Every week, the Milwaukee Music Premiere presented by The Cooperage connects the city’s artists with our listening audience. If you’re an artist with a track you’d like us to debut exclusively on Radio Milwaukee, head over to our Music Submission page to learn how.
Timing is an indispensable skill for a musician. Within the context of a song, it either keeps the listener in the flow or jolts them out of it at the exact moment you need to grab their attention. Not to get all business-y, but there’s also a marketing side of timing — releasing something at the exact moment it will resonate with people.
Whether intended or purely accidental, Nick Maas really nailed both aspects on “Around Again,” the second single released under his own name after a few years performing as Cabin Essence.
On the music front, today’s premiere applies a light touch to the acoustic guitar, percussion and vocals that drop you gently into this lazy river of a song. Things build gradually from there but never get within sniffing distance of rocking the boat. Maas just wants you to float along, observing your surroundings with an almost detached frame of mind.
Which brings us to the second aspect of timing that “Around Again” hits squarely between the eyes. The surroundings being observed within the track are familiar ones. As Maas shared with us, it’s “about the feeling you get when you revisit a place you once lived, how the people you knew stayed the same, yet so many other things change.”
That sentiment will resonate in a big way with anyone who left their hometown and find themselves making travel plans to return for Thanksgiving. It’s the clash of memory and progress. Nostalgia vs. reality. The old resisting the new.
You're seeing the friends that you once knew
And reminiscing is all they care to do
And you wonder if they'll come around
And see the brighter side
Or will they keep on spinning around
In the countryside
The song swings from verses about feeling adrift to a chorus that provides an anchor — one that comes from above rather than below: “And you look to the stars / It feels the same as they come around again / And you see that they're always real / And they'll be around again.”
It’s a thoughtful juxtaposition in a really lovely song you can listen to right now using the player on this page or by catching it on 88Nine throughout today (6:30 and 10:30 a.m.; 2:30, 6:30 and 9:30 p.m.).
