Stream: Forever X2, ‘Mad For Me’

S.Lo on February 21st, 2019

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Post-Act As If and the group’s spiral upwards into the worlds of commercial radio and sync, Peter Verdell — as Forever X2 — is having a bang-up time contracting back into a one-man project. He has been workshopping his songs to completion at his downtown L.A. apartment and recording them in a sweaty Silver Lake garage (playing all instruments himself) with producers Ari Berl and Yianni AP. Feeling that inspiration again, he says, “I wanted the songs to capture how I felt when I first started playing music. Informal and fresh, sweaty and loud.”

Verdell’s new single, “Mad For Me” (out Friday), is about jumping feet-first into the deep waters of infatuation. After a playful intro of bleep-bloops on a modular synth and a flippant, fun beat tapped out on a drum machine, the song dives head-on into a full-band, guitar-god bliss, with Verdell channeling his youthful seduction, singing, “‘Ooh,’ I said, ‘Come up to the bed, I’m broken. It’s time to heal.’ / ‘Cool,’ I said on the floor instead, ‘Make you’re heart if it’s not real,'” he sings, playing the victim before getting more assertive, “You wanna talk the talk, Come on, let’s talk. Come on, let’s talk it up / Oh, you’re a turntable, I’m a needle. Oh, come on, let’s talk it up.” By the chorus, it’s mad envy all around, with “rich boys fallin’ on their knees” and “rich girls all want[ing] to pay” to have the crazy love now burning between Verdell and his object of obsession.

“[The song] is about an all-consuming relationship I was in,” says the musician, “It was kind of obnoxious but also kinda beautiful. I don’t know if these kinds of loves ever last long, but I think you gotta ride the highs when you get them. Musically, this song is scrappy as hell.…it’s pure fun.” Just as some passions are, and the reasons we first picked up that guitar or microphone. Verdell will be releasing an EP of such fun later this year.

||| Stream: “Mad For Me”