Watch

Read

Listen

Go

Play

Shop

Community

Play (Lists)

Get Lost in Caddy, Lone Ranger’s New Single ‘When I Die’

By Charlie Maybee

There’s a trance-like quality to Caddy, Lone Ranger’s new single “When I Die.” It has the feel of a weighted blanket that induces a sense of calm with its heaviness. It submerges you into contemplative space that is hard to break out of as a simple driving beat approaches from a distance, inviting us to dance despite (or perhaps, in tandem with) our sadness.

With the first lines of the song, it becomes clear that we are experiencing the inside of Caddy’s depressed mind that has been musically transposed: “I’m feeling dead again / I’m stuck inside my bed / I can’t remember when I could escape my head.” Where the musical composition feels expansive and indulgent, the brooding lyrics stand in direct opposition as if to put us in a state of emotional contradiction.

As the chorus begins, he sings, “And when I die / I’ll come alive for the first time.” There’s a longing for escape from this state of mind, but as the moody guitar is joined by cascading synthesized arpeggios, we get locked into a meditative repetition aided by the deceptively simple backbeat. It becomes clear that a clean getaway from this state is impossible. This is a song that revels in its sadness.

This is a song written by an artist with a subtle hand whose emotional depth should not be overlooked. Caddy, Lone Ranger manages to capture the complex space between depression and yearning, while insisting that neither emotion is in complete control at any one time. It has a strong draw musically, but what makes us stay is that liminal emotive space of a depressed mind that Caddy has illuminated.

Follow our Alchemical Weekly Spotify Playlist for this and more great music featured on the site.  

Charlie Maybee

Charlie Maybee is a dancer, musician, educator, and writer based in Charleston, South Carolina who currently teaches with the Dance Program at the College of Charleston. His primary work as an artist is with his performing collective, Polymath Performance Project, through which he makes interdisciplinary performance art that centers tap dance as the primary medium of expression and research. He also currently plays rhythm guitar for the Charleston-based punk band, Anergy, and releases music as a solo artist under the name Nox Eterna.

More to explore

Foghat Sonic Mojo 2024 Tour. Fillmore Silver Spring, MD March 9
DMV

Foghat’s Roger Earl Refuses to Slow His Ride

By this point in his life, Foghat founding drummer Roger Earl has visited quite a few doctors. But what may be surprising is that the percussionist, 77, is quick to point out that many of the medical professionals who have worked on him also enjoy rocking out.

“Nearly all the doctors and surgeons I know, they all play something: trumpet, sax, violin, guitar,” Earl said recently. “There’s not too many drummers that are surgeons, there’s probably a good reason for that!”

Earl half-jokingly invites his surgeon-rockers to join him and the other members of Foghat onstage at the Fillmore in Silver Spring March 9, where they will be headlining the Rock and Roll for Children Foundation benefit for the Children’s Inn at NIH. Earl, the only original member of Foghat still in the band, will be banging the skins behind guitarist Bryan Bassett and other members Scott Holt and Rodney O’Quinn. “Slow Ride,” the band’s 1975 megahit, is all but assured to be on the setlist, along with tunes from Foghat’s most recent record, “Sonic Mojo.”

Read More »