The problem that we tend to have with a lot of our time is not knowing what parts of it we should spend more with or when all we're doing is either looking at the credits or staring at a prelude to what's about to be meaningful. There's so much filler out there and yet, it doesn't make what happens during that interim period wasteful or taunting, just less powerful and less likely to reap what's really in the mind's eye or tickling the soft skin of a ticking heart. One could look at that statement as a downer, suggesting that there are more junk minutes, hours and days than there are keepers, but if we're to rely on just what we're able to remember after a given amount of time, who is to argue with it? We have a certain amount of time to play with and most of it evaporates without a lasting memory tied to any of it, without a lasting person co-existing with any of it. We just spend our time. We spend and spend and spend. Most of it just falls right off the cliff. Keegan DeWitt, a Nashville musician with an epic voice and a tendency to make the most fleeting of moments sound like spectacular tension and heartache, seems to think a lot about his days and how they're getting shorter, even at the age of 28. Perhaps, it's because around this time in a man's life, things are supposed to be settling in a little bit and many of the concerning preoccupations of love, family and general sustenance (financial, nutritious and otherwise) have been dealt with, at least partially, even if unsuccessfully. He spends much of his time thinking about the things that he still needs, while looking around as friends and family members are checking those things off their lists, getting comfortable in their aging, that progression from spontaneous youth to that of willful responsibility and nesting somewhat. He has that need, to wake up in the middle of the night, crane his head up, look to the other side of the bed and see - depressing a peaceful oval in one side of a pillow - a great woman that he never believed he would ever find and then roll back into slumber, content with the scene. He'd like his wastebaskets to be half filled with soiled diapers and half filled with kinds of garbage that pile up now. He has that need to love, finally, that one person, that last love that has no equal. Thus far, as we hear on DeWitt's delightful and tragically grey new EP "Nothing Shows," these contemplations and yearnings are still at bay, still somewhere out there - or that's the hope. "Tired of Love" might be the most important song on the album, if we're looking for explanations as to the current state of Mr. DeWitt. He sings, "Sick of this feeling/I'm cutting up my heart/I'm tired of love/I'm tied to love/I lie to you/You lie to me too," and this is the sad truth of what he's up to his knees in - a place where no one's being quite who they are out of a need for self-protection, and that won't get them anywhere, so the nights complete themselves with lonely punctuation. We sense that DeWitt is feeling the pressure to figure it all out, to not feel so impoverished by chance and the sweetness of luck. We sense that he's tired of the trouble that it causes him, to have to be so alert to the moments that could be important and not to be glazed over or accidentally missed. He's come to question his hindsight and he things that he's beginning to see things in the wispy eves of the past that may have been, but mostly, he's planning for what's still to come. He's attentive and he's waiting for when he can finally feel as if the time has come, when the right love has come.
Keegan DeWitt's latest EP, "Nothing Shows," is available digitally exclusively on Daytrotter. It's available just to the right, by clicking on Buy Now. Enjoy the hell out of it! -- Daytrotter