Deer Tick Embrace Cheery Folk on ‘The Dream’s in the Ditch’ – Song Premiere
It’s been awhile since rowdy Rhode Island rockers Deer Tick released a record – Divine Providence was issued in 2011, though they did offer up the Tim EP last year. On September 24th, they’ll dispatch a new full-length, Negativity, on Partisan Records. Now you can take an exclusive first listen to the album cut “The Dream’s in the Ditch,” a cut with a cheery, sun-drenched folk disposition (complete with a tittering, twinkling piano solo) that belies the road-weary distress in frontman Ian O’Neil’s lyrics.
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“I wrote ‘The Dream’s in the Ditch’ in the winter of 2012, living in Bed-Stuy between Deer Tick tours,” O’Neil tells Rolling Stone. “Originally, it was intended to be a part of Dirt Naps, a project with Dennis Ryan and Julian Veronesi from Titus Andronicus, but [producer] Steve [Berlin] dug it and so we fleshed it out for Negativity. We toured exhaustively leading up to 2013 and it kind of left me and our band feeling hopeless and disheartened. After the song was written, I started to realize that’s what I was writing about: both the despair and resilience you develop as a touring musician and how that can parallel to all of basic situations in the song.”
Deer Tick are set to begin a North American tour in October.