Premiere: Grand Am coast on smokey, stripped & sterling ‘Waves’

The end of a journey elicits any number of emotions. The wind has long faded from tussling your hair and casting a red blush across your cheeks. A sadness creeps into your form, and a series of metaphorical purple and blue bruises ripple on your skin. But the new-found calm also signals a vital moment of reflection upon what has come before. As dark as the uncertain future may be now, the adventure was worth every single second, every tear-stained cry, every blissful gaze into the sun. Psycho-pop duo Grand Am ⏤ of vocalist David McMillin and producer/composer James Panepinto ⏤ sink their souls down, down, down into a place of sullen contemplation with a new stripped-out, nearly folk-bent, version of “Wave,” premiering today.

Dubbed the Seaside Lounge Sessions, filmed in a Brooklyn basement studio, the clip shreds away the outer layers for a hyper-refocusing of the evocative, soul-transforming lyrics. “Feel midnight blowing / Catch the stars at the speed of sound / In the desert wide open / Where the bar is shutting down / I’m running every red light / At 100 miles an hour,” warbles McMillin, whose mind is racing through a million images at once. His vocal weeps as if breathing the last fires of hell onto the asphalt for a sacrifice that may never actually absolve them. Guitars and percussion croak and mourn the journey’s abrupt end; even the piano howls into the star-strewn night sky and unleashes each key to some higher being.

“Waves,” originally released last fall with a far more volatile mix, permits the band to expose the vulnerability that has been hidden all along just below the surface. “In its plugged-in original version, this song is a hard-charging, keep-your-hands-on-the-wheel soundtrack for a road trip to the end of the earth. This mellow approach feels like it’s the moment at the end of that trip to reflect on the journey, realizing that there’s no road left,” McMillin tells B-Sides & Badlands. “You’re looking at the ocean, wondering where to go now that the highway has nothing left to offer. That may sound desolate, but in way, I think it’s a beautiful feeling to know that you’ve managed to see it all. You may not have found all the answers, but your soul feels more peaceful with all the memories of those miles playing in your eyes.”

McMillin’s voice soon morphs into a cool-blue spectral whose vestige is imprinted onto the backbone of human existence, fating it to haunt the realms of the physical and supernatural. “I see the world spinning / In the space behind her eyes / Take me back to the beginning / Pick my best disguise / Nobody needs to see me / Nobody needs to know my name,” he drags the listener along the sands of time, discarding the sour aftertaste for the sweet juices of what it has meant to really live in and engage with the world. “The waves will carry us / Somewhere, somehow,” he concludes.

Panepinto, who’s worked on soundtracks for MTV, Showtime and other networks, as well as alongside such engineers as Emily Lazar (Foo Fighters, Sia) and Joe LaPorta (David Bowie, Imagine Dragons), is a dazzling masterclass in the studio. In its new incarnation, “Waves” is a heartbeat throbbing inside a chest, the blooding coursing in the veins, the haunting scream atop a mountain ridge that no one will ever hear again. So, McMillin appears out of the mist as an apt storyteller, pairing his licorice tenor to evoke as much power and passion as humanly possible. Together, they’re a force that defies any and all natural borders of humanity and risk-taking.

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