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Laughing for the West

by Joe Winter

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about

'Laughing for the West' is a lament on the experience of being a citizen of ‘the west’, as well as an individual navigating their own emotional landscape. 'Laughing for the West' is about complicity. You’re not laughing with, because it’s not your friend; you’re not laughing at it, because it’s laughing at you a little bit; you’re laughing for it — because you work for it, you benefit from being its citizen; it pays you. But it hurts you too. It overwhelms you. You’re an emotional landscape within a political one. You have interpersonal relationships — romantic, sexual, familial, platonic — that feel entirely human and unpolitical. Yet you feel like your origin’s contentious past and present bleed into your consciousness in a way that’s hard to distill.

And above all of this, you’re a person living on a planet with which ancient parts of you long to reconnect. But you feel so distant from it, and you live as if it were something else that allows you to exist.

These outside forces seep into your identity, effecting the ways by which you love and can be loved. But you’re so intimately tied up with it that you don’t know what you’d do without it. When you shake me it hurts my brain, but when you leave me I waste away.

lyrics

I’m gonna hold down the line
Stay down with the ship
If I watch you on my tv
Will I become you quick
Come on and hold down the time
Like crystals under the land
Let me know if I cut
Through the skin of your hands
If I fall down
If I loose your grip
Wait for the man to come in
I don’t even know his name
But he looks at me like I
Come from faraway

Oh, when you shake me it hurts my brain
When you leave me I waste away
When you go I feel to strange

I’m proud
I’m slowly invading my soul
But I need a little bit more of your flow
I’m not sure if it either
If when we bend down we’ll see them
I’m bowling neither for the south nor the east, like
I’m holding you hostage to the world
I’m basting my bird for all that it’s worth
I’m laughing for the west

credits

released October 21, 2022
Written by Joe Winter and Beau Blaise
Performed by Joe Winter
Produced by Joe Winter and Beau Blaise
Mixed by Jake Gordon
Mastered by Colin Leonard at SING

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Joe Winter London, UK

London-born artist Joe Winter channels a diversity of influences to produce music adhering to no genre in particular. Their creative process passes beyond the music itself, into film, which they self-direct to deepen and clarify the music’s meaning, for both themselves and their listeners. ... more

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