Animal Weapon

Animalweapon Releases Preview Single To Next Year’s EP “SUMMER’S OVER”

By T.J. thing that relates to them in the music. Animalweapon, aka Patrick Cortes, “It’s very much a song for this moment,” is giving us a sneak preview of his said Patrick Cortes, aka Animalweapon. upcoming EP in the form of a new video “And I feel like I need to put it out. for the first song off the EP, which was Cortes says, “It’s reflective and it’s released last month on October 9th. The melancholy. I would hope that you think song is called “Summer’s Over,” and it about the state of the world right now reflects Cortes’ feelings about the when you hear it, and also your loved horrible situation and the losses everyone ones. There’s a sort of longing I hope it has suffered during this pandemic, as conveys.” well as his feelings for a very sick friend, and dealing with the end of what has Inspiration for this song took many been a terrible summer. Actually, a lot of paths. Besides being affected by the the lyrics in this song have double pandemic, the illness of his friend in meanings, so no doubt, anybody out Texas weighed heavily on his mind. He there listening to “Summer’s Gone” will went to Texas to be with his friend and be able to reflect on it and feel some- not only did it fuel his emotions for the 56 Rock and Blues International • November 2020 song, but it also provided some of the sounds that were vital to its production. “I was visiting a close friend in Texas a year ago who was undergoing chemo for breast cancer and I was sitting outside late at night after everyone had gone to bed,” recalls Patrick Cortes. “There were a lot of interesting sounds going on - cicadas and clicky little bugs that almost felt percussive in a way. I recorded a bunch of nighttime ambience with a handheld stereo Zoom recorder, sometimes shorter, more intentional clips, and then at one point I just kind of let it run to capture the atmosphere. I always travel with my MacBook and a small MIDI keyboard so I was able to go

inside and start working on a piano melody right away to put alongside it.”

Besides the interesting paths that Cortes used to find the emotion and basis for this song, the way he brought it to life was also incredible. He created the music for this release in a most unusual way at times. Besides using a keyboard, there was also the ballpoint pen, sunglasses, and also the clicky little bugs that were mentioned in the paragraph before this one. “I decided pretty early on I wanted this to sound very lo-fi, almost an intentionally lower production value than what I normally go for, so there was a lot of manipulation of the piano and drums and then even more sampling – for instance, the hi-hats are actually the click of a pen that was on my desk, there’s some other slightly offrhythm stuff I recorded with my Zoom that was just kind of foley - me picking up and putting down stuff that was lying around my apartment, like a quarter on my desk, or a pair of sunglasses on the counter. And then a pandemic comes along and I let it be for a little while. But I always had the idea that I wanted this to be a song about the end of summer. Maybe it’s because we spend twelve years of our childhood with summer being the only long break we get from life while we’re in school, or maybe it’s the days getting shorter and I’m prone to seasonal depression, but there’s something that feels sad about the end of summer and this song was always going to be a reflection of that. Once ‘all of this’ started happening especially once it got into summer and you compound an unmanaged pandemic with an important racial reckoning, wildfires, everything else - I had a new take on it while also realizing it really wasn’t much of a shift at all.”

Cortes tells us that the new EP should be released in Spring of 2021 on Polychromatic Records. Animalweapon has been working on the new EP throughout the pandemic. During that time he also composed the theme song for the new podcast called The Hidden Djinn for iHeartMedia that started last September 1st. Previously Animalweapon released his 2015 EP Flares and Signal Fires, along with his 2019 LP Tyrannosaurus on the Polychromatic Records label also.

Be sure to check out the video for “Summer’s Over” on YouTube or your favorite streaming service.