St.Arnaud: “Big Winner” Single Review
Unlike most quarantine songs drugged up with happy-serum to the veins, “Big Winner” is a genuine, disillusioned tune that mirrors the repetition of days during the pandemic and muses over feeling of isolation that we have all experienced over the past two years.
I sit curled in a ball on my dorm room armchair, surrounded by notebooks for German, graphic design, video ideas, and unfinished article skeletons. I turn on my wireless headphones and begin to pace from the cluttered kitchen sink overflowing with dishes to the common room littered with pillows and homework books and used masks to the bedroom where clothes lay scattered across the floor and unpacked possessions are stuffed under the thin mattress.
It’s a blue, blue, blue Monday goes on so long
Ain’t it a sad, sad to see – sad way to see your life go on?
And the five-year plan – oh it is hit again without you
Letting the sun shine, is that so wrong?
Quarantine has all hit us in different ways, but I don’t think there’s a single person that can say it’s been at all easy. 2021 hit me harder than I ever believed it could, and now I look around where I am, surrounded by fields of snow-covered farmland, missing the California sun, wondering what the heck has happened with my life in the past 5 months.
I retreated back to my old music habits in the midst of everything, latching on to two different artists this year I’ve been playing on repeat: an old boy band, Tally Hall, and a newer, lo-fi pop artist, St.Arnaud. The beauty of St.Arnaud lies hidden behind his pleasing sha-la-las, bum-bum-bums, and doo-doo-doots; his lyrics hold so much meaning behind the bouncing instrumentals that brighten the mood with the horns and keep you dancing with the onomatopoeia.
According to Ian’s Instagram, “Big Winner” was “conceived long before the dreaded C***D-**, this one pokes at isolation, social anxieties, and remaining the protagonist of your own daydreams.” Even the album artwork reflects these images – an alien in the shower – drowning our feelings in the midst of our shower thoughts, feeling like a stranger in the new skin that we have grown in the past 2 years.
The instrumentals of “Big Winner” linger on the same chord while the lyrics repeat like a faulty record groove, perfectly capturing the image that life isn’t moving on, but rather staying in the same place. Days are bleeding together, almost repeating themselves as we pace the house, looking for the motivation to work but not quite finding it – maybe some of us running on autopilot. You’ll notice that the horns are kept off until the “sha-la-las” of the bridge, leaving the tone of the verses and chorus to be a more drunkenly feel-good melancholy trip.
Something about “Big Winner” keeps bringing up schemas of Twenty-One Pilots minus all of the complaints I’ve written about them in past reviews. The song is strangely upbeat for a song about isolation, and something about the echos of “Everybody wants to be the big winner” make it even more reminiscent of more mainstream pop singles released in the pandemic. What makes “Big Winner” so different compared to the others, however, is the nature of the energy in its delivery. It is not a happy-drug syringe stuck through the veins and overdosed with the dated references of nonstop Netflix binge nights and Zoom meetings, it is a disillusioned, confused tone driven by loneliness and rich in genuity.
It’s a lot less lo-fi than the sound of The Cost of Living, but it still adopts many of the characteristics that tell you it’s Ian singing. Most obviously, there’s the onomatopoeia that takes up half the song and forces you to sing along. It’s got the jazzy swing of the vocals, the changing pitches as he plays around with the verses, and the structure and blow-outs that we enjoyed from “A Sweet Song” three years earlier. I specifically enjoy the soft rasp that adds to his voice with the ending sha-las, resembling even more closely the sound of a man crying out in the shower where he is free to bathe in his thoughts without judgement.
Another thing I have noticed about St.Arnaud is the way his lyrics tend to reach out through the fourth wall to the person listening. This can be shown most notably (and in a sort of eerie way) in an early single, “Anywhere You Want to Go” where he sings, “I see you mouthing along to the words, every syllable you’re singing.” Equally romantic and slightly unnerving, it gives the audience a sense that he is aware of them and of his appreciation for them. In the second verse of “Big Winner,” he takes a minute to remind us, “If you look around…it’s not just me.” And so as I curl back into my ball in my dorm room with my headphones, my drawing tablet, and my Cost of Living CD, waiting for the next burst of motivation to jump back into writing, I ask you: is it really a shame that we’ve been crying for you, Ian? It’s about time we’ve heard your voice again after so long!
Rating: 4.5/10
