Saint Social’s new EP “Don’t Let The Fire Die” was released today. For the occasion, we asked the band to tell us about each track. Their commentary on the effort can be seen below.

Track 1 - Don’t Let the Fire Die

This song in a great many ways is a thesis statement for our band and this project.  We want to clap back at the darkness and dance our way out of the abyss.  We hope people sing it with us loud and proud.  Lyrically, it just so happens that some of the verses span a fair amount of time in our friendship—a good bit of verse one goes back over a decade to post Katrina Biloxi where we all grew up together.  I’d held onto those words from back then until the right music emerged to contain them.  Nothing ever felt right until I’d moved back closer to the guys in recent years, and then, as we were writing the songs for what would become Saint Social, we all needed to give us voice to what we felt up against at the time.  It felt appropriate to not only nod to our past with these lyrics, but bind them with what felt most current in verse two.  The chorus says what we’re about from there—we want to encourage everyone to keep moving.  Also, we started this band with a strong desire to really embody where we live and what we feel like the Coast sounds like to us through the lens of the music we feel most drawn to naturally; this definitely has all those ingredients.

Track 2 - Swagger

“Swagger” on the surface is so triumphant, maybe deceptively so, but underneath…in those lyrics…is a roughed-up kid who decided to get gussied up and take that new found fire back onto the streets even with all the scars.  It’s “sharp as a dagger” for a reason.  This one is what it is.  In the studio, there were moments where we tried to add things, but the song pushed back and made us keep it simple.  We’re all glad we did.  I like that it has the bluesy riffy thing going on, but that beat gives it a twist.  This song is magic, and we’re glad it came to us…we hope it makes people smile all over the place.  Playing it live is the best.  It lights up the room every time.

Track 3 - Remember?

Our record is a narrative.  And this EP, to us, is like a movie trailer for the full length—it gives enough away without telling the whole story.  And this moment, this song, is simply a remembrance of a time when things were right and now, they’re not.  It represents that longing to pull a better past into a very, very rough present, and it’s taking everything to keep your eyes open.  I heard a preacher on social media say something like “get a new problem” in such and such a year or whatever, and I found that slightly antagonistic, so I co-opted that phrase and turned it into a statement of wishing that that could be done, but acknowledging that maybe there’s a state where you have to live through something until it ends while feeling powerless to change it.  What if you wish you could “file a fresh complaint,” but there’s nothing you can really do in the situation you’re in other than to keep your head up while it works itself out maybe?  This song has a sassiness that got refined all the way up until we went to record it.  The final arrangement really came together last minute even though we’d been playing it live for some time.  We all love “My Own Soul's Warning” by The Killers, and we wanted a moment in a song where the bass did the talking; the outro of this song happened to be the right moment for it in the end!

Track 4 - Be There

“Be There” is the levity of the EP, but again, it’s hard fought.  It’s a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine of devotion and friendship go down.  I really love “Reach Out I’ll Be There” by The Four Tops.  It’s such a powerful song—there’s so much longing and urgency in it that I think is not only infectious, but so indicative of the feeling of someone who really wants to help and support someone else.  Our “Be There” is a semblance of that, but has that beachy, boppy, punky take on the sentiment.  We definitely couldn’t top the Four Tops on that!  Ha! But we wanted to express that moment in our project.  Bryan’s tom work and that added percussion is such a nice flavor we’re not hearing in a lot of music currently, so we wanted to absorb that vibe into our sound and deliver it to the people.  Again, I hope people take this simple chorus and want to extend that to the people they love.