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Photo by Toni Howard

Jack Kane's back, and he’s been putting in some obvious work, as his latest EP, Obvious, dolls out a dose of heartache and anxious behaviors that meshes into a menagerie of pop goodness. Despite the dower song titles and topics, the tones on Obvious open up more like a gift basket of sonic goods that you can bring into any pop-lovers home to cheer them up. As big stans of this Hertfordshire heartthrob, we decided to spin up the internets and reach out for the man's generous words track-by-track, straight from the source:  

1. Wisdom Tooth

"Wisdom Tooth may be the most unique metaphor I’ve committed to in a song so far. Comparing lust and infatuation to that strange, lingering ache of wisdom tooth pain. It’s impossible to ignore, it doesn’t feel like it should be there, but you can’t stop prodding at it. This song tackles feelings of desire in a playful form."

2. Loving You (Is A Drag)

"The song is ultimately about getting cheated on. I think commonly cheating is viewed as very black and white, ‘whoever cheats is the villain’, but it’s obviously more nuanced than that, there’s so many reasons people cheat, and in this case it is because loving their partner has become ‘a drag’."

3. Breaking Up At The Department Store

"There’s something about arguing in public I’ve always found really interesting. That feeling of trying to express anger to someone without alerting passers by. This is the feeling I tackle in this track… the internal anger and high stakes emotion met with the normalcy of 'humming escalators' and 'cold fluorescent lights'. I hope to transport the listener right to that place and feeling of vulnerability."

4. Civil Unrest

"A song about the tumultuous nature of untangling your lives after a break up. I worked on 'Civil Rest' with Mark Elliot and Toni Howard, and this one was an idea that was born from an improvisational song - we have a full recording of us jamming the idea out of nothing. Mark and I would do these things called ‘flows’ where we essentially improvise entire songs from start to finish and then cherry pick the good ideas and finish them. Some of this EP has been written that way and it’s definitely in general relaxed my approach to making music."

5. Obvious

“It’s a song about hindsight hitting you in the face. The realisation that all the warning signs were right there, the bad habits, the missed birthdays, the cold silences, that you just didn’t want to see at the time. It’s a break up song, but really it’s about the regret you feel from ignoring your gut feelings. The song closes out the story that unfolds across the EP, five stages of a messy relationship and subsequent breakup that ultimately leaves you understanding that you should trust yourself and your instincts more."