It seems appropriate that Adam Gaffney‘s new album is called Product of Another Sad Song. When you hear “Cut Off Again,” premiering today, you get the sense that Gaffney has nothing left to lose. His head spins from the bottomless pitcher of beer, and his eyes just can’t adjust to the blinding last-call amber lights. The singer-songwriter rips the song, written circa 2022-2023, directly from an experience of being cut off at a local watering hole.
“It was about a year or two before I quit drinking. I’d only been cut off a few times in my life, and this time was the one where I’d first recognized that I had a problem,” Gaffney shares. “I think my friends were finally acknowledging it, too, when I approached them with the subject. Hence, my friend ‘Joe,’ the friend that I was living with at the time on his couch.”
The “Joe” in the song mirrors his real-life best friend, Joseph, who’d opened up his couch for a few months when Gaffney moved back to St. Louis. Gaffney had been “living down in my car in Florida for a while,” and “I decided it was time to come back, and he let me stink up his living room for a few months when I moved back to town. We lived down the street from this neighborhood bar where they’d serve you a pitcher without a glass. Good times. Ha! He’d often Irish goodbye me, and I’d stumble my way home to find him already asleep. That’s essentially where the chorus came from.”
“I’m just tryin’ to get through the season, but my cars up and busted again,” sings Gaffney, through a hazy, distorted, and whirling smoke. He adds, “Another girlfriend went off and left me ’cause she’s worried about the shape that I’m in.”
It’s that lyric that sticks in his brain the most these days. “I don’t know if this is my ‘favorite’ lyric in the song, but it’s definitely the one I always think of. Maybe it’s because of the truth in the vulnerability of that one,” he says. “This song sounds like a cry for help if I’m being frank. I think that’s what I was subconsciously trying to do without actually saying it out loud.”
“Cut Off Again” marks a significant moment in Gaffney’s life and career. It’s not only a personal watershed milemarker, but a stylistic one, too. The trench he’s built around his heart fills with the rawness of Sturgill Simpson, and the players—Austin Jones (electric guitar/vocals), Ryan Gillespie (bass/vocals), Laura Noelani (drums), Karen Choi (vocals), and Evan Farris (organ)—weave together so tightly that the song emits a classic, timeless radiation.
Admittedly, Gaffney has lived what feels like a full life since “Cut Off Again” first hit paper. “I try not to go back into those memories for too long. I don’t miss the life I had before,” he says. “I pay my bills on time now, and I don’t sleep past noon too much these days. Before I got sober, I think there was a part of me that was stuck in time. I had to shed the dead weight and the things that didn’t suit me anymore, in order to grow. Not only that, but to succeed in this business, you have to be on top of your shit, and I definitely wasn’t. Now I’m able to channel all of that energy into something I love, and it’s actually good for me. I wish I’d done it sooner, but c’est la vie.”
“Cut Off Again” samples Gaffney’s new album, Product of Another Sad Song, out 5/8.
