B-Side Guys

Tanner Bingaman describes this song as “a doom-folk-dream-cloud hippopotamus learning to swim upriver (in a good way),” which is either useless press copy or the most accurate description of a mood ever committed to a bio field. Given what the track actually sounds like, it’s the latter.

“Swing and Turn Jubilee” is a traditional folk song reimagined through an alt-country lens dark enough to justify the doom prefix. The lyric is spare to the point of feeling ancient, each verse a single image that opens onto something larger. The railroad and the sea in the opening lines establish a sense of endless extension, “as far as I can see,” before the jubilee refrain pulls everything back into a circle: swing, turn, live, learn. The movement is outward and returning at once.

The contrast at the center of the song is the hardest and easiest work the narrator has ever done: farming versus swinging in a lover’s arms. That pairing isn’t ironic. It’s just true, and the lyric lets it sit without commentary. The work of the body in service of survival against the ease of the body in service of love, and the narrator has done both and knows the difference.

The final verse is where the song’s longing sharpens: “I wish I had a needle and thread / the finest I could sew / I’d sew my true love to my side / and down the road we’d go.” The wish is tactile and impossible and the exact right image for a song that keeps reaching toward what it can’t quite hold. A prayer for better days, as Bingaman puts it. The needle stays unthreaded.