by Rohan Press (rohanpress@gmail.com)
I guess we all want our lives to be like a song. Verse and verse building to a resolute, resolving chorus. Every step mattering and culminating and becoming something more than itself. Perry Eaton, the Dedham, MA-based singer-songwriter behind the new Americana project Ivy Boy, knows that life doesn’t really work out that way—that threads are left tangled and lost. But he also knows what it means to expect that kind of romance from life—and on “80’s Babies,” the newest single from his forthcoming debut album (out Oct. 24th), he keeps that spark aglow.
“You always thought the chorus / Would sound brighter than the verse you made it through,” he sings on this loping, gently nostalgic tribute to his generation. “You used to have so much goddamn courage: / I think you still do.” Maybe we don’t have it all figured out yet, even after “20 years have come and gone”—maybe we haven’t found that brightness we expected—but Eaton finds meaning simply in these “80s babies still hanging on,” as he puts it at the song’s end, on the heels of a wistful acoustic guitar and harmonica. After all, it’s okay to expect more from life than what it offers. It might be quixotic or credulous—but maybe that’s the way courage really works.