"people might take a smile in the night all wrong..."
"Smile In The Night" by Meanlife, the rich art pop / art rock project of Toronto based Jackson Fishauf with the strident downbeats, acoustic guitar lines, garden rock organs, upright piano and jangly percussion feels somehow like something from a 60's Italian Western. Fishauf's anti-pop vocal aesthetic is enticing. He chews the scenery a bit and when the sort of glam rock lead guitar lines come in it is like the Devil's Carnival has come to town. I love this. There is a sense of baroque pop, far flung art rock, broken blues and post rock. In the end, it feels like a divergent amalgam of Modest Mouse, Man Man, Queen and Nilsson. Damn.
The song asks questions about appearances, about paranoia at times when victims fear the stranger. Despite our fear of the other, we as a society will, most likely (by far), be assaulted, raped and murdered by people we know, by intimate partners, acquaintances or relatives.
[The song's lyrics narrate the conflicted inner monologue of a night walker who assesses the tense state of affairs in which ‘people might take a smile in the night all wrong’ while lamenting that ‘really I wouldn’t hurt a fly’.]
The accompanying Official Video heightens the tension, the danger and turns the song into a psychedelic nightmare or slasher flick on the wet streets of Toronto.
-Robb Donker Curtius
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Meanlife is the songwriting alias of Toronto Meanpop musician Jackson Fishauf. Crafting catchy mantra-like songs based around idiosyncratic, socially relevant songwriting since 2019, Meanlife's unique homemade sound wrestles conflicting influences - 60's pop and 90's rock, country melodies & indie guitar music, Neil Young & Weezer - to create a genre described as Meanpop. Birthed with debut mini-album 'Bad Vibes in The Womb', the Meanpop sound was honed on 2020 covers EP 'Meanpop' and reveals its newest form in 2021 with a run of singles including 'WTF' and 'Delete Me'.
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