Every week, the Milwaukee Music Premiere sponsored by Density Studios 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.
As Josh Konkel and his wife got ready for the birth of their daughter, he carried around most of the feelings you’d expect a first-time father to have. Excitement topped the list, but there was also relief and perhaps just a hint of trepidation stemming from the many years they spent trying to get pregnant.
The road wasn’t quite at its end — as all parents know, you never really get there anyway — and Konkel needed someplace to put these emotions. This, of course, is one of the primary benefits of being a musician: taking the big and small things life throws at you, and then finding an outlet for them.
What Konkel and Lost Orange Cat ended up with was “All Along,” the song (and life-moment marker) we’re helping the band premiere today.
Both because of the subject matter and the soulful musical stylings on the track, I immediately thought of Sturgill Simpson’s A Sailor’s Guide to Earth — a masterful treatise on new fatherhood in album form. Lost Orange Cat bring those elements to “All Along,” which announces its presence with horns over a midtempo pace before Konkel drops in with a lyrical pressure valve for his impatience:
I need you here now right away
I need you here like yesterday
So don’t be late I can not wait
Any longer for you babe
And all along
You belonged
How this love
Will live on
“[It] speaks to the journey we had to getting pregnant in the first place, then waiting for her to be born and just how excited I was to finally meet her and hold her in my arms for the first time,” Konkel explained to us. “Ultimately, it’s a song about the love between a father and daughter.”
You can bask in that familial emotion by hitting the “Listen” button at the top of the page or catching “All Along” on 88Nine throughout today (7:30 and 11:30 a.m.; 3:30 and 7:30 p.m.). The song gets its official release this Friday.
