Should we hand Evan Weiss a full glass of beer, it seems that he might take one look at it, scope out the rim and note how close the surface of the liquid was to it and deduct that this was a glass that should be mourned. If the drink didn't travel right up to the very edge, he would see it as being mostly gone already. It wouldn't be a full glass to him, but one that wasn't worth the bother. It's the extreme take on his general philosophy as the musical outfit Into It. Over It, which he created and fronts. There's a lot of depression walled up in that guy. Some of it seems debilitating and some of it just seems rather normal.
He's badgered by a feeling of dread or a feeling of woesome blues, the kind that people might just be born with. He has a tendency to look at things in the bleakest possible light and that's alright. It makes for great song, but it's not tremendously healthy to walk around with all that inside of you. It must eat at you a great deal, like the road salt chewing at the undercarriage of automobiles during the winter months. It's a plaque that just grinds it out, sticking there until the protective layers are worked down to nothing that can keep you safe, that can insulate you. You lose days that way and you lose plenty of nights that way as well. It gets you recognizing that battered outline of a figure reflecting back from a mirror and it's something that doesn't frighten you at all. You just go with it and finish brushing your teeth.
Weiss is an impressive writer for his ability to get us to the bottoms of the ditches, down where the forgotten litter is, where the road kill gets tossed to an unglamorous burial of the elements, scavengers and decomposition. He gets us to those points where there's a feeling that this is the place where it turns around. In the darkest of his chronicled dark times, they give off the sensation that if shit doesn't start looking up in the morning, it never will. He sings on "Bustin'", "There's a kind of focus/A subtle art to losing sleep/It takes a special kind of person to make decisions fucked as these/But that's just the start/Just a small part/Of what makes us who we are/We make our intentions clear/We choose our words carefully/We don't believe everything we hear/We still have some noise to make."
He sings about words just coming out as drunken slurs and it's right there, in that very moment, when the epiphany comes. It's there when it strikes. They've never been known to forecast themselves and that's what makes they so sought after and believed in. Weiss believes that those bloody things could be coming, any minute, so he keeps his pen going and his eyes open.
**This essay was originally post in October, 2011 while Weiss' latest session heard here was recorded on Valentine's Day 2012 and is extra heartbreaking and raw.