Night Moves – Double Life
Bless its battered body, but the Night Moves tour van is a piece of shit. It is your standard-issue blue Ford E-350 now months away from its 25th birthday, the sort of vehicle that occasionally prompts so-called normal folks to give the grimy musicians inside suspect s..
Night Moves – Double Life
Bless its battered body, but the Night Moves tour van is a piece of shit. It is your standard-issue blue Ford E-350 now months away from its 25th birthday, the sort of vehicle that occasionally prompts so-called normal folks to give the grimy musicians inside suspect stares. The catalytic converter has been stolen three times, so it’s now permanently straight-piped; the exhaust leaks through the holes and cracks in the sides, slowly gassing anyone inside. The wheel wells are shambles. And while John Pelant was writing Double Life, Night Moves’ fourth LP and first in six years, someone swiped the license plates just after he had paid for new tags. God fucking dammit, he remembers thinking. Who the hell steals a license plate?
But Pelant soon sublimated his frustration, turning his vision of a thief who had “borrowed” the plate in order to commit more crimes elsewhere into one of the most winning tunes in Night Moves’ country-soul-psych-rock catalogue, “Daytona.” As sun-swept synthesizers and pedal steel curl around stuttering drums, Pelant offers an empathetic portrait of someone doing whatever is necessary to reinvent their lives. “Daytona, you only wanted a win,” he opens the final verse. “Daytona, no chance I’ll see you again.” There’s irritation in his voice, sure, but mostly there’s acceptance, an understanding that he cannot comprehend someone else’s difficulties and that he has plenty of his own.
That is the spirit that animates and enlivens Double Life, a cozy and cool LP built largely from a string of very rough breaks that Pelant and Night Moves have navigated in recent years. There was the unexpected death of a father-in-law, then a drummer whose skin sloughed off during recording due to contact dermatitis. There were friends arrested for making mistakes in troubled times and assorted pals struggling with sobriety and sanity. And there was, once again, the ever-vexing question for artists about when they’re supposed to step into the responsibilities of adulthood and maybe away from the lifelong compulsion to create, especially as Pelant started thinking seriously about marriage for the first time in his life. Pelant is the sort of songwriter who starts with the music—inspired of late by Glen Campbell and Bobby Caldwell, Cleaners from Venus and early ’90s country, Panda Bear and (as ever) Gram Parsons—and then writes lyrics only after he’s sat with the tune a spell. But this time, these songs are direct documents of Pelant’s life as he searches for silver linings or at least valuable meanings during a moment when very little seemed golden. Double Life is about moving through, not moving on.
Pelant started writing Double Life in the Minneapolis duplex he shares with his fiancée, Tasha. But those early and sometimes-forlorn drafts rightfully bummed her out, especially since some of it spoke of her own woes. So Pelant started treating Night Moves’ little rehearsal room—stuck in a grim industrial zone of the city, surrounded by garbage dumps and foundry fumes—as an office, showing up with workmanlike diligence to keep crafting demos.
That proved to be a tough hang, too: Separated by paper-thin walls, Pelant soon figured out his drug-addled neighbor not only lived there but would also erupt into near-daily shouting matches with his partner. He’d spill Big Gulp cups of piss in their shared hallway. It was worrying, but Pelant kept at it, anyway. He’d drive around, delivering hard liquor and wine at his new day job, where Def Leppard’s “Photograph” seemed to play always, the hit hammering through his hangovers. He pondered cycles of addiction and thought a lot about death, apt since that gig was next to another warehouse that sold funeral supplies. He listened to works in progress as he jockeyed the booze, working until he and the band felt they had the core of a record ready.
Again, not as easy as it sounds: Night Moves cycled through two producers who had first sounded like dream collaborators but just didn’t fit their vibe. Once again, Night Moves opted to return to their own practice space, recording the bulk of the album there after capturing basic tracks at Minnesota’s legendary Pachyderm. The decision afforded the band, for the first time, the challenge and luxury of producing themselves, of making every decision about tone and arrangement and timing before passing the songs to Woods sonic mastermind Jarvis Taveniere for mixing and co-production.
Those travails were, turns out, worth it. Double Life is at once the most candid and impressionistic Night Moves album yet, built on personal experiences but written so that you can map your own life onto these songs, too. Witness, for instance, “Hold On To Tonight,” a kaleidoscopic soul tune that was inspired by that death in the family; it’s a snapshot from a boozy night alone, when you stumble into the realization that the only thing you’re holding onto is fading memories. “Ring My Bell” is its musical and emotional counterpart, with Pelant extending an invitation to be asked for help whenever times get inevitably tough, all above the spring-loaded rhythm of drummer Mark Hanson and bassist Micky Alfano. “You’ve got a sadness hanging in your eyes,” Pelant sings, slipping into a bridge that Steely Dan would have loved. “Well, I just wish that I could change your mind.” This song, at least, offers a fighting chance to do just that.
Night Moves has a repeated joke when they’re on the road, driving from town to town in their bruised van: “I can’t believe I have to do this again,” they say, a reference to the surrealist repetition of shows, parties, hangovers, and long hauls that define touring. That line shows up during “This Time Tomorrow,” a could-have-been Petty hit updated with the malaise and wanderlust of modern life. “I can’t believe I have to do this again, oh this again, this time tomorrow,” Pelant sings alongside Charles Murlowski’s mocking riff. “Laughing at the joke, but the joke’s my life.” It can feel that way for all of us sometimes, right? But on Double Life, Night Moves does not retreat from the struggles and complexities of life. They, instead, double down with songs that stare them in the face and turn forward on their own terms.
Anthony Worden and the Illiterati
Sometimes to go forward, you first have to go back—and the only way to pass through the present undaunted is to unencumber oneself of the past.
For Anthony Worden, the process of moving past an onslaught of sudden grief crystalized in an Iowa City basement, and—over the course of half a year of writing and rehearsing with his band, the Illiterati—took on the form of his fifth studio album, Plain Angels. Sourced from a period that Worden describes as something of a “social reset,” characterized by the end of a long-term relationship (a development that upended his recent move to Kansas and spurred him to re-relocate to his native city), paired with a series of health scares in his immediate family and the death of an extended family member, the songwriter found himself contending with “big feelings” like “the realization that your loved ones aren’t going to be around forever.” Amidst a blisteringly cold Iowa winter—during which Worden’s day job as an electrician apprentice had him “thrown into installing solar panels in subzero weather on the farms, hog barns, and small towns of the middle part of the state”—he also found himself asking even bigger questions: “With everything that happened, I found myself almost resetting my worth, asking myself—what am I doing here?”
With emotional baggage in toe, Worden holed up in the unfinished cellar studio of band bassist Lucas Adolphson, spending “a lot of time with a glass of whisky” to divine art from feeling. The end result is a collection of ten tracks that’s as meditative as it is triumphant, presented as a loose narrative of personal resilience. Whether it’s charting the hope that comes with starting over somewhere new (“On My Way 2U”), becoming more aware of your fading youth in a college town (“Down But Not Yet Out”), the myriad feelings you feel on a funeral day (“Death of the Wife”) or encountering an ex after some-but-not-all wounds have healed (“Strangers”), the anecdotes that form Angels together create a picture of bittersweet acceptance, uplifted by Worden’s candid lyricism, the Illiterati’s refreshing approach to contemporary rock—which feels as indebted to 70s new wave as it does in early 2000s power pop thanks to the performances by Adolphson, keyboardist/producer Avery Moss, and drummer Aaron Knight—as well as mastering by Huntley Miller, who previously collaborated with indie heavyweights Bon Iver, Low, and Wednesday.
Taken all at once, Angels presents a portrait of taking change in stride, a reminder that the only way out is through, and the importance of turning to others in times of trouble. “I’m definitely in a way different, better place than when I started writing these songs,” Worden says. “As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned, you don’t really get over these things—there’s no way to really get over the death of a loved one or even the end of a relationship—you just learn how to live with it. And when I look back on this process, I think what really helped me with that was being other people—the band in particular.”
-Connor McInerney
SHADY COVE
Shady Cove is the collaborative project of songwriters and multi-instrumentalists Sarah
Rose and Sarah Nienaber. What began as a spontaneous exploration of sound in a
remote Oregon cabin has since evolved into something both expansive and deeply
rooted. Their self-titled debut, recorded in the Pacific Northwest, was a meditation on
longing and movement—desire’s pull toward the horizon.
After multiple tours supporting their self-titled debut, the duo returned home to record
Shady Cove Part II, this time in Portland, before mixing with Larry Crane at Jackpot!
Recording Studio. The album, released in the fall of 2024, drifts deeper into their
signature dream pop atmosphere, where guitars shimmer and dissolve, synths swell
with orchestral grandeur, and voices drift between memory and possibility.
Now based in the wooded quiet of western Wisconsin, Shady Cove continues to chase
the ever-receding shoreline—finding, in the search itself, something like home.
https://shadycove.band
http://instagram.com/shadycoveofficial
https://shadycove.bandcamp.com
Night Moves – Double LifeBless its battered body, but the Night Moves tour van is a piece of shit. It is your standard-issue blue Ford E-350 now months away from its 25th birthday, the sort of vehicle that occasionally prompts so-called normal folks to give the grimy musicians inside suspect stares. The catalytic converter has been stolen three times, so it’s now permanently straight-piped; the exhaust leaks through the holes and cracks in the sides, slowly gassing anyone inside. The wheel wells are shambles. And while John Pelant was writing Double Life, Night Moves’ fourth LP and first in six years, someone swiped the license plates just after he had paid for new tags. God fucking dammit, he remembers thinking. Who the hell steals a license plate?
But Pelant soon sublimated his frustration, turning his vision of a thief who had “borrowed” the plate in order to commit more crimes elsewhere into one of the most winning tunes in Night Moves’ country-soul-psych-rock catalogue, “Daytona.” As sun-swept synthesizers and pedal steel curl around stuttering drums, Pelant offers an empathetic portrait of someone doing whatever is necessary to reinvent their lives. “Daytona, you only wanted a win,” he opens the final verse. “Daytona, no chance I’ll see you again.” There’s irritation in his voice, sure, but mostly there’s acceptance, an understanding that he cannot comprehend someone else’s difficulties and that he has plenty of his own.
That is the spirit that animates and enlivens Double Life, a cozy and cool LP built largely from a string of very rough breaks that Pelant and Night Moves have navigated in recent years. There was the unexpected death of a father-in-law, then a drummer whose skin sloughed off during recording due to contact dermatitis. There were friends arrested for making mistakes in troubled times and assorted pals struggling with sobriety and sanity. And there was, once again, the ever-vexing question for artists about when they’re supposed to step into the responsibilities of adulthood and maybe away from the lifelong compulsion to create, especially as Pelant started thinking seriously about marriage for the first time in his life. Pelant is the sort of songwriter who starts with the music—inspired of late by Glen Campbell and Bobby Caldwell, Cleaners from Venus and early ’90s country, Panda Bear and (as ever) Gram Parsons—and then writes lyrics only after he’s sat with the tune a spell. But this time, these songs are direct documents of Pelant’s life as he searches for silver linings or at least valuable meanings during a moment when very little seemed golden. Double Life is about moving through, not moving on.
Pelant started writing Double Life in the Minneapolis duplex he shares with his fiancée, Tasha. But those early and sometimes-forlorn drafts rightfully bummed her out, especially since some of it spoke of her own woes. So Pelant started treating Night Moves’ little rehearsal room—stuck in a grim industrial zone of the city, surrounded by garbage dumps and foundry fumes—as an office, showing up with workmanlike diligence to keep crafting demos.
That proved to be a tough hang, too: Separated by paper-thin walls, Pelant soon figured out his drug-addled neighbor not only lived there but would also erupt into near-daily shouting matches with his partner. He’d spill Big Gulp cups of piss in their shared hallway. It was worrying, but Pelant kept at it, anyway. He’d drive around, delivering hard liquor and wine at his new day job, where Def Leppard’s “Photograph” seemed to play always, the hit hammering through his hangovers. He pondered cycles of addiction and thought a lot about death, apt since that gig was next to another warehouse that sold funeral supplies. He listened to works in progress as he jockeyed the booze, working until he and the band felt they had the core of a record ready.
Again, not as easy as it sounds: Night Moves cycled through two producers who had first sounded like dream collaborators but just didn’t fit their vibe. Once again, Night Moves opted to return to their own practice space, recording the bulk of the album there after capturing basic tracks at Minnesota’s legendary Pachyderm. The decision afforded the band, for the first time, the challenge and luxury of producing themselves, of making every decision about tone and arrangement and timing before passing the songs to Woods sonic mastermind Jarvis Taveniere for mixing and co-production.
Those travails were, turns out, worth it. Double Life is at once the most candid and impressionistic Night Moves album yet, built on personal experiences but written so that you can map your own life onto these songs, too. Witness, for instance, “Hold On To Tonight,” a kaleidoscopic soul tune that was inspired by that death in the family; it’s a snapshot from a boozy night alone, when you stumble into the realization that the only thing you’re holding onto is fading memories. “Ring My Bell” is its musical and emotional counterpart, with Pelant extending an invitation to be asked for help whenever times get inevitably tough, all above the spring-loaded rhythm of drummer Mark Hanson and bassist Micky Alfano. “You’ve got a sadness hanging in your eyes,” Pelant sings, slipping into a bridge that Steely Dan would have loved. “Well, I just wish that I could change your mind.” This song, at least, offers a fighting chance to do just that.
Night Moves has a repeated joke when they’re on the road, driving from town to town in their bruised van: “I can’t believe I have to do this again,” they say, a reference to the surrealist repetition of shows, parties, hangovers, and long hauls that define touring. That line shows up during “This Time Tomorrow,” a could-have-been Petty hit updated with the malaise and wanderlust of modern life. “I can’t believe I have to do this again, oh this again, this time tomorrow,” Pelant sings alongside Charles Murlowski’s mocking riff. “Laughing at the joke, but the joke’s my life.” It can feel that way for all of us sometimes, right? But on Double Life, Night Moves does not retreat from the struggles and complexities of life. They, instead, double down with songs that stare them in the face and turn forward on their own terms.
Anthony Worden and the IlliteratiSometimes to go forward, you first have to go back—and the only way to pass through the present undaunted is to unencumber oneself of the past.
For Anthony Worden, the process of moving past an onslaught of sudden grief crystalized in an Iowa City basement, and—over the course of half a year of writing and rehearsing with his band, the Illiterati—took on the form of his fifth studio album, Plain Angels. Sourced from a period that Worden describes as something of a “social reset,” characterized by the end of a long-term relationship (a development that upended his recent move to Kansas and spurred him to re-relocate to his native city), paired with a series of health scares in his immediate family and the death of an extended family member, the songwriter found himself contending with “big feelings” like “the realization that your loved ones aren’t going to be around forever.” Amidst a blisteringly cold Iowa winter—during which Worden’s day job as an electrician apprentice had him “thrown into installing solar panels in subzero weather on the farms, hog barns, and small towns of the middle part of the state”—he also found himself asking even bigger questions: “With everything that happened, I found myself almost resetting my worth, asking myself—what am I doing here?”
With emotional baggage in toe, Worden holed up in the unfinished cellar studio of band bassist Lucas Adolphson, spending “a lot of time with a glass of whisky” to divine art from feeling. The end result is a collection of ten tracks that’s as meditative as it is triumphant, presented as a loose narrative of personal resilience. Whether it’s charting the hope that comes with starting over somewhere new (“On My Way 2U”), becoming more aware of your fading youth in a college town (“Down But Not Yet Out”), the myriad feelings you feel on a funeral day (“Death of the Wife”) or encountering an ex after some-but-not-all wounds have healed (“Strangers”), the anecdotes that form Angels together create a picture of bittersweet acceptance, uplifted by Worden’s candid lyricism, the Illiterati’s refreshing approach to contemporary rock—which feels as indebted to 70s new wave as it does in early 2000s power pop thanks to the performances by Adolphson, keyboardist/producer Avery Moss, and drummer Aaron Knight—as well as mastering by Huntley Miller, who previously collaborated with indie heavyweights Bon Iver, Low, and Wednesday.
Taken all at once, Angels presents a portrait of taking change in stride, a reminder that the only way out is through, and the importance of turning to others in times of trouble. “I’m definitely in a way different, better place than when I started writing these songs,” Worden says. “As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned, you don’t really get over these things—there’s no way to really get over the death of a loved one or even the end of a relationship—you just learn how to live with it. And when I look back on this process, I think what really helped me with that was being other people—the band in particular.”
-Connor McInerney
SHADY COVEShady Cove is the collaborative project of songwriters and multi-instrumentalists Sarah
Rose and Sarah Nienaber. What began as a spontaneous exploration of sound in a
remote Oregon cabin has since evolved into something both expansive and deeply
rooted. Their self-titled debut, recorded in the Pacific Northwest, was a meditation on
longing and movement—desire’s pull toward the horizon.
After multiple tours supporting their self-titled debut, the duo returned home to record
Shady Cove Part II, this time in Portland, before mixing with Larry Crane at Jackpot!
Recording Studio. The album, released in the fall of 2024, drifts deeper into their
signature dream pop atmosphere, where guitars shimmer and dissolve, synths swell
with orchestral grandeur, and voices drift between memory and possibility.
Now based in the wooded quiet of western Wisconsin, Shady Cove continues to chase
the ever-receding shoreline—finding, in the search itself, something like home.
https://shadycove.band
http://instagram.com/shadycoveofficial
https://shadycove.bandcamp.com
