Daily Yinz – Meeting of Important People – Horse Opera

The group returns with MOIPsgiving, its first full-length album since 2016.

You might picture a song called “Horse Opera” as a bombastic affair filled with whinnying tenors and stirring string arrangements, perhaps an existentially tragic aria about an injured Kentucky Derby winner awaiting his journey to the glue factory. Meeting of Important People’s “Horse Opera” is nothing of the sort, mostly. The song, a leisurely porch swing rocker featuring unhurried acoustic strums and drum fills that fit like loose jeans, drifts by plaintively, and Josh Verbanets’ lilting melodies elicit the same poignant feeling that you get from looking at a yellowed yearbook page or the last sunset of a vacation. There are no glue factories to mention here, but the lyrics are existential nonetheless; one of Verbanets’ key refrains is the unresolved observation that, “You can try and try and try to fill your days,” which reminds me of what Camus concluded in The Myth of Sisyphus, that “The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.” Sometimes the effort spent searching for a worthwhile way to leach the day’s excess hours is itself the worthwhile thing. That thought strikes me the same way “Horse Opera” does: ambivalently, melancholically, warmly.

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Artwork by Eileen Yoest Hadden and Andre Costello