Music Review // The Sarandons "Drawing Dead"

 

"Drawing Dead" immediately takes me back to being a pre-teen, going to my grandparents' house and into my uncle's room.  My uncle, only a few years older than me, always had cassettes of the latest artists on the radio, so in some underlying way I developed a lot of my musical taste from him as well.  This song just has that sound like when artists were on the radio with first name/last name, a lot more than they seem to be now.  Bruce Springsteen, Bryan Adams, Tom Petty and Don Henley all come to mind during this song.  Even a little John Mellencamp.

While I understand the lyrics of this song to the point where I can relate with them, I don't find them easy to explain.  There are lines: "Drawing dead / Should have folded long ago" which makes this feel like it can relate to playing cards.  The card game which I play the most is Uno, and I think about when you don't have a card to play so you pick from the draw pile and it just feels like you're picking twenty cards and you're dooming yourself to never win.   This song, lyrically, feels like it is about that only in relation to real life issue and not a card game.

I really enjoy lines in the lyrics such as "I love ya baby, I know that's not enough" and "There's not a single thing I could say / That could keep you from pulling away".   This song feels like a breakup, but a monumental one, and it isn't a big fight so much as just that realization that there is nothing left to be done.  The idea of "Things were locked in, and after 11 years / Things are different, things are honest, oh it's clear".   

This is the type of conversation that people might not want to have, but I'm glad that The Sarandons are bringing it to life.  More than just growing apart, this song is about the passage of time.  That eleven years really hits because I feel like once you pass ten years together in a relationship, you're just not the same people as when you started so it becomes so much more difficult to stay together and some couples don't make it.  Still, if you don't want to be bummed out, this is just a good guitar-driven rock song to put on and feel the story.