“I’m pretty honored to be asked about this. I kind of felt like everything I wanted to say was already in the lyrics but it’s really cool to see people responding to it, and having someone asking about how this song came about.”
“I was working 10 hours a day landscaping, and anyone who has a 50 hour work week knows how physically draining it can be. I was burning the candle at both ends and I suppose it showed because everyone said that to me all the time. I would get up at 7AM, work until 5, shower, drive an hour out to Boston, Taunton, Weymouth, or wherever we were gigging, play a show with the band, drive back for 1 or 2 or 3AM, and then get up at 7 the next day and do it all over again.
I did this for about a year and a half. I think it was around this time that the song started to take form. I was getting into fights with everyone in the band, and the only escape I had from the exhausting physical labor was to make melodies in my mind all day, and since I was doing simple boring repetitive tasks, I would come up with repetitive, catchy little melodies that I thought were fun to keep singing over and over in my head.
I didn’t see it coming, but my boss had to lay me off. I think he knew that my heart was fully in love with music and I couldn’t keep up the schedule so he walked me through all the things I had done wrong that week. I tried my hardest to be good at the job but my heart just wasn’t in it and we both knew that… I felt like crying at that point. He was right about it, all of it, but it hurt to hear. I wanted to make everyone happy and do well on all fronts, but the band was going through rough times, I was performing very sloppily… The muscles in my arms had been so overworked that I could barely play power chords anymore. It was embarrassing, I had let everyone down.
It was a very sad place to be in when I wrote that song, but I think I needed to go there because everyone feels like that sometimes. The song got whittled down to an actual form in the coming months after I had left the world of landscaping and started to do music as a full-time career. The lyrics all kind of poured out one day and I think Alex helped me reign in the lines to keep it concise and catchy and not too meandering. I think after that, Josh and Chris jumped in and jammed on it and we all had a blast flushing it out. It was extremely cathartic to get it out…”
—Dave Anthony
“Wrong” is taken from NEMES’ debut full length release, I Carry Your Heart—in stores now.
