Influenza with Heroes of Popular Wars’ Blue Eyed Devil
Approach Influenza as a series which serves to help give insight as to where music is born; these are the thoughts, influences and the inspirations directly from the mind of the artists. In this edition, the inspiration behind a recent track by the Brooklyn-based group Heroes of Popular Wars is explained by the group’s front man. Under the alias of the Blue Eyed Devil he shares the song’s story, a soft aching attempt create something out of devastation. The resulting track comes from when the decision was made to overcome the emptiness of love removed by pushing forward with inspiration and drive.
On “There’s the Bell”:
I’ve always been interested in moments that seem to outweigh others. The song, “There’s the Bell,” is about a concentrated moment in time when the things you have anticipated, maybe for a long time, actually happen.
A few years ago, a girlfriend decided she couldn’t date a musician anymore. She told me she was moving out and that the movers were scheduled to come the next day. It’s tough to argue with that logic, so I helped her pack up. We were ready the next morning when they were scheduled to come but the movers were late. We had finished the last errand we would ever run together and I was afraid to talk because I thought I might get upset. So we sat, silent and brooding, for most uncomfortable two hours of my life until the movers arrived begging for the doorbell to ring.
The melody and the verse came to me in the next day or so. I was so excited to fill this bad energy place with something positive that I slammed all the music together in an hour but the problem was I was so excited that I wrote many complicated verses. Everyone agreed that the key was to just cut and cut until, eventually, we had the nerve to just sing that one line over and over. S2K, our DJ and other singer, balanced out the simplicity by recording some of those annoying corporate phone messages and loop them into a “beat,” kind of the way The Books or an old school hip hop DJ might. Our drummer, Campbell, plays vibes instead of live drums to further add to the spare, lonely quality that is supposed to represent that original moment.
