Shortest
1970s Laurel Canyon playing on the beat-up jukebox of your favorite dive bar.
Quite Short
You spend most of your days doing things you don’t want to do in the hopes that it will get you what you want tomorrow. But what if that tomorrow never comes? “For most of us,” says the Brooklyn-based singer/songwriter Couvo (aka Josh Couvares), “we’re still waiting for that tomorrow. And to me, that sounds a lot like purgatory.” This idea sparked his latest album, The Drinks Are Always Free in Purgatory, mixed by Charlie Stavish (Jenny Lewis, Interpol, Weezer) and mastered by Alex DeTurk (David Bowie, D’Angelo and the Vanguard, Norah Jones). With a sound like 1970s Laurel Canyon playing on the beat-up jukebox of your favorite dive bar, Couvo sings about characters who are broke and jobless, anxious and aimless, dulling their days in dead-end relationships. But above all, one question runs throughout this album—when will anything change? “The album is about living in that kind of purgatory. But it’s also about how we manage to find our own salvation.”
Full Bio
You spend most of your days doing things you don’t want to do in the hopes that it will get you what you want tomorrow. But what if that tomorrow never comes?
“For most of us,” says Couvo (aka Josh Couvares), “we’re still waiting for that tomorrow. And that sounds a lot like purgatory.” We live a lifetime of todays that, for most of us, consist of bad jobs and debt, unfinished plans and unfulfilled dreams, with nothing for company but that nagging worry hiding in the dark corners of the mind that you’ll never get what you want.
These endless todays sparked his latest album, The Drinks Are Always Free in Purgatory, mixed by Charlie Stavish (Jenny Lewis, Interpol, Weezer) and mastered by Alex DeTurk (David Bowie, D’Angelo and the Vanguard, Norah Jones). With a sound like 1970s Laurel Canyon playing on the beat-up jukebox of your favorite dive, Couvo sings about characters who are broke and jobless (“Horses & Divorces”), anxious and aimless (“Visiting Hours”), dulling their days in dead-end relationships (“How It’s Always Gonna Go”). And with this wistful lyricism comes a quiet introspection—you can imagine yourself listening to the album in a sunken living room, sinking into the lush carpet on a hazy summer afternoon, thinking too much about the past. But there’s a raw edge to it as well, like a loud, raucous bar, squeezing out every ounce of joy you can out of a 4 am night.
Across these atmospheres and scenes painted by each song, one question runs throughout this album—when will anything change?
The answer seems to be: not anytime soon. At least not in Bushwick, the perennial setting for the album. “Every summer always smells of cigarettes/and the broken glass lines the pavement,” Couvo sings on “Every Summer,” summing up his neighborhood. It’s a song that hits like Pinegrove with a tinge of pop, gliding along at a smooth pace until it explodes into an outro that will make you leap to your feet and scream along. This same feeling of stasis comes through on “Tired,” where Couvo combines keen lyrics with a neo-soul sonic landscape reminiscent of D’Angelo and Solange.
Who doesn’t feel that things will never change? It’s something we see in our own lives, as well as on the macro scale across the country, across the world. We do the same work every day, yet never seem to profit; we keep at the grind even though the only thing it seems to be doing is grinding us down. Still, there’s still hope. You hear this most acutely in the album closer, “A Prayer,” which brings to mind Dawes with the lyrical bite of Father John Misty. It’s a moving acoustic number where Couvo finds solace in our collective ability to yearn for something better, concluding the record with the powerful invocation, “May you always dream of something more.”
“The album is about living in that kind of purgatory,” says Couvo. “But it’s also about how we manage to find our own salvation.”
