“Writing on the Wall” by Paper Route, Saturday, June 11, 2022

You never know what to expect when you get a new Paper Route album. The protean band has evolved from a quartet of multi-instrumentalists playing indie rock Americana to a pop group with a fetish for synthesizers by the EP Are We All Forgotten, which proceeded their major label debut, Absence. The band's sophomore record, The Peace of Wild Things, the band became even more of a pop group. So when listeners heard the choral "Intro" on the band's third record, Real Emotion, immediately followed by the dirty, distorted guitars of "Writing on the Wall," we wondered, are we getting a rock Paper Route record?
 

I FORGAVE YOU ONCE/ THEN AT TWICE/ I TOOK CONTROL. But Real Emotion was Paper Route's most diverse record. "Writing on the Wall" is arguably the closest to a straightforward rock song that Paper Route has ever performed. Much of the record reverts back to the solid pop tracks on The Peace of Wild Things. But Real Emotion's sixteen tracks, complete with interludes, compared to the concise ten tracks on the standard edition of Peace allows Paper Route to experiment as a band and explore the relationships between seemingly dissimilar tracks. The tracks on Real Emotion don't seem to have an explicit theme, which was clearer on the band's sophomore record. Rather, the choral introduction reprised in the song "Untitled" makes the theme of the urgency of appreciating loved ones before hard times come one of the complex emotions explored on the record. Color is a motif on this record, reds, blues, and blacks are mentioned frequently in the lyrics and even in song titles, and references to art, literature, and the Bible play into the collage of the emotional trip that Paper Route takes their listeners on through the album.

Depiction of Daniel 5 in Belshazzar's
banquet hall. Painting by Rembrandt. Source.

IT'S A BITTER CUP/ FILLIN' UP/ BABY, LET'S DRINK. "Writing on the Wall" is a fairly common idiom in English, meaning that there are signs of doom. Perhaps "Writing on the Wall" is a metaphor about the lengthy hiatus, possibly break up, that Paper Route would begin in 2018 and was officially announced in January 2019. A band plagued with personal conflicts and perhaps bad or inconsistent marketing, Real Emotion perhaps may be the last thing we ever hear from the band, despite Apple Music and Spotify constantly mislabeling a rapper by the same name in Paper Route's feed. Whenever I hear the phrase "writing on the wall," my Sabbath School/Arthur Maxwell The Bible Story upbringing takes me back to the story of Daniel in Babylon  (Daniel 5). In the story, the king of Babylon, Belshazzar, holds a feast. During the feast, Belshazzar orders his servants to bring the golden goblets that his father Nebuchadnezzar had stolen from the temple he ransacked in Jerusalem, starting the first Jewish diaspora. But, according to the scriptures, this action was not a mere solecism, but the final blow which invoked the vengeance of the God of the Israelites. In the middle of the drunken debauchery, a hand appeared and wrote in Hebrew on the wall. Needless to say, this mysterious hand stopped the party. Because no one could read the language, they called Daniel to read the language. Daniel said that because of how the Babylonians had disregarded the God of Israel, that very night the city would be handed over to the Medes and the Persians who had infiltrated the walls by reversing the flow of the Euphrates River. It's a very scary story for a kid, and there was always a warning, don't piss God off too much, or something awful will happen. I'm sure not everyone feels that ingrained religious guilt whenever they use idiom!

Live performance:

Studio Version:

Read “Writing on the Wall” by Paper Route on Genius.