Brewflies Release New Single 'My Life'

Brewflies release their cover of Iris DeMent’s “My Life” on June 20. The song is the concluding track of the band’s album “Rain Down Mercy,” due out August 11. The song’s theme that the smallest human gestures of grace, compassion, and love can be enormously significant is a central message of an album conceived as a response to the collision of events and emotions of the last three years. 

“My Life,” on the surface, is a frank appraisal of human inadequacy: “My life, well, it don’t count for nothin’, when I think of this world, I feel so small.” It echoes the stark reality that any individual “ordinary” life leaves a momentary footprint on a vast shoreline that sweeps all human pretension and aspiration clear with the next wave. “My life is only a season; a passing September that no one will recall.”

Nevertheless, the song’s chorus asserts, despite common human insignificance and transience, the least of us are capable, just by the mere fact of our being, of bringing joy, contentment, and comfort to those close to us. And that may very well be sufficiently redemptive—may make a world, even in the midst of the plagues of a pandemic, racial animosity, political lies, and war, “seem better, for a while.”

When Brewflies were working on building the song choices for the album’s narrative arc, they hit a wall of frustration and despair over the enormity of the political, social, and medical horrors of what everyone was living and trying to work through. Larry Brittain says, “I stumbled again on Dement’s poignant tune that perfectly expressed this, and it provided the impetus for pushing ahead and finishing the recording. The song, better than anything I’ve ever come across, highlights the simple common acts of everyday kindness, empathy, and love that can make each one of us a ‘hero’ for each other in the most mundane circumstances as well as the most dire.”

The song’s lyrics are monumentally symbolic in their literalness. Perhaps the most symbolic word in the song is “it”: “I can make it seem better, for a while.”  “It” is universal–from a hot and sticky night, to a dropped ice cream cone, to a fruitless political effort, to a pandemic, to the astounding capacity for human cruelty and barbarism.

“This song,” Brittain says, “became the perfect coda to an album we hoped would reflect everyone’s fears, tears, and shared groping for release.”

The song features Billy Clockel on bass, Larry Brittain on acoustic guitar and lead vocals, Gary Oleyar on fiddle, Prof. Louie on accordion, and E’lissa Jones on cello and background vocals

The album documents Brewflies Covid-19 experience through interpretations of noteworthy songs representing the period. Artists represented on the album include Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, and Mary Gauthier, and three original songs by their musical soulmate and collaborator, Michael Veitch.

 Listen to the new single here:

Photo credit: Marion Tarantina