I spend a lot of my time analysing the music I love and studying what it is about particular songs or pieces of music that move me in certain ways. I’ve recently come around to this idea that there exists a lineage of songs by the artists Warren Zevon, Tom Petty, Talking Heads, Pixies, Oasis and Eels. These songs are connected by a recurring moment that is repeatedly captured. It is as though in the moment of creating these songs, all the writers were in a similar headspace, and only by writing this exact song could they capture that feeling and satisfy that particular mood. One day I was in the shower when one of these songs came on the radio. I had a bit of a light bulb moment and in the time it took me to get out of the shower and plug a guitar into an amp, I had written the basis of the song ‘Something in the Water’. I’ve bored many friends while explaining this theory and proudly recounting how I added to this 40-year lineage, no one else seems to hear this through-line that to me is crystal clear. Perhaps music historians of the future will agree with me.
Lyrically it was far less high concept. I was at a little village football tournament just outside Santa Cruz in Bolivia, I befriended some locals and ended up drinking Ayahuasca tea from a plastic 7up bottle, I wasn’t told exactly what I was drinking until later the next day. For the next several hours my new friends and I convinced ourselves that we were in fact watching football in hell, there were pigs running around all over the place and the buildings seemed to be on fire. As the afternoon wore on I struggled to get back to my hostel in an insane thunderstorm. I remember standing on a balcony looking out over the low rise sky line of Santa Cruz with no idea what the hell had just happened, I was watching the blackest storm clouds I had ever seen, I watched as they broke up and give way to shafts of perfect golden light. It was a real roller coaster of a day. When I was writing this song, the first lyric that came into my head was “there was something in the water that had us losing our minds”, at first I didn’t really know what I was singing about, but then I suddenly thought about that day and the rest of the song just wrote itself.
lyrics
Who knows what she was thinking when she came out of the blue into our lives
She was crawling up the walls sending shivers running all along my spine
And as the sun set heavy over roof tops spreading out for miles
There was just a final word to be heard before she passed out on the cold tiles
But there was something in the water that had us losing our minds
God knows what we were drinking while the world I knew was fading out of sight
And there was something in her eyes that had me losing my mind
God knows what we were thinking while I prayed I made it out the other side
We crawled down to the bar and to some cut price bottles over lime
As the time lapsed love turned to lust but everything was all right
As the rain fell steady over car doors slamming on my mind
There was just a final act to be played before we gave in to the nighttime
credits
credits
from SOMETHING IN THE WATER,
released January 19, 2018
FAR003
WRITTEN BY THE MAPLE STATE
RECORDED AND PRODUCED BY ANDREW FARRER & THE MAPLE STATE
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