“The Aaron Waters Show” – Midwestern Dirt
At once brisk and pensive, “The Aaron Waters Show” keeps a steady pulse even as it diverts through a series of instrumental breaks between verses, along with a one-plus-minute interlude between the third verse and the ensuing bridge, and a one-minute instrumental coda. The song has no chorus, which I think contributes to its restlessness, a sense of looking for something that isn’t arriving. The unusual amount of instrumental time does that too; the vocal sections, together, carry a purposeful undertone of wishing somehow they could do more than they get to do. And they don’t do anything that isn’t laid out first by an instrumental part.
The song’s main riff (first heard at 0:21)–a gently descending guitar line finished with a decisive two-note upturn, the piano and bass joining in–repeats four times in the introduction before it becomes the verse melody at 0:47. Patrick Kapp, reminiscent of Nils Lofgren (anyone?), sings sweetly, with character; he makes the most of the relatively limited time he has to sing. The instrumental breaks keep trying to upstage him–each break following a verse features a different guitar sound. And then comes the long instrumental break after the last verse, which delivers a subtle shift via a new chord pattern introduced between 2:35 and 2:47. It repeats once and then becomes the foundation for the bridge when the vocals resume at 3:02. The lyrics at this point slow down, aiming towards some kind of resolution, even as the background cadence remains, driven by a bass line grown increasingly hyperactive. The vocals wrap by 3:57, and the song proceeds for nearly another minute, finally relaxing the tempo for the last 30 seconds. There’s a strong sense of a journey coming to an end, or maybe at least some kind of adventure ride. Which maybe makes sense given the song’s provenance: the title is a pun on the annual Air and Water Show held every summer in Chicago. The song, says Kapp, was inspired by the way each summer he is initially unnerved by the war-like noise of the aerial practice that precedes the show, only each year to remember it’s only the show, everything is more or less okay.
Midwestern Dirt began as a studio project for Kapp while he was living in Brooklyn, with recordings fleshed out with the help of family and friends. After he returned to Chicago in 2019, and then after the worst of the pandemic, the project became a full five-piece band. “The Aaron Waters Show” is a song from the album Twilight at a Burning Hill, coming out next month.
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