Edmonton indie pop group, Baby Jey, are melding genres in pursuit of getting listeners dancing with “Swing Like This,” a pedal steel guitar inflected anti-capitalist dance floor anthem.
“‘Swing Like This’ was written in the green room of The Aviary, the same venue where we are having our vinyl release show later this year (October 27th). I wrote the lyrics as a note in my phone backstage after having a conversation with our steel guitarist,” explains bandleader Jeremy Witten.
“Partly, I was reflecting that our previous album Someday Cowboy had a lot of love and breakup songs and I wanted to do a more straight up dance song. We were also talking about how the word ‘swing’ comes up in a lot of different genres of music, like how New Jack Swing is a subgenre of R&B and Western Swing is a subgenre of country music. The word ‘swing’ isn’t confined to one genre of music–on the dance floor, to ‘swing’ simply means to move with an easy flowing but confident rhythm.
‘Swing Like This’ features the Hammond organ tone of a Yamaha DX7 keyboard, which was popular in a lot of 90s dance music and R&B, but it also features a pedal steel guitar solo, which you’d normally find in country music.
So [this song] symbolizes the broad range of musical genres that have inspired us as a band. It’s a celebration of that on a dance floor.”
Baby Jey’s sophomore album, Crop Circles, is set for release in full on November 24th. It incorporates their members’ prairie upbringing throughout a fluid blend of ballads, indie pop, and dance forward songs which expand in a cosmic direction.
