Although the date isn’t nearly as warily memorialized as, say, January 6 of the following year, March 12, 2020 roughly marks the official oh-shit day here in the US when we realized this whole COVID thing was definitely something to be concerned about. Many of us were told to stay home from work for the first time since we thought Tom Hanks was going to die, some of us went to the nearest Walgreens and—for some reason—bought literally all of the toilet paper, some of us casually announced our sixth studio album.
For Liam Parsons, one half of Aussie jangle-pop duo Good Morning, it was a day of wandering around the already surreal city of Las Vegas. Naturally, it wasn’t long before a song began to materialize. “It was one of those weird times where I had all the words in my head ready to go without ever explicitly thinking about them,” he recalls. “Las Vegas is a strange and messed up place at the best of times, but when you feel like the world is gonna end it becomes even weirder. I remember walking around in the morning and the streets were pretty quiet and it was the day that The Killers put out that song ‘Caution’ (Las Vegas banger). I listened to that on a loop and was looking at all these mock versions of world landmarks and just quietly freaking out about my future.”
In being a Good Morning tune, of course, the resulting “Excalibur” is far from freaked-out. At three and a half minutes, the cut from the band’s upcoming seventh LP Good Morning Seven is a soothing soft-rock composition paired with nearly mumbled vocals from Parsons. Like the song itself, the video it arrives with is almost comically composed, with Parsons covertly singing the tune as he recreates his out-of-body Vegas experience in the slightly more normal locale of post-quarantine London, seemingly holding in a panic attack while stopping by all the city’s most famous (actual) landmarks.
Check out the visual below, and pre-order Good Morning Seven here ahead of its March 22 release via Polyvinyl. You can also catch the band on tour with Waxahatchee beginning April 18 at the dates listed here.
