One of the artists Rocks Off has most enjoyed getting to follow in the last couple of years is Tim Qualls. On the surface, his music is the same self-deprecating white guy acousti-pop that John Mayer and Jason Mraz are doing, but as we hear more and more of his work, we realize the depth of soul in his compositions and his true dedication to a good set of lyrics.
Qualls' debut EP, This Is Our Land, was a hell of a good record, released by the always consistent boys over at the Red Tree Music Studio, but its biggest flaw was that it was basically a single masquerading as an EP. There just wasn't enough meat there, like one of those tiny steaks you order at a good steak house because the prices make you want to pretend to go to the bathroom and slink out of the restaurant in poverty and shame. Now, one year later, Qualls is preparing a new EP, The Melancholy Sessions, and in an effort to bring his fans into the creative process he is releasing snippets of studio time through his YouTube channel. The short videos are a great look into what the modern indie-rocker must go through to create music in a time when the music industry simply can't support sending someone on a local level into a high-powered studio.
Hell, in the current recession, most musicians can't scrape enough together to rent somewhere like SugarHill on their own. What you see through the eye of the camera is simply a dedicated group of musicians having a good time creating in a bedroom studio, laying down tracks the way other people grill outside on the weekends. The music being put together for Melancholy is fairly appropriate to the title. Qualls sent us an unfinished, and unfortunately not for sharing, version of "one of the more upbeat tracks" from the upcoming album called "For Love." If this is an upbeat number, the downbeaters must be real wrist-cutters.
All jolly emo-kid fanfic-ing aside, though, the song itself is stellar, subtle battle cry to braving the dangers of the everyday world in the name of love. Qualls is a man who realizes that the average American doesn't really need to fear a terrorist attack or some kind of exotic superflu with an animal's name painted on the front like a Valkyrie on the hood of a douchemobile.
