The Singles Bar: Peter Drucker drags social media obsession through ‘Concrete’

Welcome to The Singles Bar, a review series focused on new single and song releases.

Peter Drucker‘s “Concrete” needles right into the fingertips. Braiding together indie-folk, blues, and pop, he wields his ripe poeticism to dissect our culture’s obsession with social media. There’s a coldness woven into the backbone, as we peruse colleagues’ and friends’ Instagrams and witness only the outer shell of someone’s life. It’s never a complete picture. In fact, it’s blurrier than you’re likely to accept yourself. You do it, too. We all do it. We all present what we think the world would want to know, tucking away the mental decay, darkness, and sorrow for our pillows.

“Guess, it’s one of those days, / I’m brushing my teeth with Tequila again,” he sings on the opening line. A fragility sprouts from his signature warble, uncertain and quaking in its place. “Hey, do you want to go play? / Never mind I’m out of blues and greens again.” Drucker heaves his words like cinder blocks, lugging two at a time behind him, scaring the earth with more than just jagged edges. His tears seem to streak alongside his feet, too.

It’s on the hook that he lets a rash of emotions, from anger to misery, soak the eardrums. “It’s like I can’t breathe / Rub my face in concrete / Tell me that you’re gone and you’re never coming home,” he snaps, percussion washing over him. “It’s like I’m half gone, wishing I was half lost / Maybe I was wishing you could stay a little longer.”

Each line sprays like acidic rain. “Maybe that it’s alright, I don’t need sleep right /  I can sit around and watch you dance among the stars / Saying that, you’re gone, feels wrong, to me.” It’s clear from his inflection that his wounds run far and deep, perhaps never really healed (and maybe never will). The song tumbles and smolders, clearly branded with personal experience.

The song, always festering below the surface, depicts “a ‘friend’ of mine who seems to have moved on to greener pastures and left me behind to drudge through my dreary existence without them,” he offers of the song. Strings and other instruments smother on thick and creamy around him, and even if there is a lace of bitterness at his lips, it strikes an unavoidably universal core.

Listen below:

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