Found by Accident — But Not Really
The track arrived through the Glass Beams similar artists radio, which makes it accidental. But it wasn’t entirely — the name stopped me. Andrew Savage is the vocalist and guitarist of Parquet Courts, a New York City rock band I’ve been obsessed with for a long time. That’s what made me click.
What I didn’t know was this solo work. I knew Savage from a different direction: Milano (2017), the collaboration album between Parquet Courts and Italian composer Daniele Luppi, which features Karen O (Yeah Yeah Yeahs) on vocals throughout — a concept album built around the punky underground energy of mid-1980s Milan, with Karen O playing fashionistas, junkies, ne’er-do-wells and escorts across its tracks. That record is big, vivid, cinematic. This is the opposite.
Several Songs About Fire (2024), produced by John Parish (the person behind some of PJ Harvey’s most intimate records, recorded in rural England), is Savage alone — quieter, more inward.
The Song
The tone is soft and unguarded — a delicate, lilting groove with a gently restrained quality, close and late-night. Savage’s voice is deadpan in the way that only works when there’s real feeling underneath.
The lyric opens walking home at night from nowhere, past the padlocked bars and service-hour windows of a city that’s closed. From there it expands into a celestial metaphor for asymmetry in how people see each other. Savage described it:
“The song is about the different ways people see each other, and how the smaller we feel the bigger others seem. Sometimes you find yourself orbiting someone who has no idea of their own magnitude.”
Black holes and stars are not abstractions here — they are people. The song holds that imbalance without trying to resolve it. It just observes it, the way you observe it walking home alone at night.