PREMIERE | Night Windows, "Broken Glass"
Breaking through for a realer view with Night Windows; photographed by Jessica Hughes.
The past decade, or even just the last four years, have forced us all to do some serious soul searching. The kind of events that typically transpire over the course of a century have felt condensed into a maelstrom of practically anything and everything you can imagine (and maybe never even thought possible) in a constricted economy of time. We have watched civic fabrics become ripped apart. Social systems jeopardized to becoming full on compromised. The brutality of more useless wars and needless bloodshed. The rise of tribalism. Disconnection, dissociation and apathy at all time highs to rabid polemics with no chill, and little to no room for reasonable discourse. We still are very much in a pandemic that continues to mutate in a world where novel viruses truly are running the whole darn show. We just want to know what still works…where our places are in what continually feels like a world on the brink, constantly grappling with the discontinuities that are too numerous to keep up with. While it is utterly impossible to expect a static state of normalcy, the best we can hope for is some degree of consistency. And at this juncture the only consistent thing we can invest our faculties of expectation in is the perpetual tempests of storms that rage beyond our control and wishes as we stand as a worldwide humanity striving to subsist and assist our communities within the deluge that rages onward, often devoid of the tenets of reason.
Out of this spinning velocity of the ceaseless vortex are the beloved Night Windows, who offer the shine of the down home sound from Pennsville, NJ with the debut of “Broken Glass” off the forthcoming new album In Memories. The trio of Ben Hughes, Tad Lecuyer and Adam Smith bring the world something real that we can all connect to in our own unique ways. The homeland hum of everytown USA can be heard and felt in so many sublime ways, stories of what we have lost to the things that stem beyond the reaches of our control and how it affects us in ways that are apparent, yet absolutely sublime. Night Windows offer solemn and sincere songs of woe and sadness about the things that affect every big city and township and hit the smaller communities even harder. Night Windows rips the Mobius strips of depressing headlines and back pages and illustrate how these series of unfortunate events really affect us all in ways that are painstakingly human, and all too familiar.
“Broken Glass” provides something that is more than just fodder for the doom loop obsessives or a pithy blurb for the obit section. While the subject of dead malls and other such ruins of antiquated retail are big topics and themes within the online communities and water cooler chatter; rarely does any of this discourse really focus on how it impacts the people that rely and depend on these marketplaces to meet their most basic needs. Ben Hughes eulogizes with a feverish heart the closure of the last grocery store in his town, a sobering depiction of the aftermath that is reminiscent of the uneasy sights of vacated establishments and blight that have ravaged our municipalities. Night Windows share an emotional reminder of our fragile existence, even in the so-called best of times. “Broken Glass” is about what these now abandoned edifices meant to us, our memories, what they meant to our neighbors, friends, families, acquaintances, strangers and everyone else in between. Night Windows present the stories of the places and people that are now gone and the reminiscences that remain in memoriam. The remnants of these vacated premises become mausoleums to the previous eras and the good folks that made our humble earth a better place to be. “Broken Glass” pays tribute to those local histories like tales of rembrance shared around backyard bonfires and at the establishments that still remain as we reconcile a sense of meaning in the face of things that feel otherwise meaningless. The band marches forward and onward in a moving epicedium that is given further gravity with vocal contributions from Samantha Rosen that pierces the throes of solemnity with kernels of warmly held hope.
Ben Hughes of Night Windows provided some privy reflections on the stories, feelings, perceptions and thoughts that informed “Broken Glass”:
I spent a lot of time riding my bike around town in the early days of the pandemic. Broken glass, littered trash, boarded up windows, it was all becoming pretty bleak. My heart breaks for little towns like this, and breaks even more when I see recovery coming in the form of warehouses stamping out the farmlands of the Garden State.
One town over from us (where I was born and raised) literally had the last grocery store in town close. Hard to understand how to reckon with something like that. And though I’m fortunate enough to not be directly impacted by it, I feel it in my bones.
Cover art for In Memories, courtesy of Dot Gomeringer.
All in all, the song to me is about finding your place in what can feel like a steaming heap of trash at times. Looking closer, finding the beauty there. The uniqueness. Finding the present. Finding your place, and understanding that though it’s not the same as everyone else’s, it’s okay.
Night Windows’ In Memories will be available February 23.