Premiere: Jordan Lovelis get caught up in ‘Sweet & Low (San Francisco)’

It’s shockingly easy to get caught up (and even lost) in your memories. You meander through dark and dusty halls with the hope you’ll stumbling upon that feeling again ⏤ when time meant nothing and you could actually live in the moment. Los Angeles folk-rock journeyman Jordan Lovelis reopens such a door, leading perhaps to nowhere but into his imagination, with his sadly gleaming new song. “Sweet & Low (San Francisco),” premiering today ahead of tomorrow’s street date, picks up a romance right where it left off. Or so he thinks. “Ruby red sundress / Like the bridge / To my mind / Wine stain teeth on the corner / Of Haight & Ashbury / Where I smoked my last cigarette,” he sets the scene with pointed details, tracing outlines as best as his memory will allow.

A stolen kiss, an embrace that chills his skin, the sun playing peek a boo over towering cityscapes and greenery, his words are both beautiful and tragic. “Sometimes, I close my eyes / Get lost inside / A Memory,” he feels the hands of time and distance ripping him apart at the seams all over again. Then, the tears crash against his bones as waves on a rocky shore. “It was the night everything changed…” That personal breakthrough quakes through his body, and even though that entanglement may never have fully blossomed, he still clutches it close to his heart. The beat resurges only in faint ghosts and imprints of what he has concocted in his mind.

On the song, Lovelis writes to B-Sides & Badlands over email, “‘Sweet & Low’ was written after being up all night with a potential lover. Falling for someone is always pretty overwhelming, and this was created out of that feeling,” he says. “We lived in different cities, so it was pretty strange to leave and have to let time be the deciding factor.”

“Sweet & Low (San Francisco),” recorded in Brooklyn and later mixed in American Fork, Utah (with Joshua James), twists open the valve of humanity’s most universal of sorrows. Should haves and could haves carry with them endless possibilities, and as we grow older and more weary, regrets swell and nearly suffocate us if we let it. But Lovelis offers a critical reminder that it doesn’t have to be this way. We can brood, heart rending in two, without it consuming us. We should listen.

Lovelis is expected to drop an EP this fall.

Listen below:

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