Time and location change, people stay the same. Or is that just another superstition that we all have heard and taken in as truth without ever really inspecting the validity of the point? I suppose, like many things, the truth is in the eye of the beholder.
If the truth is beheld by Weather The Boy (AKA Evan Andree), the inherent accuracy in these observations gets even more convoluted. For instance, the project and name embodied by “Weather The Boy” are old; the project released the album “Sink Low” in 2015 with the artist’s name cut down to simply “Weather” and Andree has long held the instagram handle Weathertheboy in respect to the project. So same band, same handle.
Skip three years later, however, and the name is different yet the same: Weather The Boy as an artist is born and fully comes into being. Andree returns to the scene with his new single “Afraid”. And yes, you guessed it: it’s the same, yet it’s not. The track pays homage to the folk roots of “Sink Low” while also exploring a handful of new elements. Grimy synths and mellotron laden leads harking back to the days of Motown sneak into the cracks left in what otherwise would be a sparsly populated Americana song that would have fit comfortably on a vintage release by Dylan or Springsteen.
The track seems almost upbeat compared to Andree’s past offerings, but is kept down to an earth we can all relate to by it’s insistence that everything is changing and ,in light of this volatility, it’s okay to be afraid. Time and location certainly, but Weather The Boy as a human and an artist seems to prove the old idiom false.