PIGEON PIT
Crazy Arms is the 5th LP by Olympia, WA country/punk poets Pigeon Pit, and their first since becoming a nationally touring 6-piece band. It's a melodic call to action for folks who listen to both Bright Eyes and CRASS. A night at the Ryman on slow-burn psychedelics and the dreams you choose to think out loud at sunrise. Crazy Arms is the sound of a band hitting their stride, comfortable in the chaos, letting you know you aren’t alone.
“The terror breathes beside me: another little act of sabotage” – “Run Your Pockets”
As front-woman Lomes Oleander tells it: "It’s last call for nuance before we all get put against the wall so I’ll just cheers to the human spirit: we’re all fucked up and crazy people. Let’s get wild with it and love our humanity while we can, all our contradictions and flaws that make us real. This is a bunch of love songs for how fucked up we are, and how beautiful it is how we try anyway. How we struggle every day to change our shared reality, to produce a world around us that makes sense to us. When you see a genocide unfolding on your phone, see fascism and AI swallowing up reality, and you force yourself to push it down and not respond to your humanity inside you that calls you to intervene, when it feels like there’s nothing you can do, that’s what kills the human spirit because that force of love and cooperation is humanity, that’s what makes sense inside of us. Giving a shit is the unpopular opinion. I’m just writing about what it feels like for me to try to hang on in a world that’s trying to kill the human spirit."
Today, the band is sharing the album’s lead single which is available now on all streaming platforms for any playlist shares. On the song, Lomes Oleander says, “‘Keys To The City’ is about being a part of the living flesh of the city, having fun in sketchy ways, the ways that make you feel real and excited to go out at night.”
"Dilapidation's on the inside, a city choking out the night sky. It's gonna be another late night: whatever makes you feel alive." – “Keys to The City”
"We’ve been busy as hell the last couple years. We did a lot of touring, and it was really our first-time touring or playing shows as a full band. Our full lineup had been practicing for 3 weeks or so when we recorded Feather River Canyon Blues (2022). We never played a show together until after that, and we’ve played a lot now. We got to play tiny desk, toured Australia and New Zealand, and got to tour with Laura Jane Grace, and all the while, I’m kind of stumbling around the country getting devastated by the immensity of love and humanity as it all falls apart and writing all this new stuff."
"Every moment, like broken glass, a holding cell, a furtive glance, falls in squares of light across an empty bedroom floor" - “Bronco"
"We recorded crazy arms in my friend Vivienne’s basement, all analog onto a 1/2” tape through a 4-track, so it’s mostly live tracks, which is really fun. You can’t dub over a bunch of instruments or redo individual parts when you mess up. We dragged this piano across town in a van and squeezed it into her basement. It wouldn’t fit into the studio, so I ended up playing the piano from the basement with all the mics and wires running out of the studio space. Working with all these insane restrictions forces you to get creative and gives the thing you’re working on a sort of living character. It gets fucked up through the process, like a kid becoming a person. It’s more country than the last one, it’s more pop punk, it’s more experimental, it’s more of everything. I'm just having fun with my friends. I couldn’t have any favorite songs, but there’s a song that Maddy (banjo, vocals) wrote on it, which is just so special to me and her voice is so unique and devastating."