It’s not every day that a rising rock band asks you to be a guest vocalist on a recording of a new song. Well, I guess we are calling this ‘vocals’. All I remember is that they piled me into a van, shoved a mic in my face and told me to read from a script acting panicked. Now that I think about it, this was all a bit strange but they were all so cute.
The Lights Out are no less than an indie rock tour de force out of Boston, Mass. Their roots lie in 80’s hair bands and 90’s grunge but their dedication and web savviness are distinctly 00’s. Their new album Color Machine comes out on September 25th but the band has allowed The Music Slut to premiere their (our) song ‘Five Seventeen’ today. ‘Five Seventeen’ is a song about the eruption of Mount St. Helens and the story of Harry Truman, a resident of the mountain whom decided not to heed the warnings and evacuate.
Guitarist Adam Ritchie explains…
The unique thing about “Five Seventeen” is because it involves an actual event (the eruption of Mount St. Helens and the disappearance of Harry Truman), we wanted to make the recording as authentic as possible. So we researched news articles and broadcast segments from the eruption and wrote a script using actual sound bites from the reporting. We wanted to capture writers/reporters reading those lines, and invited Jen into our band van (its name is Tim) to cut her part after our show in at The Trash Bar in Brooklyn. Another “first” with this track – we’re pretty sure it’s the only time you’ll ever hear a guitar solo launched off on the peak of an erupting volcano!
Lead singer Rishava Green explains his reasons for writing ‘Five Seventeen’…
“Five Seventeen” is based on the true story of Harry Truman, an old woodsman who ran a camping lodge at Spirit Lake underneath Mount St. Helens, and who I actually met once when I was a young child. He was, shall we say, a very peppery dude. When the seismologists began warning all of us in the Northwest that she [Mount St. Helen] was gonna blow, Harry decided to go down with the mountain rather than spend his last years in a trailer park somewhere. Years after this happened, someone made a crappy movie about it starring Art Carney as Harry, and I only remember the song at the end, which went something like, “here’s to you, Harry Truman/they can’t talk you into moving” (!). That was the beginning of our song, because I distinctly remember saying to myself, “Holy hell, what an oozing pile of treacle! This guy deserves better.” And all these years later I finally gave it a shot, and with the help of my esteemed colleagues, I daresay we managed to pull it off. More than the story of a volcano erupting though, I always saw this song as being about standing your ground, even in the face of death. Whatever his reasons were, Harry Truman lived and died by them, and he deserved better than a crappy pseudo folk fest at the end of a well intentioned but tepid movie.
Awesome. And without further ado, here it is:
