It’s a new year, but I’m still caught up in the same music I was listening to last year. I find it increasingly difficult to find new albums to listen to because I am so so busy at school. Instead, I just stick to my old favorites. One album that I could listen to for a long, long time without getting tired of it would be Cleopatra by The Lumineers. This group is an amazing folk band who I had the pleasure of seeing live in Pittsburgh. Despite their immense popularity, they manage to give me the feeling that I am having my own individual experience apart from all of their other listeners. There isn’t anything very extraordinary about their voices or even their lyrics, I just think that they come across as natural and down to Earth. Please listen along to the songs I have selected so that you can understand how I feel about this music as well.

“Sleep On The Floor”-  The beginning lines of this song capture its most integral part, which is a message that in order to move on with their lives and start a new chapter, they must leave where they are and not look back. Wesley Schultz (lead vocals) sings in a tone that is sad, but urgent: “If we don’t leave this town/ we might never make it out/ I was not born to drown, baby come on”. This may be looking back on the time when the band left Denver, CO, to start heavily touring the country and launch their career.

“Cleopatra”- As the title track, this song holds a lot of meaning. It is evident that the woman in the song lives with an incredible amount of regret that she missed her opportunity with the love of her life. I love the idea that the band wrote the song through the perspective of a female taxi driver in the Republic of Georgia. They used someone else’s story that they found heartbreaking and worth telling because that is a great way to find inspiration outside of personal experiences.

“Gun Song”- Though it is hard to choose, I think that this may be my favorite track on the album. When I saw the band in concert, Wesley told the audience about how after his father passed away, he found a pistol in his dad’s sock drawer. He told all of the thousands of people that it made him realize that there were things about his father that he never knew. For this reason, the song has such a special and intimate feeling, because he leaves a lot up to the listeners imagination about his feelings. The lyrics leave me with questions, like “Does Wesley want to own a gun to protect his family just like his father, even though he says he hopes to be more than his father’s son?”.

“Long Way From Home”- Wesley again draws on his experience with his father, who succumbed to cancer. He tells about the experience watching his father deal with the chemotherapy and disease.  It is soft and painful, although it feels final and right. Personally, I felt as though the last line “At last I was sure you weren’t far away from home” meant that he felt at peace with his father’s death due to the horrible struggle he had faced. It hit home with me and probably anyone who has seen a relative suffer.