Presenting a vision of end-times passion, Urban Heat frontman Jonathan Horstmann contrasts the innocence of a heart-eyed gesture with a harbinger of earthly destruction.
I heard the newsman say the world was ending,
So I walked across town to where you stay.
And on my way, I picked a flower – I wanted to give it to you.
But before I could get there, it burst into flames.
The Austin post-punk trio’s latest single, a catchy, spoken word cut with big drums and swirling synth arpeggios, culminates in the refrain, “I just want to write you a simple love song, but the world keeps falling apart.” The lyrics serve as a necessary reminder for modern times: even when society’s going through dire straits, love can still be one’s driving force. Horstmann, the group’s vocalist, reveals that lyrics to the hook came from a conversation he’d had with his wife.
“It was right at the start of the pandemic and all I wanted was to create a nice little cocoon of simple joy with my music, but 2020 had other plans,” he explains. “It didn’t feel right not to address the elephant in the room, and writing a love song would have felt escapist at the time.”
He wrote and recorded the chorus that day, then all but forgot about it until the end of last year, when he completed the verses, which find the lovers dancing amid the burning hills.
“I just loved the imagery I was getting of running through a burning city to get to your lover, only to realize it might be too late anyway so you just start dancing together,” he explains. “By the end, the narrator has discovered that the only world that really mattered was the one that they were creating for themselves and could continue to create if they could just survive the apocalypse.”
Speaking of dancing, the video – directed by Horstmann – features some delightfully idiosyncratic dance moves from the frontman, plus instrumentalists Paxel Foley and Kevin Naquin. Watch “A Simple Love Song” here:
This article appears in January 29 • 2021.