{"id":10182,"date":"2012-05-02T12:10:20","date_gmt":"2012-05-02T16:10:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=10182"},"modified":"2012-05-06T10:54:08","modified_gmt":"2012-05-06T14:54:08","slug":"midweek-music-break-water-liars-dog-eaten","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2012\/05\/midweek-music-break-water-liars-dog-eaten\/","title":{"rendered":"Midweek Music Break: Water Liars, “Dog Eaten”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

[Image(s): Water Liars. You’d never imagine that a couple of guys who look like <\/em>this\u00a0would
\nwrite, play, and sing so sweetly, would you?]<\/em><\/p>\n

I don’t know how the duo who call themselves Water Liars came up with that name. I do know, however, that it’s the title of the first story in a collection by the late Mississippi writer\u00a0Barry Hannah<\/a>, 1978’s Airships<\/em>. You can read the story here<\/a>\u00a0or here<\/a>; briefly, it’s a first-person narrative of a man who’s come to the sudden awareness that he was not his wife’s, y’know, first<\/em>. (In short order, he remembers that she<\/em>\u00a0wasn’t his<\/em>, either — but he seems to dismiss this little dissonant factoid with ease, not to say convenience.)<\/p>\n

Before coming together as Water Liars, the two guys —\u00a0Justin Kinkel-Schuster and\u00a0Andrew Bryant — had been performing alone or with other bands. For their first album, Phantom Limb<\/em>, they just sort of shut themselves away in a room in a small Mississippi town,\u00a0with a single microphone,\u00a0their instruments, and a handful of songs. Among them, the lovely, haunting “Dog Eaten”:<\/p>\n