“Birds”
from the album Love Notes/Letter Bombs
2011
iTunes
The Submarines are John Dragonetti (a.k.a. Jack Drag) and Blake Hazard, who met, fell in love, broke up, made up, got married and created a bunch of music along the way. While their (musical) relationship began in the form of collaborations on each other’s — at the time — individual material, the two soon began chronicling the ups and downs of their offstage connection, and the results have been as fiery as the passion that inspired them in the first place. “When you write about relationships, you can’t do it halfway,” Blake said in a press release. “I think you really have to be fearless, and of course it’s never easy.”
With its schizophrenic chorus of “I want to take you home tonight / hey, what if everything’s all right” set to a disturbingly cheerful background of upbeat guitar (and tweety birds, of all sound effects), “Birds” is the most random and off-beat of love songs, term used extremely loosely. “I imagined a couple in a rambling old broken-down mansion, like something from a Wes Anderson movie, pushing flower pots off the balcony onto each other, tying a love note around a brick and throwing it through a window,” Blake said in a press statement of the album title’s inspiration.