Couch Potatoes// Living Room Songs

— by jack

It was a lazy and almost warm Sunday afternoon when I took the 72 bus westbound to Logan Square and had the pleasure of meeting Chicago’s favorite Indie Pop quintet (is this true? it should be), VERY TRULY YOURS. 

The first thing I noticed was the living room was covered in Louise Brooks iconography. 

We were shooting at pianist/violin player Billie’s Logan Square loft, and the whole place was just a specific kind of nostalgic eye candy for me. See, I’ve been watching Pandora’s Box since I was a teenager and my dad tipped me off that there maybe has never been a more effervescent screen presence than Louise Brooks (I’m like 90% sure dad used cruder but no less truer terms).

Then I stumbled across a little Bettie Boop icon on a bookshelf and I remembered my mom, who watched the black and white cartoons with little-kid-me and my sister. It’s a pretty vivid memory. 

And so the nostalgia set in. And when Kristine (Very Truly Yours’s lead singer) broke into her song, “Your Funeral,” a song about her memories, real and imagined, of her dead grandmother, she announced it nearly made her cry. Nearly made me cry, too. There was that kind of feeling in the warm toned room that Sunday afternoon.

The song we’ve got for you today is, “Sorry To Say It.” Quiet and understated and maybe teeming with rage, the song has a kind of melancholy joy, or joyful melancholy to it. The whole afternoon could be described that way, with kitsch evoking nostalgi, and then the music on top of that.