For Taking Meds‘ new album Dial M For Meds, vocalist/guitarist Skylar Sarkis wanted the band to focus musically on their streamlined, accessible side, but his lyricism i something that’s much deeper than you might expect from the simplicity of the hooks. We’ve got a review of the album in Notable Releases, and Skylar has also given us a track-by-track breakdown of the whole thing. Read on for what he had to say and stream the new LP…
“MEMORY LANE”
This was the last song we wrote that made it to the record. [Guitarist] Ben [Kotin] sent me the music about a month before we went into the studio. I came up with the chorus first and sung it for a few days, and then eventually was able to build the rest of the vocals around it.
We felt like it was important to keep things more structured, simple, and catchy on this record. That can be hard to do without sacrificing lyrical content, but it was a good exercise. Lyrics don’t have to be complex; oftentimes they shouldn’t be. I just try to adhere to the rule of “show, don’t tell.” I’m not telling you anything on this song, I’m showing you what I’m talking about.
A lot of current, well-loved bands in our genre don’t adhere to this rule. Usually they will either tell you exactly what they want to say or rely on cliches to show you. Most people are bad lyricists, and most listeners don’t care because something catchy and relatable is all they need to latch onto a song. That’s fine, but it often makes for a very boring listen. Images and symbols are distinct, whereas cliches and plainly-stated human feelings already belong to our collective consciousness.
“Memory Lane” is about a single idea: I romanticize the past. Nothing new there. But the song is meant to show you exactly how I do it.
I promise I’m not going to continue being self-righteous, I just want to stress the importance of the words on this record and warn you that I’m going to continue talking about them for another nine songs. If you don’t think they are important, there are probably 100 shoegaze bands started every year in America so you should check one of those out.
“OUTSIDE”
This is another Ben song (the bulk of the music on this record comes from his demos). I can’t remember exactly where in the timeline this one came around, but I remember it was very easy to write to. I don’t think I had these lyrics in advance–I wrote them along with the song.
I imagine it’s pretty clear that this song is about existing in our particular world of people who are pursuing, for lack of a better term, full-time bands. It’s the only world I know, but I’m sure these sentiments exist across all genres, mediums, and beyond. Friendships are conditional and people are fake, corny, and out for number one. None of that stops me from being attracted to it and wanting to exist in it. It can just be very soul-deadening sometimes.
“AFTERTASTE”
I feel like Ben wrote this one around the time he wrote “Outside.” Another song that was filled with hooks even before I wrote the vocals. I particularly like the pre-chorus.
This song is about hypothetically achieving whatever success I hope to achieve in my life as an artist and realizing that it didn’t make me happy. The things we want may drive us, but they don’t fill us. If you recover from a serious addiction, like drugs or gambling, or even sex, that concept can be pretty easy to see once you’ve cleared your head. The thing is, it doesn’t go away. It mutates and finds different forms. When you are in the midst of experiencing it, it always feels incomprehensible.
“LIFE SUPPORT”
This is the only song that came from one of my demos. I don’t know if I sat down to write an homage to the Gin Blossoms, but that’s more or less what I feel like we got, and I’m very happy with that. That music reminds me of being a kid and makes me feel a certain peacefulness.
Since the song is fun, I wanted the lyrics to be fun too. Of course, it wouldn’t be a Taking Meds song if it wasn’t about dread, so we have a fun song about dread. In all seriousness, I think I just played around with different feelings of hopelessness (that I think might especially apply to artists and musicians) and tried to talk about them with acceptance. Accepting but sarcastic.
“LONG TOOTH”
I remember the summer of 2022 I called Ben and we talked about the demos we had and how we felt about them. I told him I really didn’t want things to get any “weirder” musically, in fact I thought we should be pushing to be even more palatable than we were on Terrible News From Wonderful Men. A lot of the demos we had at the time had a lot of disjointed, atonal, and mathy parts. I think sending me this song was his response to that phone call, and it’s one of my favorites on the record.
The lyrics sort of continue with the theme of what it feels like to be pursuing this lifestyle (I hesitate to call it a career) into your 30s. It’s hard to avoid feeling shameful, jaded, and disillusioned. I’m sure even more successful artists feel this way. You see life go on around you and you can only relate to people in this specific corner of the world. I am quick to be prideful about my life that is unbeholden to any schedule and insulated from normies, but a lot of that is bullshit. I spend a lot of time feeling anxious and lonely.
“SOMETHING HIGHER”
I feel like this song came about around the same time as “Aftertaste” and it definitely has a similar thematic starting point, as far as the lyrics go. There’s a feeling that you’re chasing something and you don’t quite know how to describe it, but you can tell that it’s a solution and you want it. I used to feel that way when I was a kid and I had first started partying and driving around with my friends and stealing shit. I never wanted the night to end because that meant I had to give up the chase. It’s obviously a cliche, but I started to feel that yearning in every other area of my life. For a while I felt it in school, and then when I turned all my attention to music, I felt it there. I’ve since learned that that “solution” is a myth and letting it drive you can be toxic, but I still take some comfort in feeling it every once in a while.
“WADING OUT”
This is one of the tracks we decided to use from before my aforementioned phone call with Ben. It’s in what we call our “Meds tuning” and it definitely has some of the older Meds flavor to it. That being said, I’m really happy with how it fits on the album and I think it came out great.
There are a lot of lyrical themes in this song that are repeated from earlier in the record. What it comes down to is, myself (and many of my friends) choose to live in a way that prioritizes music over everything else. Unfortunately, my default setting when living that way is to oscillate between listlessness and nagging anxiety, giving no acknowledgement to any progress that’s been made and hyperfocusing on failures. I don’t know if that’s because I’m a negative person or because the lifestyle runs so counter to the stability of the human brain, but either way, it’s not a very good default setting. It’s pretty hard to change it, but it’s pretty easy to write about it.
“THE OTHER END”
This is another Ben song from “before the phone call.” In fairness, we did a lot of work to make this one blend better. We ended up changing entire chord progressions after the song structure was laid out and vocals were already written.
I have heard people in recovery groups say that they have a “problem with reality.” I think that idea applies in these lyrics. Fantastical thinking is important for all kids, and as we get older, some people hold onto it more than others, use it in different ways, etc. I think many young adults don’t feel pressed to delineate between fantasy and reality when they are supposed to start doing that, and then a lot of potential for creation and growth in their 20s turns into “I’ll figure it out.” I think a lot of this song is informed by that.
“KINDNESS”
Yet another Ben song from “before the phone call,” and the last one to make the cut. Ben and I actually wanted to cut this from the album because it is a clear outlier, but James and Noah insisted that we keep it and I’m glad we did. It’s definitely the weirdest song on the record, but I still think it feels at home in the sequence. It also features vocals from our friend Jess Hall of Massachusetts band Oldsoul.
I only very recently fell into a huge Stone Roses phase, so this parallel wasn’t intentional at all, but I feel like this is my much less graceful recreation of “I Wanna Be Adored.” This is what the day-to-day looks like when you just want to be adored. Anyone who has any degree of narcissism in their personality has felt and thought all these things and I think everyone has had days where they walked around treating people this way. Or maybe there are some really good Catholics out there who haven’t. But I certainly have.
“SEE THE CLOWNS”
This one came from a later Ben demo, I think right before he sent me “Memory Lane.” I love this song. I called it “the Smashing Pumpkins song” for the longest time, but I never got a verbal agreement from anybody on that so I think I might have been off base. Either way, it rocks. I am typically against songs that are over five minutes, but this one got the pass.
Built to Spill has a song called “You Were Right” on Keep It Like a Secret that just plays with famous lines from classic rock songs the entire time and manages to evoke feelings that are very different than the ones in the songs they’re borrowing from. I’ve always thought that was fucking rad. This is my attempt to do the same thing.
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Taking Meds also have upcoming tour dates, including Brooklyn and Boston shows with Smoking Popes this weekend. The Brooklyn date is also with Teenage Halloween. All dates:
Taking Meds — 2023 Tour Dates
09/02 Brooklyn, NY @ Meadows *
09/03 Boston, MA @ Brighton Music Hall *
09/05 Ottawa, ON @ New Sodom +
09/06 Montreal, QC @ Casa del Popolo
09/07 Rochester, NY @ Bug Jar ^
09/08 Cleveland, OH @ Mahall’s ^
09/09 Chicago, IL @ Beat Kitchen ^
09/10 Detroit, MI @ Lager House ^
09/24 Birmingham, AL @ Furnace Fest
10/27 Gainesville, FL @ The Fest
* w/ Smoking Popes
^ w/ Born Without Bones
+ w/ Spite House