The Singles Bar: Spencer Kilpatrick steps into the rain on ‘You Feel Like Nevada to Me’
The indie-rock man flexes his folk roots with a new song.
Welcome to The Singles Bar, a review series focused on new single and song releases.
Spencer Kilpatrick teeters on the edge. His voice is soaked in beer and scratches hard. There’s an unpredictable magic that emerges through his rough, sandpaper-hewn approach. It’s as if he wields his brutally-rugged vocal cords as a set of scalpels, to carve out the skin and rediscover each scarred layer. With “You Feel Like Nevada to Me,” recorded live in his kitchen during a rainstorm, which heightens the song’s melancholy, the indie-rock guy flexes a kitschy romanticism, appropriately doused in his raw growl.
Having performed a two-night stint at Moody’s Bistro Bar & Beats in Truckee, Calif., tucked away in the warmth of boozy chatter and the thrill of guitar vibrations, Kilpatrick challenged himself to write a song before sunrise. While he found himself initially disapproving of the melodic familiarity and the generally saccharine filter, “Nevada” quickly began to haunt his waking hours. “Over the last month or so, the melody has popped in and out of my head, and the chords have become comfortable under my fingers,” he says. “I’ve decided to embrace its ‘cuteness.'”
As the rain splatters on earth and wood and cracked paint, swelling underneath the cool ripple of his guitar work, there is a relentless urgency that plays at his heart. “I’ve been overthinking, baby / ‘Bout where I ought to be / California just can’t compare,” he finally confesses to himself, the song nearly reading as a new year’s resolution of sorts. “Releasing music is always funny for me, I constantly look for reasons to postpone, and I’m not completely sure why,” he continues, grappling with his own artistic thirst and whether any of it really matters. “I have a job that pays my bills and no fanbase to speak of. There are no repercussions for me for releasing shitty music, yet I constantly balk at the idea of hitting the upload button.”
“You Feel Like Nevada to Me,” as garishly charming as it may seem, sees Kilpatrick moving ever-onward. Along with his band Failure Machine, he is expected to re-record the track for a forthcoming album titled nothing bad has ever happened to me but i still drink a lot, out later this year.
Listen below:
