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“It’s a fair question you ask of me today,” MD McNally sings on “Strange Currents, his latest track premiering today. “Am I moving closer or drifting away?”
To that, I’d add another question. “In a song that clocks in at barely 3 minutes, are you devoting a minute-plus to an unconventional guitar-driven solo?”
The answer: Sure, why not?
The instrumental that serves as the corned beef in this Reuben of a track immediately jumped out because it happens in phases. You’ve got a warbly harmonizing phase, then a phase punctuated by a single repeating note, and finally a bluesy wailing phase. It’s a weird, cool element stuck in the middle of an otherwise-conventional “shimmering guitar rock song from a second-gen CD jukebox,” as McNally puts it.
The subject matter is pretty straight down the middle as well — a relationship that, to follow the song’s nautical theme, seems headed for rocky shores:
Strange currents indeed
To draw you off of your charts
Push me onto the reef
And leave us further apart
Strange currents indeed
At the will of the tide
Oh won’t you take me for a ride
And bring us back within reach?
You can hear the solo, sailing metaphors and everything else in “Strange Currents” on demand using the player on this page, as well as on 88Nine five times today (6:30 and 10:30 a.m.; 2:30, 6:30 and 9:30 p.m.). The track will also be part of McNally’s newest collection, I’ll Dissolve for You, which gets its release this Friday.
