B-Side Guys

The setup is so specific it almost hurts: walking home in the dark, carrying your shoes, catching the light in someone’s window you have no business wanting. Andy Gish doesn’t abstract it. The whole first verse of “Shine” lives in that moment of being slightly drunk, slightly unsteady, watching a light that doesn’t belong to you, and wanting it anyway.

The Yum Yum Tree’s first album in 19 years arrives in April, and “Shine” suggests the wait hasn’t softened Gish’s instinct for writing toward the uncomfortable. The song is about unrequited wanting, but it refuses the usual consolation prizes. “I want you to shine / Even if you’re not mine” is a genuinely generous sentiment, and the verses spend three minutes admitting everything that makes that generosity hard: the war inside, the inability to call a truce, the fear that isn’t of fire but of ice.

That last move is the one worth sitting with. “I’m not afraid of the break / Because it’ll mend in time / I’m not afraid of fire, I’m afraid of all the ice.” The fear of warmth going cold is more specific and more honest than the fear of pain, and Gish names it without explaining it to death. The production matches the approach: guitar, bass, drums, a hook built for repeat listens. Nothing that doesn’t belong.

Gish is a 20-year ER nurse who cites John K. Samson as her songwriting benchmark. The specificity of the mundane made universal is exactly what “Shine” pulls off: a walk home after last call, a lit window, a want you’re still carrying nineteen years later.