The impetus behind the writing of Springworks’ song “Joke of the Season” was the feeling of hearing a lot of uniformity in in music, probably popular music, and how a stylistic trend of production method will run through a huge swath of music or really form of art for awhile. In the 2010s too many years meant yet another “garage rock” band that sounded like everything else on Burger Records or a “psych rock” group that wasn’t particularly genuinely psychedelic or really even trippy but just had a little reverb or delay on the guitar and vocals to thicken the tone and give it a little atmosphere. Just prior to that the whole chamber pop thing or indie Americana. If you listened to a radio station touting the indie music format you might very well listen to a half hour of music and not know it was a different band from different decades. The title refers to a joke told too often, or really any trick or rote creative choice or habit repeated to the point of being stale rather than reliable.
So did Springworks succeed in bursting past a popular trend of today or at least burst through an instinct to repeat a successful formula? When the song begins it’s not unlike a good psychedelic pop song with some resonance for psychedelic music of the 60s but around the halfway point the song shifts into a piano driven section with samples for a half minute a so before returning to the musical themes of the beginning of the song. But the chorus of “We are the joke of the season” in the outro gives us a clue as to the conclusions reached in writing the song. It’s like what Thirteenth Century Zen master Dōgen wrote “Before one studies Zen, mountains are mountains and waters are waters; after a first glimpse into the truth of Zen, mountains are no longer mountains and waters are no longer waters; after enlightenment, mountains are once again mountains and waters once again waters.” It seems Springworks in undertaking challenging their own internalized creative complacency that seems to have infected too much of popular music discovered that some principles of songwriting work for a reason bur that in “Joke of the Season” the innovation comes in the structure of the song and the reworking of the placement of lyrics and not getting stuck in stale habits yet not rejecting completely what you do well. Is that indeed the titular realization? A perennial desire to revolutionize your creative aesthetic only to conclude that you can only be you but you can reconnect and reconfigure your methods and mode of expression. And to be fair does Springworks sound like a band in a worn out popular style? No. “Joke of the Season” is effective in the way Springworks has always deconstructed lo-fi psychedelic pop, the band just found a new way to give it a fresh approach. Listen to the song on Spotify and follow the band at the links below.
Queen City Sounds and Art 
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