THE LEGACY OF BILL GRAHAM
AUTHENTIC POSTERS
INCREDIBLE PHOTOGRAPHY!

Jamaican Queens

Sample this concert
  1. 1Welcome to Daytrotter00:12
  2. 2Water03:29
  3. 3Caitlin03:27
  4. 4Asleep At The Wheel04:12
  5. 5Wellfleet Outro04:36
Jamaican Queens Feb 21, 2013
Liner Notes

The heart flops. It flops again and again. It's not trying to flop, but it finds a way to get that way, to be limp and defeated. It finds a way to refuse guidance and advice. It finds a way to undermine the possibilities and to just go about doing it's half-assed dance through the nights of hard equations and blanked faces. The heart just flops. It drops dead, while still living.

Many of these problems are drawn from the people operating them, but the hearts are built to absorb all of the blame. They are fucked up and they are perverted. They are dumb and they are absent of reason and cunning. They are dullards and knuckleheads. They are jesters and snakes. They are ruled by the lust of simpletons when they fail and they are ruled by the brains of royalty when they are right - if ever they are.

The songs that Ryan Spencer and the rest of Detroit's Jamaican Queens write are those that are intrigued not just by the bearish sensibilities that these stupid hearts have, but also by all the messed up things they're going to try like hell to get themselves into. Spencer sings, "I've begun to think of love as an impossibility/Do you agree?" but that doesn't mean that he's going easy on the possibility of it going the other way. It's one of those attitudes that's sort of willing give anything a shot to get there, to prove it wrong. It's willing to throw it all out there on the line and see where the chips are going to fall.

Most of the time, this leads to some precarious outcomes. These are the stressed out and frazzled exploits of those fucking with love, seeing how much it can take, how much blows up and how much sticks. Spencer sings, "It takes a lot to mellow out," but there's nothing anywhere in these tales that would suggest that it's anything that he'd want to do.