It took a pretty early morning drive from Los Angeles for Stacy King and her MuteMath travel mates to get to San Francisco for their Daytrotter tapings a month or so ago. Early into that drive, someone took a photo of her looking sleepily, but mostly dreamily, out of the vehicle's side window. She looked beautiful, tired and not at all unlike the way the characters in her songs tend to sound when she sings about them. She brings them to life, even when they'd rather be nestled into a cavernous cave of blankets and sheets, surrounded by pillows and darkness, nursing themselves through whatever they need to get through. Most of the time, in Sucre songs (a project that King does with her husband, MuteMath drummer Darren King) what everyone needs to get through are the riddles that keep tumbling their ways. There's a lot of white noise and it makes things foggy and indiscernible. It makes the right way to turn harder to figure out. She sings about things and people and words/meanings getting "buried in snow" and about "calling up the black hole." Either way that you look at it, there's enough to mull on. There's enough stuff festering and flitting about that you're lucky if you'll ever get out of any of it with your wits intact.
"Endless Sleep" is a song that addresses some of these pieces of confusion, or is it overload? They are the complexities and the random bits of kindness and sorrow that hold the day together, that make it something of a bear - sometimes cuddly and other times hungry and on a tear. King sings about wanting to just stay in her room - a bunker in this case - to wait it out, to fortify her tenderness. It's then that she delivers a pretty little kicker and that is a realization that even though she wants to kiss it all away, it's in that moment that there is some reluctance. It's at that point where the permanence of such a decision kicks in, or where some little touch makes you feel loved more than you've ever felt loved. It's then when the hesitations kick in and there's a waffling. It's then, as she sings, that, "Life never seemed so elegant and trite." King packs so much longing and gorgeous sadness into Sucre songs that they stun you, right in your tracks. You find yourself considering whether you can get away as well, if only because you feel that you need it just as much. The good thing is that we all know some little thing is gonna come along to change all that.