Music Review // Petunia & the Vipers "Love in Vain"

 

When "Love in Vain" first starts it has this lively way about it which makes me feel like we're going into a polka.   This song may not fully be a polka, but it has that same energy or something you might hear at Oktoberfest.   Horns come in and they also can remind me of salsa, but overall I think it just has a fun vibe with a song which tells a story as you listen.  In many ways this also has elements of dreamy rock n roll, which can take me back to times of artists like Buddy Holly and especially Ritchie Valens.  

At some point I feel like we've all loved someone in vain, but it's not always something you know until you reach the ending.  I like to think that we can learn from our past to help us grow, so nothing we do is really in vain.  If you feel like you're in a relationship and you know it's not right but still stay in it, there has to be some greater reason and down the line it has to make things feel even better when they start to get better.

Many times you'll hear these songs about being heart-broken and along those same lines but they don't ever really say anything about how they dealt with it- just that they're feeling it.  I give Petunia & the Vipers credit for the lyrics: "To ease this feeling so heavy and dull on my breast / I went and smoked away my mind and put it at rest".   Sometimes that's just what you have to do to hit that reset button and start again without those negative feelings.

I just imagine this song being performed on a stage, whether it be in a bar or a larger venue, where every person is just hanging on every word, listening to it as the story unfolds.  This is a sort of songwriting style we don't hear enough of in music and the fact that it can also cross genres seemingly makes it the perfect song for anyone to listen to and take something from it.