Put Tony Meade's Upcoming Single on Your Radar

Tony Meade looked to the past and bands such as the Beatles when composing his single “A Walk in the Sun,” which drops on Sunday, March 20. The tune itself, however, is all about the future.

“Something like ‘Here Comes the Sun' would definitely be a theme,” Meade says. “That’s my favorite Beatles song anyway. I’m a big [George] Harrison fan. But also ‘All You Need Is Love,’ with the horns.”

Meade, who records with two other Denver musicians on guitars and keys, also uses a bass player in Maryland and a drummer in Rome, making for a sort of virtual international band. For “A Walk in the Sun,” he found an Australia-based horn player to compose the slightly slurred brass melody that dominates the song.

“It has a slightly vaudevillian feel on those horns,” Meade says. “I’ve never done that before. It just appealed to me; [it's] a little bit more whimsical than I would normally be.”

The song was originally going to use a vocal melody instead of horns, but it was a good choice to change things up, because the horns are next-level catchy. Meade was happy with the result, as he’s been trying to shift away from playing strictly guitar rock.

“I was listening to a bunch of Beatles stuff anyway, especially after that documentary came out last fall,” he says. “I’ve been returning to my roots, and I thought, ‘I’ve never tried horns before.’”

Lyrically, the song offers hope that we can collectively trudge past the rut that has overtaken the country the past few years. Meade struggles to find the right word for what he hopes to accomplish with the song.

“I hate to use the word ‘positive,’ because that conjures up all that sort of self-helpy, motivational crap I’ve grown to hate over the years,” he says. “But definitely more uplifting, especially with the last couple of years. I needed that.”

He adds that he didn’t want the song to be specifically about COVID or the previous president, and he wrote it before the renewed threat of World War III sprang up in Eastern Europe with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But "A Walk in the Sun" can be applicable to any of those things. In spite of how awful the torrent of bad news tends to make a sane person feel, the song carries a message of resilience.

“I just wanted it to be about the feeling,” he says. “Tolkien talks about being applicable rather than allegorical. You can apply [the song] to any of [those events], because we’ve been under a cloud for a while.”

Meade says that he came up in the punk rock, country and grunge realms of musical creation, all genres that can be a little nihilistic and angry. And he admits that there's a place for that kind of art, but personally, he feels the world has become a negative enough place on its own the past several years. For his own sanity, he needed a change and has been taking his music in a more positive direction as of late.

“The comics writer Grant Morrison talks about how what you create as a creator in a lot of ways manifests itself in your own life,” he says. “If you want a different life and you are already a creative person, you can do that by changing what it is that you are creating.”

He adds that "A Walk in the Sun" shouldn’t be misconstrued as being “toxically positive,” where one buries his head in the sand and pretends like everything is fine.

“There's a verse that is very much ‘Life is shit right now,’” Meade notes. “The chorus is ‘In the face of that, this is what we are going to do.’ You have to acknowledge the bad before you can move forward.”

The single comes out on the first day of spring, and is one of four he plans on releasing this year, each on the first day of a season. That will include an alt-country song in the vein of Jason Isbell for summer, a traditional Christmas song for winter, and another that draws from a Taylor Swift and Harry Styles kind of pop for autumn.

It can be a tad disorienting to hear Meade list his influences. The only thing that binds them is the fact that they can be loosely defined as pop acts. (And there’s really no accounting for the medieval and Renaissance music that has influenced him.)

He adds that music has become background noise for a lot of people, so it’s often more about the general vibe than about having something to say. Club music, for example, is popular right now, but no one is really going to the club to hear the music; they're going to socialize and drink cocktails. It doesn’t really matter what the music says to some audiences.

“It’s a craft that not everyone is good at,” Meade says. “It’s something we are missing nowadays. Even if you listen to what are, genre-speaking, ‘pop songs,’ some of them aren’t very good pop songs. They don’t like to write bridges anymore, or the melodies are one-octave melodies. People aren’t good at writing pop songs anymore.”

“A Walk in the Sun” premieres on Sunday, March 20. Check out tonymeade.com for more details and music.