Two days left in the week of live acoustic sessions! I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I’m a sucker for great harmonies. But harmonies in combination with some feel-good, cinematic, folky instrumentals…now that’s just downright catchy. The harmonies in this song are so great in a natural sense that, as Rolling Stone puts it, it’s “so richly executed its hard to tell if it’s one voice of 12.” I actually heard the studio version afterwards and found it to be rather subservient to this live acoustic version, which is almost always a promising indication that a band has enough talent to fill entire albums with great tracks, rather than just one or two hit songs per album. Lots of upside for this young band!

The members of Darlingside met at Williams College in western Massachusetts, and the story behind the band’s name is pretty interesting. The suffix “-cide” is often used to describe something being killed, such as pesticide being defined as a substance that kills pests. In the words of one of the band members, “A former teacher of ours used to say ‘kill your darlings,’ which is to say, if you fall in love with something you’ve written you should cross it out.” The band liked the idea and the concept of the word darlingcide, but decided tot change the c to an s because, in their words, “we’re not super into death.” Gotta love a band name with a great backstory like that!