Brand New – “Lit Me Up”

“Lit Me Up” is a simmering brooder; this moody slow-burn whose pinnacle isn’t a guitar solo or chorus, but rather a creepy, electronically distorted “when I grow up, I want to be a heretic.” The song is hauntingly prophetic, as Lacey unwittingly predicts his demise: “Lit me up and I burn from the inside out / Yeah, I burn like a witch in a Puritan town” and then ultimately concludes that “it was a good dream.” Many of the #metoo movement’s detractors referred to it as a witch hunt, so the Salem witch trial depiction, in retrospect, is uncanny and downright chilling. Then, the song ends with an equally spine-tingling reversed audio passage: “If so…you will be dead tonight”. This is one of the only Brand New songs that doesn’t “go anywhere” but is better because of it. One can almost hear the crackling of wood and imagine the flicker of flames dancing against the silhouette of an autumn night sky. Absolutely haunting stuff.

Read more from this decade at my homepage for Sowing’s Songs of the Decade.

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5JjmQsvmmmOBFnUjP7FLu4