Showing mutual adoration, Say Anything and mewithoutYou have covered each other’s material to celebrate their joint tour. Say Anything have taken on mewithoutYou’s ‘Torches Together’, choosing to alter the title to ‘Torches Apart’, while mewithoutYou have approached ‘Cemetery’ with a few minor changes. The result, adding snippets of ‘Baby Girl, I’m A Blur’ has become ‘Cleo’s Ferry Cemetery’.
“This was the first song I ever heard or fell in love with recorded by my friends in mewithoutYou,” says Say Anything’s Max Bemis of their choice. “Getting to know Aaron, along with my admiration for his lyrics and the way he lives his life growing over the years, has made him a sort of philosophical idol of mine. However, I often see myself as too flawed and messed up to measure up (Aaron, always humble, wouldn’t agree.) I altered the song to imprint my tendency towards cynicism and self destruction as a comment on how beautiful and inspiring the original is. Just call it the “Bum Out Remix”.”
MewithoutYou’s Aaron Weiss said the following: “The original version of Cemetery embodies what I love about Say Anything: vividly corporal, emotionally confrontational, self-deprecating, brutally honest, cynical/dark while weirdly hopeful, etc. He sings way better than I can, so why bother covering his song outright?, better to do something our own, even if it’s inferior, at least it’s not only inferior. Cobbling together lines of Max’s, lines of mine, a Morrissey lyric, it’s harder to know who gets credit if it turns out well, who’s to blame if it fails, probably accounting for the somewhat-less-anxiety-ridden-than-usual song production process. All this plus we can recommend a visit to Cleo’s Ferry Museum in Melba, Idaho—a partial cure-place, I think, for what ails “people” like me and Max.”