This past Friday, Chicago’s Ratboys released their third full-length album Printer’s Devil, an incredible assortment of tracks all on the theme of loss, change, and eventual rebirth. The group – made up of guitarist and vocalist Julia Steiner and guitarist Dave Sagan (not including touring members Sean Neumann and Marcus Nuccio – demoed the album in Steiner’s childhood home, which had recently been sold and emptied out – this would undoubtedly result in conflicting feelings that would be present somewhere within the final result, to which Steiner agrees:
Demoing there was almost too intense. I kept writing in my journal that it feels like we shouldn’t be there. I don’t know if that feeling made its way directly into the lyrics, but to me the songs will always be connected to that sense of home and time passing.
You can hear the lingering pain and something akin to confusion within the absolutely beautiful track “A Vision,” which feels more like a performance art piece evoking a dream or hallucination rather than just music. Steiner’s voice feels delicate, paper-thin, even, but still manages to stretch thinner as the narrative grows more emotional, becoming more like a tender prose poem, set to sparse instrumentals that slowly blossom into being. Steiner disclosed the inspiration behind the track in an interview for Flood Magazine:
This song came together very quickly—I think I wrote it in less than an hour, all at once. I remember I was in my bedroom in my old apartment, and we had some friends over, but I got sucked into this moment where I had to write the song. That happens very rarely, so when it does and you know you’re 100 percent onto something, you have to follow it, no matter what else is going on. I had known for a few months that I wanted to write a song about a specific rainy morning that I had experienced on the road. It felt almost like a fantasy or a dream, so the song had to be that too. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was able to connect some rhymes across the length of the song, which doesn’t often happen naturally for me. I think that makes it really pleasing to sing.
Within the lyrics, Steiner mentions a lot of “instants.” She wakes up twice “in an instant,” chooses not to interact with symbols and representations of mortality by driving, swerving, actually, around a dead possum in the middle of the road “in an instant,” the image of the “hot and soft pavement rocking him slowly in the mist” hauntingly lingering in the listener’s mind long after the track ends. Ultimately, it’s a narrative about the gift of remembering one specific morning, one specific emotion – there’s a special kind of power in remembering “instants” rather than overwhelming swaths of time, for it allows us to more deeply connect with our own unique perception of the world.
Printer’s Devil is out now.
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photo by Johnny Fabrizio
kid with a vinyl 