Indie meets Americana band Hooks & The Huckleberries has shared a cover song today, a new spin on the song "Skeleton Key," originally by Banner Pilot.
Working on a new album, Straight On 'Til Morning, the band breaks down why they chose this particular cover:
A sense of displacement comes so naturally to the weird kid raised in the middle of nowhere. Instinctively recoiling from the hypermasculine, flag-worshiping, high school football cult of small-town, Midwestern culture. Forced to forge friendships with a litany of literary characters, spiritually rebellious rock records, and outsiders from all walks of life who refused to even attempt “fitting in.” Surviving in the shadows of fluorescent lights against wood-paneled basement walls, smoke curling from a well-crafted PBR can pipe left smoldering on the second-hand coffee table.
We were already punk before we even knew it had a name.
Great songwriting doesn’t start and stop with the Billboard 100. Hell, nowadays, it doesn’t even make an appearance among those ranks.
Punk has always been relegated to a kind of “juvenile” status in mainstream music culture, often looked down on for its deceptively simple and aggressive approach. Yet, hiding in plain sight amongst the shadows and smoke of all-ages basement shows and dive bars, exist some of rock music’s most important poets. It was in this spirit we chose to reinterpret Banner Pilot’s “Skeleton Key.” Nick Johnson’s lyrics hit as classic as any Kerouac novel or Springsteen song, and it seemed a perfect bridge between the rural punk rock world that raised us and the indie rock/Americana world we grew into.
By taking this brilliantly written punk masterpiece and filtering it through a more country lens, we hope to showcase to listeners, on either side of the aisle, that genre is meaningless, and a good song really just synthesizes down to two simple, yet important ingredients: Three Chords and The Truth.
