Sweetheart. Honey. Miss. Darling.
Every woman knows the feeling of being called those names condescendingly by a man who sees her only as an object of attraction, not as a human being.
For a band like Evil Felipe, made up of four young women in their late teens and early twenties, the nicknames are inescapable even backstage at shows, and that’s what drove them to take one back on their newest track, “Darling,” released Feb. 14.
“Every time I’ve been called ‘darling’ in my life, it has never been good,” singer-guitarist Emma Bain said. “Every situation where everyone has called me ‘darling,’ it has been looking down on me and underestimating what I can do, and I took all of those experiences and pulled them together.”
The song, in three-quarter time, is a throwback to the 2000s rock that provided an outlet for so many girls and young women.
“Darling, you’re fragile, you’re paper-thin/Stuck in a world that won’t let you in/You know you try to do this alone, but the promise of more struck through to your bones,” Bain sings. “’Darling, you’re making a mess out of things’/That’s what they say when they don’t want you to sing.”
Though the pet names, and the sexist attitude they represent, are a problem all over, “Darling” was particularly inspired by the band members’ experiences growing up in music. Evil Felipe began as a childhood project, so for the first several years of the band’s existence, its oldest members were teenage girls, a chronically underestimated demographic.
“Being an all-girl band in this industry is hard sometimes,” Bain said. “I also work in the music industry and see it day-to-day. There have been shows where people assume I don’t know what I’m doing and will talk to someone else instead of me because I’m a girl, and it’s always very strange to see.”
Bain and guitarist Ella Staltare said the song has been in the works for more than a year, and audiences at their live shows have been hearing and liking it for quite some time now. According to Staltare, though her lead guitar parts on the song evolved over that time, the lyrics have always been the same.
“Darling, you’re not really chained to the wall ‘cause the chains that they hold weren’t there at all/Now you can see what they all try to hide/Now you can go and leave this behind,” Bain sings. “Darling, you’re cold, alone, and you’re tired/But they won’t break you down ‘til they put out your fire/You’ll take back your throne and we’ll be alright/But they won’t ever change, so we’ll put up a fight.”
Bassist Abby Rickert said she particularly likes the “dark carnival” vibe of the song, inspired by some of the band’s stage outfits, though their use of that sound is more like “a Dungeons & Dragons one-shot” and less of an indication of what else they’re working on.
Right now, she said, the band is “dissecting” a batch of unreleased songs and reworking them so they will “represent where we are now.”
“We have been really into some punk and hardcore recently, so going forward, we’re going to try and play into that more,” Rickert said. “More vocal fry, heavier music, something that can express some of the rage that we’re feeling.”
“Darling” is available on music streaming services and Evil Felipe’s Bandcamp page.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.worcestermag.com ’
