The Hotel Year’s new LP, …It Never Goes Out, is officially out via Mightier Than Sword Records. The band was kind enough to write up a Track-By-Track guide behind each of the songs on the record for PropertyOfZack. Read up and check out the record!

Our Lives Would Make A Sad, Boring Movie:
So, this song sort of traces the life path that middle-class kids have sort of layed out for them from birth. The “school, work, retire, die” path that makes us feel more like robots than living beings. Its a common theme Worcester’s hardcore scene to talk about the 9-to-5 and the college debt trap, and I was pretty influenced by that. If you listen real closely, we rip off Nirvana.
 
Vacancy:
This was actually the last song we wrote before recording the album, and it was pretty much thrown together in an hour or two. I actually was looking at a Kevin Devine guitar tab that was horribly wrong but I liked the chords sorta and went from there. Lyrically this song is putting a strong emphasis on the fact that at some point in everybody’s lives they need to stop being a kid and grow up. And everybody knows that sucks. Yeah…

Lonely Hearts Club:
Before this song was fully written, we’d play it live and make up the lyrics as we went. Louis Armstrong style. The lyrics are about realizing where you are… and deciding you want to get the fuck out.

An Ode to the Nite Ratz Club:
So, Chris and I and our friends Matt and RJ used to stay over Matt’s and throw rocks at the abandoned polymers (fancy name for little plastic balls) factory behind his house. Then we got the guts to actually jump the fence and go in it one night and it was awesome. It’s seriously the most simple yet powerful time that happened in my life. It’s weird and dumb sounding, but I feel like we were kids that were given everything, and yet none of it felt like it belonged to us, like there was no place that was ours. Then we found this big, lonely, carcinogen-filled building and decided to call it our own. Moral of the story: when you are too young or poor to ‘own’ anything, property sucks.
 
Weathered:
This is the only song that we wrote in the studio. I had written the bare bones of it beforehand, and the lyrics had kind of came out naturally. It was weird, because the feel of it was dead on, but when people ask me to explain it I never know what to say. It’s essentially about the ridiculously unfair period where the people you have spent all of your life becoming close with are taken from you. If you’ve ever seen Stand By Me, its like that. I cry like a baby at that movie.

I’m Gone:
So we took like this break type deal where we didn’t practice much or play shows… then we didn’t do that anymore. And this was the first song we came up with when we started frequently playing again. This song is basically about how music has helped me maintain composure and control through a lot of bullshit. Take it how you will, I honestly don’t think its my position to tell you what this song means.
 
Holiday:
The most self-explanitory song ever.  Fuck work.  Fuck the american dream. Fuck the rich. Fuck money. Fuck giving in. Fuck people fucking people over. Fuck doing anything that is not making you happy. Destroy what destroys you.
 
Still-Water Spectacle:
So living in the suburbs, you see all these nice houses with clean cut lawns, and everyone waves to one another and I feel like I’m living a Reaganite utopia. However, it seems that through talking with my friends, I’ve learned a lot of the families I live around are pretty fucked up. I feel that same sort of idea is been something all of us middle-class kids have been conditioned with. It’s like, no matter how damaged people are, they refuse to show it, they just dress up nice and keep a smile on, learned to become stone hearted, and never feel again. It’s depressing.
 
Title-Track:
This is the “Watch Me Rise” track.