The Evangenitals to preview first single from upcoming Moby Dick; or, The Album
Moby Dick: or, The Album, the band’s debut album with Fluff & Gravy Records, will be released on March 18, 2014. It is a musical swirl of immaculately crafted songs, each interpreting an aspect of Melville’s masterpiece with an approach that tacks between intricate arrangement and the deceptively simple country-inflected tunes for which the band is best known. The first single, Quee Queg unfolds slowly, over the better part of 8 minutes, drawing the listener in and washing over them with it’s swirling strings and harmonies.
For Juli Crockett, the band’s co-founder and primary lyricist, this was the track that started it all. “Quee Queg was the first Moby Dick song I ever wrote. It’s also the last track on the record: The Alpha and the Omega! It’s the first song that we ever played as The Evangenitals. The song has always had a kind of magic about it… it quiets noisy rooms, takes people on a journey. There’s something transcendent about it; it exists in another space and time.”
Staged as a love story between Ishmael and Quee Queg, this is a track filled with yearning, forbidden love, and energy of the unattainable.
Says Feldman, “I originally envisioned the concept with an ex-boyfriend (Gordon Torncello) in New York circa 1995. It was before I’d ever actually read the book, and it led me on a decades long fascination with the tale. I mean, you don’t HAVE to have read Moby Dick to have an experience/idea ABOUT Moby Dick. Epic works are accessible: we all can relate to Ahab, the White Whale, in some way because we all know about obsession, pursuit, mystery, and the unknown. Gordon was reading the book, and he’d tell me these crazy stories that I began to put together in my own head. That may be what gives Quee Queg it’s dream-like quality, because it’s made up of these fragments and images passed down through storytelling. Gordon had written the “do you want me” line randomly, and I heard him singing that and decided it should be a love story about Ishmael and Quee Queg. The rest is history”.
