My new EP is here for your downloading pleasure. Yay! Here’s some more information about it:
“After releasing three collaborative albums in 2013 (with Birdapres, Sugar Pill Gang and Magnum KI), Rob Crooks returns with his first solo release since 2012’s Hearts. This EP is a continuation of Rob’s exploration into the territory of post-rap and indie-pop, manifesting in two brand new songs that are as equally heartfelt as they are danceable. “Me and All of My Friends” is an ode to Rob’s peers, who just like him, are getting older and are starting to fear that they’ve wasted too much of their youth on quixotic pursuits. But instead of dwelling on what is lost, this song is an uplifting and life-affirming call to re-awaken the potential in each of us. As the final verse says: “it’s not too late.”
“Saturday” is an anthem for a generation whose weekends are vanishing, in one way or another. The vagueness of the lyrics, which refer to each day of the week as another day to “get down,” lends to a pluralistic interpretation of what getting down may actually mean. Some of us are in the twilight of our youth, where every day is a new day to have fun and experience everything we can, while attempting to hold off the realities of adulthood until a never-quite-present tomorrow. For others, every day is another day that we get down to work, grinding through the week towards a weekend that just never seems to come. Either way you interpret it, Saturday has become meaningless. Every day is Saturday, and no day is Saturday. “Saturday is just not real.”
To fill out the EP, Rob has invited some of his friends and contemporaries to remix his songs. Speed Dial 7 offers a remix of “Me and All of My Friends” that slows down the original, which manages to stir up the feeling of giving a toast to all of your friends from the head of a dinner table that you know may never be full again. Nomad’s folky cover of the same song emphasizes an almost painful concern for those same friends to truly find freedom again, freedom from whatever it may be that has come to oppress them. Finally, Winnipeg-based techno producer The Medicine remixes “Saturday” into a song that is ready for those of us who may finally have a weekend free to dance away.
The result of all this is an EP with many different textures, all of which reveal Rob Crooks as an artist who is maturing into something special.”
By the way, the beautiful art work was done by Patrick Skene. Isn’t it gorgeous?