Premiere: The Get Ahead nudge a poor, tired soul to really live with ‘Paper Tiger’

Some heartbreaks can mangle your body beyond recognition. You try to move on, but your heart never quite grows back like it was before. Instead of an organ reaffirming your vitality, you’re left with a gruesomely soured replacement, acting only to give you an illusion of life. Americana-rock five-piece The Get Ahead feel such a poison coursing in their bloodstream with a new song called “Paper Tiger,” premiering today. Written as a counterpoint to “Special Breed,” another deep essential to the Portland band’s upcoming record Deepest Light, the guitar-thrashing hay fever magnifies “the insulated, guarded, so afraid to be hurt that she never allows herself trust or to live,” writes frontman Nathan Earle over email to B-Sides & Badlands.

Guitars and violin creep along inside a bed of dirty, scaly, swampy drums, reflecting back the tragedy and ruin as metallic fractures of light. The narrator has then constructed a towering wall of stone around themselves to shield out any kind of intimacy or human connection, even on the most shallow of levels. “So exposed, vulnerable / In a position / Leaves out in the cold / It makes you strong / That’s what you think,” sings Earle, his voice tangling with Juliet Howard’s as a rose bush starved for water and oxygen. Later, they paint the grim reality of a terribly lonely existence, “Each day in hiding is another day lost / Never trusting anyone, your path ever comes across….”

Alongside ragtime musicians Sean Farrell (bass), Angie Johnson (saxophone, violin) and Danny Johnson (drums), Earle confronts, challenges and consoles the emotions into a hyper-sensitive state. “It’s only paper / It has no weight / You’ll never know it / Til you escape,” he prods the terribly lonesome, color-depleted soul to really examine what has happened and what is stretched out right before their eyes. Tears soak his cheeks, too, but his penetrating gaze conjures up the survival instincts to completely dismantle and reconfigure reality, creating his own fate in the process.

The Get Ahead’s Deepest Light drops everywhere April 26.

Listen below:

Follow The Get Ahead on their socials: Twitter | Facebook | Instagram | Website