verygently titled their debut as an apology addressed by name, and the first song shows why it takes a whole record to deliver one. “I told you for the last time / I swear I’m gonna change my ways,” the narrator of “I DON’T WANNA DIE” begins, and the reply lands before the verse ends: “You said that yesterday.” What follows is a negotiation where every promise meets a deflection. The doctor hands him B12, and he’s heard it makes you feel good. She tells him he needs help, and he tells her she needs to let him cook. Even the title carries a hedge, since “I don’t wanna die just yet” treats mortality as a scheduling question, and the chorus keeps smiling while he’s “laughing while the ship goes down.”
The song’s most honest line comes late and gets postponed on arrival: “I gotta get it off my chest / But maybe just not right now.” That sentence carries the album, an apology that knows it is owed and keeps checking the calendar. Tristan Bushman says the song is about finding balance, and the trio’s “tongue-in-cheek approach” to “heavy-ish things” supplies its register: a narrator who will “light another cigarette” and drink until he almost drowns, then chant “I’m coming around” like a man talking himself into the trip.
That vow gets its answer seven tracks later. “CHANGIN’ MY WAYS” is a stripped-down ballad that sets the trio’s harmonies beside their most confessional writing, and its line reads “I thought about changin’ my ways, but I changed my mind.” The band did not notice the echo until they prepared the release, and it works better unplanned: the vow sworn on track one is revoked on track eight in a single line, with nobody in the song registering the contradiction.
The titles in between read like the replies a person gives when pressed. “ANYTHING BUT ME” and “IT WASN’T LIKE THAT AT ALL” sound like answers that dodge the question, and the sequence closes on “WHATEVER, I GUESS,” a shrug that finishes the apology without delivering it. The tracks around them are where the album’s songwriting gets specific. “WHO CARES” and “STRONGER THAN THAT” sit back to back at six and seven, and both document the end of a relationship, written while the members were in the middle of breakups of their own. Joey Hendricks took the lead on “WHO CARES,” and its chorus is built on his wordplay. “STRONGER THAN THAT” was co-written with Sam Hollander and Kevin Griffin of Better Than Ezra, and Drew Erwin calls it the record’s outlier, “big, spacey, atmospheric, moody.” Put together, they make a shrug followed by a claim of strength, the same evasion in two different outfits.
The sound that holds this together is harmony, and it was built in front of audiences. Bushman, Erwin and Hendricks were three solo songwriters who moved to Nashville in 2017 and 2018 and spent their days co-writing in rooms with little time to perform. A 2024 writers’ round at Analog at Hutton Hotel turned into a band, and Augustana’s Dan Layus gave them their first tour when his opener canceled. Dates with The Fray and Ruston Kelly followed, and the road taught them what Erwin says the album now reflects, that “how front forward the harmonies should be” is the whole point. Crosby, Stills & Nash is the reference for “IT WASN’T LIKE THAT AT ALL,” and the Eagles sit in the same family tree.
The lead single points in another direction. “HOW IT’S ALWAYS BEEN” features Kelly, who co-wrote it with the trio after they met on a shared Nashville bill, and its alt-rock sensibility rests on ear-grabbing guitar parts. Bushman brought the song idea into the room the day they wrote it, and he describes the melodies Kelly added as “very Ruston.” A song born from a collaboration with one of their tour mates shows the band’s range from the inside: three harmony singers who can plug into a stranger’s voice and still sound like themselves.
“ANTIDOTE” sits ninth, and it comes with a long history. It was the first song Bushman and Erwin wrote together, in 2020, and it became a staple of the live show long before a record existed. Where the earlier tracks offer excuses, this one is named for a cure, and its place so near the end gives the apology one last chance to land before “SOMETIMES I WONDER” and “WHATEVER, I GUESS” take it back. An album titled as an apology ends by declining to finish it, and the harmonies make that delay good company.
SORRY, SARAH is available now.
Leave a Reply