Exclusive Song Premiere: ‘Leaving,’ Busy Living

ABOVE: BUSY LIVING.

When discovering music, we sometimes search for a balance between the new and the familiar, craving something different, yet not shocking or uncomfortable. L.A. based three-piece Busy Living accomplishes this equilibrium by taking unique angles on intimacy and singing them over traditional indie-pop sounds, laced with a bit of post-punk vigor. Rather than cliché songs about love and longing, their lyrics redirect the focus toward more challenging aspects of relationships. The band’s track “Let You Down,” for example, illustrates what it’s like to be the object of someone’s affection when the feeling isn’t mutual—a side of the coin we don’t always hear about. For their newest single, “Leaving,” which we are pleased to premiere below, Mike Moonves, Tim Hutton, and Matt Leddy worked with Jim Eno, one of the founding members of Spoon.

“[The track] is about a relationship that has reached a terrible place, and the main offender—the narrator’s voice—deciding to finally make an effort to change,” Moonves says. “It’s about an almost too late, last ditch attempt to salvage things. It’s an impassioned proclamation and we don’t know how the other side of this situation reacts. The ending is ambiguous.”

The song blends garage band elements with undertones of electronica via its catchy melodies. “The melodies appear at random moments and get sung into the voice notes recorder on my phone when I’m out and about, so there’s a bunch of these 15 second ideas to choose from,” Moonves explains. “Once I find one that’s rad, I’ll go pretty deep on the music until there’s something to work from, at which point the words start to come out.”

Outside of music, Moonves also sources movies for artistic inspiration, which comes as no surprise with the story-telling nature of Busy Living’s material. “I find the situations and emotions in songs are great, but they’re already formed poetic ideas and such. Movies feel more open to interpretation to me,” he says. “The marriage of the audio and visual together is so mutually beneficial. Many of my songs are born in front of a screen.”

FOR MORE INFORMATION ON BUSY LIVING, VISIT THEIR FACEBOOK.