“News to Me” hits a lot of aural touchstones in the “best of my favorite acts” catalog that I keep tucked safely in my head, but I’m going to go against my own style and avoid mentioning them because I don’t want to diminish or distill the impact of what Levi Fuller & the Library are doing here.
Looking at “News to Me” – from the forthcoming ep such bad things happen – on the merits of its vocal delivery and lyrical message reveals a songwriter passionate about environmental activism, or at least that’s what the verses will tell you. That bridge and chorus, though: taken separately from the verses (and especially the final chorus, delivered after a blistering bass vamp over which guitars first chime, then crunch, and then chug along with the drums), these words could just as easily refer to the state of American (or any ideologically divided) society. Fuller’s dolorous refrain, “I wish that I could say that this was all a big surprise,” and the admission that we watched as things changed before us and even went so far as to make ourselves deaf and blind to those changes . . . it speaks directly to every person alive today that has any power to change things (and really, isn’t that every one of us to some degree?) and says that we’ve essentially allowed all of this to happen—because we never thought it actually would happen.
“News to Me” isn’t so much a protest song as a contrition song. Laying the blame at our collective feet is heavy-hearted stuff, but the confessions of complicity aren’t the saddest part of the lyrics; it’s the “I wish that I could” (and the implied “but I can’t”) for giving the impression that this activist, resigned to defeat, has all but lost his belief in the power of the people and the concept of “the greater good.”