Influenza with Keenan Mitchell of Bottle Up & Go
photo by Ben Rowland
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. Here, Bottle Up & Go’s Keenan Mitchell reminisces about days-gone-by, connecting them with “Wayward Son,” a song written in repentance of drunken tomfoolery.
On “Wayward Son”:
This song was written the summer before last, back when we were getting kicked out of every bar that we played in. The night before we wrote it Fareed walked off the stage and fell flat out on his face, I got kicked out for insisting that I could bring a backpack of malt liquor into the bar because I was the goddamn performer even if I had puked already, and Lucas took off his shirt and tried to fight the bartender, and then the bouncer, and then a bum outside.
We woke up on the floor to find out our whole band had sat around a table at someone’s house later that night scaring them by all talking in absolute gibberish as if it were real sentences. I felt like I should write a song in penitence.
“Wayward Son” is a song, like most of our songs, that takes an American archetype and filters it through our own experience. I felt like writing it about the ever-regretful drunk, with every morning’s recollection a blank slate that gets filled in slowly by the people you wake up next to. I think that’s how we were all feeling most mornings, until the king cobra and orange juice started going around the table in a big bowl.
That’s the character its about, until the middle, when it gets quiet. Then it’s actually about me. Calling my mom from jail, having other people call her to tell her I am in the hospital, calling because I crashed the car. We take turns singing that part in the live show; it goes to whoever feels the most wayward at the time. Lucas has had it on lock down for a long time, but now that I owe my mom a thousand dollars for an ambulance I drank my way into I think I might just take it over again. – Keenan Mitchell