{"id":803649,"date":"2020-01-30T14:07:46","date_gmt":"2020-01-30T21:07:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rollingstone.com\/?p=944983"},"modified":"2020-01-30T14:07:46","modified_gmt":"2020-01-30T21:07:46","slug":"song-you-need-to-know-ben-watt-summer-ghosts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/music-news\/song-you-need-to-know-ben-watt-summer-ghosts\/","title":{"rendered":"Song You Need to Know: Ben Watt, \u2018Summer Ghosts\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Everyone talks about perfect summer songs, but hardly anyone discusses great winter ones \u2014 tunes that capture a certain cold, bleak, will-spring-ever<\/em>-arrive? mood. Its title aside, Ben Watt<\/a>\u2019s \u201cSummer Ghosts\u201d is one of those songs, and beautifully so.<\/p>\n

Triggered by something, seemingly a painting of his mother, the one-time half of English pop duo Everything But the Girl<\/a> finds himself ruminating on his past \u2014 especially his parents with \u201ctheir own shit, wrapped up in themselves, jazz on the shelves.\u201d Whether it\u2019s an actual trip or just one taking place in his mind, he\u2019s soon returned to the neighborhood of his youth. There, he finds a bleak landscape \u2014 \u201cclearance sales, Saturday hair and nails, loans and help with debt\u201d\u2014 and a chain hotel that definitely wasn\u2019t there before. Despite evidence that part of his past has been physically erased, Watt still realizes that the memories, the ghosts, remain, and part of him maybe hasn\u2019t changed that much after all.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard to believe, but this year marks the 20th <\/sup>anniversary of Everything But the Girl closing up shop. Tracey Thorn<\/a> has moved on to a second life as an author and columnist, as well as solo artist, while her longtime partner and husband Watt returned to his DJ roots, ran a club and eventually resumed the solo career he put on hold after he and Thorn formed Everything But the Girl in the Eighties.<\/p>\n

Part of Watt\u2019s upcoming album, Storm Damage<\/em>, \u201cSummer Ghosts\u201d is an extension of the pensive pop Everything But the Girl once specialized in. (Even when their songs were remixed, as in the classic \u201cMissing,\u201d<\/a> the mood was as thoughtful as it was jubilant.) With its sparse piano and synths and walking-through-the-slush tempo, it\u2019s as musically haunted as Watt\u2019s observations, which are talk-sung in the verses to add to the conversational tone. The only moment of beauty arrives in the choruses, which are lush and pretty and feel like a ray of sunshine that breaks through the clouds before disappearing once again. Thomas Wolfe said you can\u2019t go home again; Watt says you can, but best to be prepared for what you may find there.<\/p>\n

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Popular on Rolling Stone <\/h3>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

via:: Rolling Stone<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Everyone talks about perfect summer songs, but hardly anyone discusses great winter ones \u2014 tunes that capture a certain cold, bleak, will-spring-ever-arrive? mood. Its title aside, Ben Watt\u2019s \u201cSummer Ghosts\u201d is one of those songs, and beautifully so. Triggered by something, seemingly a painting of his mother, the one-time half of English pop duo Everything But […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[98],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-803649","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-music-news"},"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-07-24 04:46:30","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSMT The Mountain","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/803649","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=803649"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/803649\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=803649"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=803649"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=803649"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}