Song I Wish I Wrote: Destroy Boys on “I Want To Be You” by Your Funeral
Destroy Boys released two of my favorite songs of 2021. “Muzzle” is an extremely short, direct, perfect one minute, two second blast of power chords (The music video nearly hits two minutes but there’s 45 seconds of exposition before the song hits). It’s not hardcore. It’s just short.
“Escape” stretches to three minutes and sixteen seconds, covering similar ground as “Muzzle.” Both songs are about the non-glamorous aspects of working life, societal expectation and substance abuse.
When I asked frontperson Alexia Roditis on a song they wish they wrote, they cited a song and a band I’ve never heard. After listening to the song they wish they wrote, there’s a lot of shared DNA in the three songs released 39 years apart.
Recommend If You Like: What’s the song you wish you wrote?
Alexia Roditis: It’s off of a random deathrock compilation my bandmate gave me. There’s a song by this band, Your Funeral, and the song is “I Want To Be You.”
It’s super simple, it’s three chords but it makes me speechless.
I think it’s the sense of wonder. It gives me nostalgia for things I never had and I’ve been trying to pin that feeling down into words for a very long time. It’s like feeling forever in a song. The feeling of when you’re driving somewhere, looking out the window, and thinking about possibilities. Looking at people and thinking about all of the little lives they’re living, the song gives me a sense of wonder.
RIYL: Do you associate nostalgia with wonder?
Roditis: I think so. I connect them because it’s sort of the same feeling of being where you are and being somewhere else. Nostalgia is about daydreaming about the past and wonder is about daydreaming in the future. It’s sort of in-between-worlds feeling.
RIYL: Do you think you would love this song as much as you do if not for the pandemic? I feel like wanderlust has been amped up more than any other time in modern
Roditis: I think I would. It’s also the sort of a song that could be in a movie of a person having fun, living their life. There’s a Pulp song, “Babies” that gives me that same sort of feeling.
Maybe these feelings have been exacerbated, they have been exacerbated by the pandemic, but I’ve always like these songs that make you feel like you’re in a movie.
There’s a bunch of songs that his this niche, like “Babies” by Pulp and “Only a Shadow” by Cleaners From Venus, Television “Carried Away.”
Also, if anyone has songs that sound like this, please send them to me.
Destroy Boys’ 2021 LP, Open Mouth, Open Heart, is available on Hopeless Records. The band plays multiple dates the United Kingdom March 1 through 12, 2022.