John Deering’s song “Gotta Get Away” is an experience. And not just because it is a powerful, powerful song. He wrote the song about the first days of the Ukraine war, creating an intensely personal image of a father spending time with his daughter before he sends her away. There is a quiet tension that ripples through the song from the moment it begins. It is not a song that has big hooks and brash production. It seizes your attention, shakes you and leaves you completely because of its raw honesty and the alien-yet-familiar quality of the sounds that make up the texture of the song. The falsetto and layered harmonies reach out, don’t just fill the gaps of the music. They feel as if they are talking, yearning, representing the questions that can’t be asked during a time of grief or crisis.
Recorded in his own basement, with Peter Anderson laying down tight drums, and guided by Ryan Smith, “Gotta Get Away” is a song that carves itself out of the thin ice between fragility and rhythm. The first half of the song feels like a slow goodbye, uncertain and unsure. But as the song begins to transition to its middle section there is an unbridling of anger and confusion. Confusion about this fractured state, of the violence that war can bring to a family, a person, a home. Nothing is very clear in this sonic world. That soundscape of alienation is the same feeling of mental fog that a parent might feel while being forced to accept the loss of a child, even if only temporarily. While the drums in the song never overpower, they ground the song, keeping it all on track, like a reassuring heartbeat during a time of tempestuous thought.
“Gotta Get Away” is an important piece of work because of what it makes you feel. This is a personal story, but any parent who has had to send a child away before (whether that be by their own doing or someone else’s) will relate. In this song, John Deering doesn’t want to make you think about the Ukraine war from a political, rational, or numerical perspective. He wants you to experience it on a deeply human level, just like he did.
Follow John Deering on Bandcamp, Facebook, YouTube and TikTok. Also Visit his Official Website
