Take a lyric that sounds cloyingly romantic, flip it on its head into something darker and more subversive, and you get the premise for Tan Vampires' song "I Found A Body."
Originally built around the line, "I found a body to call my home," the song is not the tender love song the lyric suggests. Instead, it's a darker portrayal of relationships and human nature that seems to suggest that happiness is not found in the company of another person but rather in solitude.
One of the standout tracks from the New Hampshire-based band's debut album, For Physical Fitness, released earlier this year, the song transforms from a quiet lullaby filled with softly chiming electric guitar into a majestic manifesto laden with trumpets and ghostly howls. Tan Vampires never take it too far, instead leaving enough room for the song's melancholy lyrics to come to the fore.
"Sleep in your own bed tonight / Aren't you sick of the fights? ... There is no need for silence / Tonight you can leave on the lights / And do what you like / 'Cause I found a body to call my home."
Singer/songwriter Jake Mehrmann told us more about how the song came about and what it means to him:
Jake Mehrmann:
This was actually a song I wrote very quickly. I have something of a debilitating perfectionist streak. I tend to get carried away with trying to make every song the greatest, most perfect, self contained piece of music ever created. This is ultimately (and obviously) futile and counterproductive, so the fact that "I Found A Body" was written in maybe twenty or thirty minutes might have something to do with why people seem to respond to it a certain way.
I think I may have had a little bit of the chorus melody kicking around for a couple weeks in the back of my head before I sat down and wrote the whole thing out — that and the line "I found a body to call my home." I thought it was pretty cheesy, actually. Then it occurred to me that if I subverted the sense of comfort and self-assuredness of that line by putting it in the context of a song that is actually about something more complicated and uncomfortable, it could give the idea some depth.
Despite [the fact] that it is a pretty song, it is, to me, still pretty dark. I've had people tell me they used it in weddings or that it's their song with their partner. I'm always sort of like, "Um, do you actually know the lyrics?" Clearly people will project something of themselves onto how they perceive a song. I guess it's nice that people choose to take something positive from it and not just toss it onto some pile of things to despair about. The more unexpected and varied people's reactions are the more rewarding the experience of sharing the music tends to be.
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