock and marries with an enchanting powdering of alternative pop. His voice wriggles playfully across the melody, despite the altogether melancholic wash. “Alyssa, kiss me, we can take it slow / Alyssa, call your mother from the road / Just join me for a month or two,” Snider unwraps, the arrangement rather tart to the taste.

Rooted underneath the rhythmic zip, which diffuses the message in his shades, the car’s glistening exterior, the wind’s soft caress, there is a hulking and calculated measure of anguish. “I wanna run away with you / To somewhere with an ocean view,” he later promises, the flurry of ’70s drums clashing and collapsing behind his ears. “Run Away with You” is outlined with a curiously timeless feel, owed in large part to Snider’s pointed delivery. “Humans collect emotional baggage like a hoarder in a rent controlled apartment. It compounds as we get older. Trying to connect with another person is often a process of assessing whether we can balance the weight of each other’s baggage and carry it together or not,” he tells B-Sides & Badlands, premiering the song today. “This is usually at the expense of more important things like love, passion, romance, honesty, shared desires, self love and empathy. Many of us become myopic, imprisoned by our traumas, lacking compassion for our own poor choices, and seek solace in another person whose damaged spaces look like our own.”

That damage is the connective tissue of much of life. Hell, go check out social feeds, and you’ll begin to fall into your own darkly-bound spiral. So, Snider proposes a series of inquires withing the song, adorned with sunny accents and a grumbling gloom. “What if we could leave it all behind and run away with someone? What if we could find a beach and start over, hard reset, go emotionally back to one? It takes a lot of work to be healthy,” he continues, seemingly unraveling his own state of affairs in frank nuggets. “I try to stay grounded in the now and own who I am, where I’ve been, and move intentionally to where I want to go. But the fantasy of emotional amnesia is real. The idea of sharing it with someone can be intoxicating.”

“Run Away with You” hankers for release, and in part, the listener does achieve a certain modicum of that ⎯⎯ but it also “embraces denial,” he verifies the very nature of uncertainty. “It longs for an emotional clean slate even if it’s only for a short time. It’s a narrow world view informed more by youth and inexperience than intention. It’s a place all of us live at one time or another.”

The song leads up to Snider’s new album City Living, out July 27. “[This song] is the voice that makes driving to the ocean at 4:30 in morning with two bottles of whiskey, a bag of cocaine and a car full of intoxicated strangers make sense. It’s the siren beckoning to move closer to the shore.”

Snider is set to play New York City’s Berlin space a day before (July 26).

Listen below:

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