Toronto Alt-Folksters BIRDS OF BELLWOODS Outline Their New Single “Catching Up” [Exclusive]

Toronto, Ontario’s Birds of Bellwoods are an alternative folk quartet who self-describe themselves as sounding like “a folk band in a fist fight”. Gearing up for the release of their debut album Victoria the guys hit us up for an exclusive overview of their latest and second single, “Catching Up”.

The band noted that the song, “…is a reflection on the past and a realization of the present, basically our collective existential hangover. The song started in the fall of 2016, though it took a long time to find it’s final form both as a recorded piece and in live performance.”

Band member Chris Blades relates its origin:

“Stevie came over to my house to hang out one night and told me the phrase ‘it’s all catching up to me’ had been banging around his head all day. That was how he was feeling generally, unable to escape the darkness of the past, and the anxiety that creeps in with the waning of youth.

“I offered up a melody to put it to, and we started working with that, while Stevie wrote the verse lyrics and melody. Occasionally I’ll go into these long improvisational sessions with a loop-station and at some point the beginning riff came out of that. Then it got filtered through the rest of the band and we decided to take an ostensibly soft folk song and kick it into rock mode halfway through. I think we drew some inspiration from Dirty Projectors for that part.

“The shouted “live fast die young” that comes in towards the end of the song is sarcastic or satirical. Contextualized by the words that come next, ‘you fall down until you can’t stand up.’ It was cannibalized from another song we’d started and thrown away, a kind of millennial party anthem that had always felt a bit fake. When we found ourselves writing a song about the dark side of living fast and hard, it was too good to pass up; we just had to throw those lyrics in.

“It has become one of our favourites to play live. A real, “THIS is who I’ve become, and now I have to live with it.” – and it’s a fairly concise expression of our body of work. Fears you can dance to. Half breeze, half thrash. You can catch it and all the other tracks live at Mod Club in Toronto on September 23rd for our album release show.”