Written by:
Will Darpinian
There is something about the melancholic intensity of “Sowing Season” by Brand New that keeps me coming back. The alternation between heavy guitar riffs and quietly intimate, confessional vocals strikes up an energy that blends the better part of Brand New’s acoustic tendencies with heavy rock into a catchy blend that doesn’t overcook its component parts. More than that, I’ve been down, and the solemnly reflective lyrics speak to my broader nostalgia. After moments of great loss, I have found that memories tend to bubble up to the fore unbidden and wild, possessed of their own energy. As expected of a song that mixes metaphors between planting seeds and funerary burials, “Sowing Season” is about the defiance of loss and the intimacy of that memory and the dialogue it maintains with the past. We all experience loss and the changes that come along with it eventually, usually in grief’s many masks. Anger is definitive in this song among others, and that anger drives a lot of the feeling in “Sowing Season’s” quiet (and not so quiet) rumination on loving and losing. It’s a directionless anger manifested alongside despair, and the resignation of continuing to build up broken things “with worn-out tools. Yeah.” Because in the aftermath of grief, those who remain have to carry on, like seeds trying to blossom into new growth even though the ground is cold. The imagery of the song just aligns with my mood lately, and it makes me think of all the things I left behind tingling like phantom limbs in my own memories. I can’t fight my own reminiscences, I’ve found, no matter how inconveniently timed they may be. Maybe I’m biased, but it is valuable to embrace a bleak mood at times and really give those darker emotions their moment (and marinate them in some music that suits your taste). Personal circumstances aside, “Sowing Season” is not Brand New’s first foray into difficult emotions, but it is emblematic of a particular kind of grief.
Loving and losing is always difficult, especially when faced with an uncertain future and the march of time that all but guarantees more loss. Losing those things you love is to lose a piece of yourself, and “Sowing Season” is written in parts like one half of a conversation with the subject of the singer’s grief. And it is the memory of what you had that stays with you, animated in spite of itself, which keeps that conversation going. For sure, I’m feeling some kind of way. But that’s what music is for, right? I can discuss a subject like profound personal loss while still conserving the private intimacy of all my memories and not need to spill my guts about it in writing. And Sowing Season is also a song about coming to terms with pain by framing it in the context of cycles. There’s a season for sowing and a season for reaping, and the pain of loss is something we must all deal with eventually and still somehow unexpectedly. So cherishing each moment of the things we care about becomes vital, as there’s no guarantee we won’t lose them.
The intense guitar bursts underscore the volatility of the song, as the lyrics transition from closely personal contemplation to thinking about the seasonality of burials. And it is in those emotions aroused by the subject; anger, pain, grief, and even despair, that we find the imagery of loss as a natural part of the process for new growth. In its way, it is this reminiscing that drives us forwards, and while I don’t take stock in the inevitability of pain and sacrifice as being necessary to succeed and make progress, I do think that it is important to address where each of us comes from. Our past is never truly gone, as it lives in each of us and brings us to this present moment, and remembering it is important. Whatever ritual we use to enshrine the past, the result that comes forth is art. And by the time that the harvest arrives, the world will continue, enriched by what we have added to it.
