Hailing from Lexington, Kentucky Big Fresh returns 10 August with a new EP, titled Sweeps (via Desperate Spirits). Drawing on influences that range from legendary producer/arranger David Axelrod to XTC, this 10-piece outfit grapples with issues of personal identity and the ache and ennui of daily life. One can hear that in the outfit’s latest offering, “The Voices”, a track buoyed by a danceable track that summons memories of Todd Rundgren’s marriages between booty shaking rhythms and embittered observations about the soul-draining nature of conformity and well-manicured laws and lawns that swallow us as were swallowed by sinister sprawl of suburbia and suburban psychology.
Big Fresh’s John Ferguson says, “The song was written to acknowledge the onslaught of self-doubt messaging that plagues us all. The idea that we’ll never be enough. That we are unfit to do what we do. That we are somehow not worthy of participating in something because we are not authentic enough. I wanted the song to be an anthem to fight those voices off with the universal message that we’re all headed in one direction: Toward death. Since we all have the same destination, we are all equally worthy of being part of the whole.”
He adds that he and the others found inspiration from Andrew Gold’s “Lonely Boy”, Billy Joel’s “Sleeping with the Television On”, Joe Jackson’s “I’m the Man” as well as the Police and other late ’70s piano-based singer-songwriters. Joining Big Fresh on this journey were Ken Stringfellow of the Posies on backing vocals and the Silver Masked Tenor who added lead vocals.