Brian Merrill gives us the highs and lows as he addresses personal failures and depression. Then comes the anxiety with spiels and tributes to lost love. As peculiar as it may sound, there is understanding and comfort to his music that will leave you stuck in the couch. “Bliss Bunnies” was recorded in the living room of a townhouse in Bed-Stuy one summer ago, the track mainly focuses on “being on the edge and being left behind, bubbling tension and momentary peace, the stomached anxiety understood uniquely by those alive in 2017,” says Merrill.
Brian Merrill speaks about the musical and visual inspiration for the track “Bliss Bunnies”,
“Bliss bunnies is this term for flighty spiritualists I grew up around in southern California – people hilariously chasing joy but don’t really wanna put in any work. Or get like all “blissed out” from meditating and say they can’t do anything work-wise after. That idea was sorta the lens for talking about these high and low experiences, and near death experiences in the verses. I wrote this in the middle of a pretty heavy break up, and in those moments I feel like we tend to look back and re-create something in our head that likens the joy of that love to other moments we’ve experienced. Like, this person and I had experienced all this fleeting joy but had failed to keep it.”
“The visual inspiration – two moments in my head I was reflecting on when writing – an out of body experience i had in a hotel in Seattle 9 years ago (on a one-night layover to Hawaii), and another time my friend paul pulled me out of the street when a speeding SUV swerved without headlights by the beach in our hometown and missed me by about 6 inches.”
“As for the music video, I was introduced to Clare Zhou through a photo – a photo she captured of a child snorkeling (now turned upside down to match her original concept)—by my manager Ben Wilkes who was discussing album art with me. It felt eerily spiritual, like some afterlife moment. Now not only the cover art to bliss bunnies but the music video from the same shoot. The short film was Clare’s response to intense emotional and political anxiety at the end of 2016—which she shot shortly after she moved to Oahu. Reflecting on a simpler time, she was drawn to the idea of a child “stuck on the surface”, learning to dive.”
The track “Bliss Bunnies” is like walking a tightrope lined with sentimentalism, we need to balance out and get a feel for the world and mind of Brian Merrill. We can almost taste the emotions being heard, as the bold guitar strums over the consuming and emphatic vocals.
LYRICS
I was in a hotel
floating above my cells
I was waiting for you
but you weren’t in the blue
bliss bunnies parading the lawn
under the sun
hours waiting alone for you
but you were aloof
I walked the line on the road
with Paul on the coast
through the night fog, you swerved
almost gave up the ghost
some days I wanna break everything
I’ve ever touched
I can’t escape if fire wakes
I gush
