On last year’s Holy Ghost, Brendan Lukens and Jake Ewald of Modern Baseball extended their reputation as two of the most careful songwriters working at the forefront of the emo resurgence. So much so, in fact, that it seems somewhat unfair to saddle them with the genre name—not because there aren’t strong writers working within it (as any fan of The World is a Beautiful Place and I’m No Longer Afraid to Die will tell you), but because it’s a term so fraught with negative connotations.
In fact, it might make more sense to think of writers like Lukens and Ewald as playing a younger, angstier version of the music that John Darnielle has long created with The Mountain Goats—hyper-specific story songs where loss and longing form a kind of dramatic fulcrum upon which their singers rock. So it makes sense that when we asked Ewald to play us one of his favorite songs as part of the most recent installment of Original Tracks—which took place before the band announced this past week that they would be taking a hiatus to focus on their mental health—he chose Darnielle’s “Palmcorder Yajna,” from 2004’s We Shall All Be Healed. And just because we were feeling greedy, we also asked him to play Holy Ghost’s “Everyday,” which he graciously did.
You can check out both videos below, and see Ewald play “Wedding Singer” on Original Penguin’s website here.
“Palmcorder Yajna”
“Everyday”
Click here to see the rest of the Original Tracks series.
