Laura Kerry
Do you remember the first apartment you moved into on your own? This past week, I visited a friend in her new, unfurnished one-bedroom and remembered the very specific feeling of inhabiting my first apartment after college. On the first night, my roommates and I set up camping pads and sleeping bags in the middle of the empty living room, and I woke up before sunrise, cold and freaked out that I had moved to a new city and signed a lease and had an entire apartment to fill. Then the sun started to leak in through the windows and the space started to warm up, and everything became manageable, even exciting.
That is exactly the feeling that Hales Corner’s new single, “Garden View,” captures. The project of Bloomington, Indiana’s Wesley Cook and Caleb Adams, Hales Corner started as the joint album of two musicians who had some “post-college apathy to shake off,” according to their Bandcamp. That apathy is apparent in the beginning of the song, in a subdued mix of a male voice and a guitar that sets the one of indie-folk melancholy (“Got my life packed in broken boxes”). The chorus, though, is the sun shining through the window: “That’s alright,” the voice sings in a rising, doubled-voice melody as percussion, a bright guitar, and a warm synth enter. “A small one-bedroom / But with a garden view.”
“Garden View” serves as the perfect anthem for post-college malaise, a move to a new city, or any other new adventure that presents a bright spot amid the terror. Like the light in the window or the view onto a garden, it’s a sign that good things will come—which, in the case of Hales Corner, means a full-length album out in May (which you can pre-order here).