Big Hurt Boy

"The EP is named Big Hurt Boy after a lyric from this Martin Simpson song called “Never Any Good”. It’s a song about all the things people found frustrating about his dad. This is a verse about his mom (a single mother at the time) meeting his father. And when my mother came to your door, With a baby in her arm, Her big hurt boy only nine years old, Trying to keep her from harm, If you had been a practical man, You would have been forewarned. You would have seen that it never could work, And I would have never been born. Basically, he’s saying that if his dad was more practical he would’ve never dated a depressed person who already had a child, and then he (Martin Simpson) would’ve never been born.

If his dad wasn’t a frustrating person, he (Martin Simpson) wouldn’t exist. Which gets into the idea of everyone having to tolerate their parent’s failings because they ARE a product of their parent’s weaknesses. Which got me thinking about how my songs are like that, just products of my own failures, and fixations. And I write about them again and again in this fashion, just hoping people will still be interested. So the title is from the verse that got me thinking of that, and it’s also poking fun of myself. That I’m theoretically this big sad guy who keeps getting dumped and writing fucking songs about it. We did all of the songs live off the floor with a band in the studio which I hadn’t done previously. Trying to capture more of an undone feeling. Like everyone, trying to get back to the feeling that my early recordings had. Which is impossible because I had no idea what I was doing back then, but this is certainly the closest I’ve ever gotten since. They’re smaller, less polished songs than the ones I’ve been putting out recently." - Donovan Woods