A Hand-Made Stop-Motion Clip And A Gritty Blues-Rock Pulse Give The Song Its Shine
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Joe Rian sings as if every line has already spent a few nights in a barroom. On “Think Yer In Luv”
, the Chicago-based songwriter sets that weathered voice against an uptempo collision of rock ’n’ roll and blues, where guitars scrape at the edges and the rhythm section keeps pushing forward. As the title track from the album of the same name, it catches Rian in familiar territory — love, doubt, hard miles — but with enough mischief in the delivery to keep romance from becoming reverence.
That sensibility stretches back to Rock Falls, Illinois, where Rian grew up around blue-collar routines and a radio dial tuned to Kenny Rogers and Tanya Tucker. Country storytelling left its mark, particularly in his instinct for finding significance in ordinary lives without dressing them up. Later, Chicago’s mid-’90s art-loft scene pulled him toward indie rock, while long shifts at Buddy Guy’s Legends and The Moosehead kept him close to another lineage altogether. “Think Yer In Luv”
carries traces of all of it: country plainspokenness, blues abrasion, and the loose swagger of a rock band playing close enough to feel the room shake.
The arrangement keeps that history moving rather than displaying it behind glass. A taut groove gives the song its forward lean, while the guitars snarl and jab without crowding Rian’s vocal. There is twang in the frame, but little interest in polishing the song into pristine Americana. Its edges remain visible. That roughness suits the writing, which circles the strange territory between falling in love and deciding that you must already be there. Even the deliberately crooked spelling of the title carries a wink. Rian treats certainty with suspicion, letting affection and self-deception occupy the same few feet of floor.
That handmade quality extends to the accompanying stop-motion video, which Rian drew, cut and animated himself using watercolour paper, markers, scissors, glue dots and a borrowed camera. The fingerprints are part of the point. Its cut-paper movement mirrors the song’s scrappy humour and physicality, making the visual feel less like packaging than another piece of the same world: slightly imperfect, patient, tactile and unmistakably human.
Rian brings years of that sensibility into The A.M. Drinkers, whose tavern-rock footing gives his writing an appropriately sturdy home. Here, mastering from Gavin Lurssen adds width and warmth without sanding away the grain; the track still feels capable of leaving a mark on the furniture.
“Think Yer In Luv”
ultimately lives in the territory Rian knows best, where romance shares a table with work, weariness and late-night second thoughts. He does not romanticize the mileage. He lets the guitars rattle, leaves the joke in the title, and gives love enough room to remain complicated.
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