Wednesday are honest chroniclers of the Southern everyday, surveying a no-frills landscape of ashen Dairy Queens, run-over dogs, and pissed-on wallpaper. Their stories will make you laugh, wince, recoil, and reminisce. On “Chosen to Deserve,” the lead single from the Asheville band’s debut studio album, “Rat Saw God”, singer and guitarist Karly Hartzman details a messy adolescence full of fuck-ups and first times: skipping school, having sex in the back of an SUV, witnessing friends overdose on Benadryl.
“Now that it’s been awhile I’ll get around to telling’ you all my worst,” she informs a lover, not looking for absolution but just saying it like it is, “just so you know what you’ve been chosen to deserve.” Between the meandering, relaxed verses, the band takes it back to a slamming country guitar riff that’s part Drive-By Truckers, with whom the band toured with last year.
The accompanying Spencer Kelly–directed music video is an ode to down-home North Carolina, with home-video footage interspersed with newly-recorded scenes of the band in the neighborhood where Hartzman’s parents live: golf cart rides around the trailer park, geese swimming in the local pond, trips to the pool with the slide shaped like a frog’s tongue. Though in the last verse Hartzman confesses that she’s outgrown her teenage antics—“Now all the drugs are gettin kinda boring to me/Now everywhere is loneliness and it’s in everything”—the song still indicates fondness for the good ol’ days, surrounded by community.
“Chosen to Deserve” by Wednesday from the upcoming album ‘Rat Saw God’, out April 7th on Dead Oceans Records.
The Fat Angel Sings 