The chorus on Milk St.’s new single “Just So” goes “Why are you so sad all the time,” and Jonah Wakefield wrote it to mock himself.
“While dealing with my family splitting up and my father struggling mentally, I dissociated and kept writing, but all that came out was ‘I feel sad,'” the Bangor, Maine frontman says. The new song sits inside that helplessness without dressing it up. Lazy, slack, slightly frenzied at the edges. The chorus repeats like a mantra you’ve stopped hearing yourself say. Emo shadow underneath, slacker-indie on the surface, all of it sounding natural rather than worked over.
Wakefield treats writing as a pressure valve more than a craft. “Whenever I would dissociate, writing and exploring whatever was blasting through my mind and just letting it flow onto the page, became almost a grounding exercise,” he says.
“A lot of times I would look back the next day or even week at what I wrote and I would be like ‘oh thats what I was going through at that time.’ It seriously is like therapy.”
During the period the song comes from, his siblings had been separated from his father, and Wakefield was the one trying to keep the rest steady. “I felt sort of like the tether responsible for keeping everyone sane and happy. I think feeling the need to be strong for other people in times of extreme stress maybe leads to the need for those emotions to come out somehow, and they sort of spilled out onto the paper as a sort of pressure valve.”
He writes about all of it in past tense now. “Looking back, I feel super fortunate I had that outlet, and it’s crazy to see how far all of those situations, as well as how far all of those people involved, have come (Including myself). That might’ve been a super hard and difficult time period, but reflecting now, I’m incredibly proud of everyone for overcoming everything and I feel like that’s really what this song, and subsequent record, is inevitably about.”
“Just So” is the first song to surface from Milk St.’s 2024 sessions with engineer Cade Earick, who co-produced the track with the band. Alex Farrar mixed it. Justin Perkins mastered at Mystery Room Mastering. Wakefield is on guitar and vocals, Harry Burns on drums, backing vocals and lead guitar, Gabe Chambers on bass, with Jordan Kernan adding backing vocals. The arrangement keeps the bleak lyrics riding a hooky, casual pulse, the chorus looping until the weight starts to settle.
The video, is an absurdist western odyssey. Fellow Mainer Matthew Meunier directed, with Sophia Kotowski on production design, Wilson Weirich working as gaffer and camera op, and Trent Wayne shooting as director of photography.
Milk St. last appeared on IDIOTEQ in November 2024 with “Floral/Slide Off”, a coast-to-coast split with Seattle post-emo trio Sinking Season that sent both bands on a thirteen-date co-headlining run around the Great Lakes. “Just So” is a looser, hookier turn from there, leaning indie where the split cut leaned shoegaze.
The band’s April 25th hometown show at Wilson Center in Orono with Gunshot Glitter has wrapped, and they’re set to support folk punk band Walter Mitty & His Makeshift Orchestra at Radio Bean in Burlington, Vermont, on May 14th. More announcements are due soon.
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