The only kinds of people that Escondido's Tyler James and Jessica Maros write about are those who throw themselves completely and fully into another person. They find themselves splashing and thrashing around in the deep end of that person and they're rarely able to grip anything close to a shoreline. They've plunged into uncharted waters and they've got no choice but to develop a knack for floating, for staying as buoyant as they can, until helps arrives or they just figure these depths out.
Those in Escondido songs never test the waters. They commit from the very beginning and they discover all of the rough stuff in a hurry. They run through all of the good stuff too, and it's what keeps them around, but they're aware that the dark secrets and the less than ideal characteristics cannot be shaved away from the man or woman of desire. They will be there always and they will be pushy. These songs are dusty pulsations of relationships that have been heavily invested in. They aren't casual, but rather ridiculously intimate affairs that are difficult as hell to ever clean from one's life. They can't be laundered. They can hardly be fixed if they're broken. These are the relationships that do us over.
They take control of people and they spit them out when they're through with them. The people involved are never in control of who they're going to turn out. They're just strung along until the union has expired, as randomly as it began. These are stories where the lonely, sad goodbye is the norm, but where the lived in days still hold such promise that the end is delayed over and over again, with fingers crossed for a revival, for something reverting back to those good old days. Maros sings, "Some hearts are just made for locking," and this all feels right, at least for a while, until she amends the thought, offering, "Loved you until the truth came knocking." Even when this occurs, the love felt doesn't just go away. There are bonds that last, against all odds and reason and these dark roasted slices of Nashville-meets-Laurel Canyon folk are all kinds of proof.