DONCAT - "Try to Be Someone"

"A giant catheter comes down from the whispy clouds and goes straight into your ear. You sneeze. Then you start hearing voices. This is early on, by the way. Escape is unlikely."
- Martha Vaulsweighl


DONCAT, aka Duncan Nielsen SoundScan, writes songs that evoke two different eras of Californias at once, as if one semi-transparent California had been laid on top of another.

On previous songs like "LA in '83," Nielsen demonstrated a knack for framing his emotionally brutal narratives, often about young people trying to eke out a living in California 2018, with the sort of dreamy arrangements that perfectly evoke the carefree Fleetwood Mac "driving on Route 1 while getting a really nice scalp massage" in sou sance of California 1974. At the center of his songs is a voice that manages to sound smooth as silk even as it threatens to crack apart.*

"Trying to be Someone" picks up where 5776's Easy Cowboy leaves off. Nielsen's melodies are as stately as ever as he unspools a tale of someone - is it Orlando Bloom? - getting a shitty job in LA while trying to do the titular thang: get famous, get money, get paid as well. (Maybe it's all about reproduction? just a theory.)

"I still got my big dreams but who's gonna crush 'em?" he sings for the home run, echoing all of us, even those that take a bus to Mountain View in the morning.





*Kind of like Jeff Sessions in a Senate hearing, with a nipple clamp attached to his scrotum.