In 2022, cliffdiver (back then stylized in all caps, these days in all lowercase) released their debut album Exercise Your Demons. It was a profound piece of work that paid tribute to the various styles of emo that had influenced the band, while also providing an intimate look into the mental health of its two vocalists, Briana Wright and Joey Duffy, and their constant struggle with the will to stay alive—which is where the exercise/exorcise pun originated. Two years on, second album birdwatching is on the horizon, and finds the Tulsa six-piece honing their sound while confronting those very same demons from a much more (if not wholly) positive angle.
New single “Lord Have Mercer” is an empowering call-to-arms about not taking anybody’s shit—whether that’s in a personal relationship or within an ever-problematic, male-dominated music industry. Indeed, there’s an inspiring clarity to the band’s new songs, probably something that’s largely inspired by a horrific fluke accident last summer, when a chain link from a lorry flew through the cliffdiver tour van’s window and into the neck of bassist Tyler Rogers while he was driving. Miraculously, he survived and was out of hospital three days later. And yet, as “Lord Have Mercer” demonstrates, the band still have their sense of humor. In fact, their ability for combining the ridiculous and sublimely moving is stronger than ever.
Ahead of the album’s September 20 release via SideOneDummy, listen to the song below while reading a Q&A with Wright and Duffy about it. It serves as the inspiring therapy session you didn’t know you needed.
This song is all about calling out abusive people. What prompted you to take a stand?
Wright: The whole thing started with the line “How big a boy are ya?” There’s a radio DJ from Tulsa and he’d make prank calls to people as this character called Roy D. Mercer. He had this Southern drawl, and he’d provoke people really badly and say, “I’ll meet you down at the QuikTrip on First and Harvard, how big a boy are ya?”—just sizing them up and stuff. I’ve been wanting to put that kind of call-out of asking someone to answer for their behavior in a song for a very long time. I love the idea behind that, and tying it into some more personal issues, and this idea that love shouldn’t cost an arm and a leg—that you shouldn’t have to give so much.
Having been a wife and mother and taking on these roles in my life, it’s definitely a fucking problem, and this song is just saying that I’m my own entity, and that doesn’t need to be infringed upon for your happiness or survival—I don’t need to be the one to feed you. You can go figure that out on your own. And then bringing in the idea of mutilation, because at the end of it, you can’t even recognize yourself, because you’ve lopped off these parts of yourself for somebody else. And also there’s the idea of these takers in the industry who put people—especially women and femme people—in that position, and calling it out: Stop treating women like objects! How many more hundreds of years do we have to keep having this conversation?
It’s very “cliffdiver” that the initial inspiration was something whimsical and then became much more profound.
Wright: I wanted that escalation. At the beginning, it almost sounds metaphorical—I’ve lost an arm and a leg in the name of love. And then by the time you get into it, it’s “I’m going to rip your teeth out one at a time.” That’s the point to which I’ve been pushed. It goes from annoyance to full-on fucking rage, like, “Where’s the next one? I’m hungry now and want to shoot these motherfuckers out of the sky.”
The lyrics are also very self-aware of the sacrifices people make in the name of love, and they seem to be sung with the knowledge that it could all end badly.
Duffy: I do think that there’s a level of inevitability to it. Everything is temporary, but you have to choose when to love and how to love knowing that heartbreak is part of it. Because that’s life. There’s a level of pain to vulnerability and allowing yourself to be open, but part of growing—and part of what we’re doing with this album, especially—is asking, “What does it mean to grow up?” What does it mean to be in my mid- to late-thirties? What does it mean to examine some of these past things that we just accepted?
In your twenties, you accept that love is going to hurt, and that you’ve got to do whatever you can to put yourself in a position to be loved. Being loved is more important than not being hurt. When Bri and I were talking about it in the studio, we were like, “Yeah, but love shouldn’t hurt like this.” If we’re allowing ourselves to be hurt over and over, that’s not actually love. So it’s taking these behaviors we accepted in the past as the price you pay for love, for companionship, for whatever it is, and now going, “Wait a second, that’s not actually love, that’s abuse.” When we were younger, maybe we didn’t really understand that. Maybe love is loving yourself first, then taking your power away from those people that would use it against you.
Presumably this is an album you couldn’t have written before Exercise Your Demons. You had to go through that stuff to get to this stage of cliffdiver’s existence.
Wright: It feels like we’re introducing people to the demons on this one! The previous record was how we dealt with them, and this is like, “Here they are.” I’ve had an abusive relationship, there’s a song about the nightmare of fucking getting sober and losing your friends, and about the disruption of sleep paralysis. There’s a lot of those elements where I feel like we’re looking at them head on and calling them out individually.
Duffy: The last album was the beginning of the healing process, and at the end of the album, it’s like “Everything’s going to be OK! We’re on our way now!” But then what happens in reality? You have this big emotional breakthrough and you expect everything to get better—you get sober or you get out of a bad relationship and you’re like, “Yes! Now everything’s good, my mental health is going to be better.” And then you realize that life still happens. It’s no longer this life-or-death scenario that it was on Exercise Your Demons, where you’re literally fighting to survive, to not give up and not quit. And this album is like, “Yeah, but what happens on a Tuesday?” This is real life, and we didn’t want it to be this pretty bow.
When my brother listened to the album’s last song, he was like, “You guys usually end on a very positive note, and this one didn’t feel like it ended with that triumphant positivity.” And that’s because life’s not that easy. There isn’t this moment where you flip a switch and then everything is just better from now on. So the end of it’s just saying, “OK, we’re going to do our best, and maybe that’s going to look different than we expected.” I thought that all my problems were going to go away when I quit drinking, and I found out, for both positive and negative, that I’m still insane. I’m just no longer playing life on nightmare difficulty.
With that in mind, what do you ultimately want people to take away from this song?
Wright: This album deals more with the idea that you can work on yourself all you want, but the world is still fucked. When you step outside your door, shit’s still going to get tested. This song specifically is about reclaiming yourself and recognizing yourself as whatever it is you need to recognize yourself as. Especially women—we have a hard time validating our own trauma. We don’t want to be a victim of anything, so you underplay or you lie to your friends about what you’re going through. And this is calling it out. But in doing that, you always have to make yourself a little bit vulnerable, too, because I’m having to admit that I let this person hurt me. But not only can I admit what I was subjected to, I can call you out for it publicly, too. It’s taking the power back that you gave up. Because it hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s still inside of you and you can keep moving forward.
It’s also just being comfortable with your own fucking anger. That’s something that I never felt like I could do. It’s not how you’re supposed to act in a relationship, but when something pushes you to anger and you’re not an angry person, it’s OK to look at that. It’s the same with an abusive relationship. You can do all the work on yourself that you possibly can, you can try to fulfill every obligation and take every hit, but it’s not going to change the situation. I’ve been in that position in relationships where you blame yourself—“This is happening because I’m inferior; this is happening because I need to do work on myself”—but really someone needs you to feel that shame and insecurity in order to get what they need.
So this is recognizing that that doesn’t work for me anymore. I don’t do that in relationships anymore. I don’t take any more than I have to, because love is already hard and we’re already subjecting ourselves to potential grief and breakup. The risks already exist, so anything that makes it harder is not for me.
