SONG OF THE DAY: "Where Your Nights Often End" by Into It. Over It.

Into It. Over It. is the brainchild of Evan Weiss, an indie-emo singer from Chicago who has been in and is in a million other bands (Their / They're / There, Stay Ahead of the Weather, Pet Symmetry, formerly of The Progress, Damiera, and Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A Start), which are always in alternating states of activity and hiatus. IIOI remains Weiss' only steadily touring and recording band, and is the band with whom he is most often associated.

It's hard to say how many albums the incredibly prolific songwriter has recorded. He has a wealth of material, but they exist largely on non-traditional formats, such as his 2009 "album," 52 Weeks, which includes 52 songs all written and recorded one per week for an entire year. But, for most intents and purposes, his first official album, the appropriately titled Proper, was released in 2011 and was followed by 2013's Intersections, which has been credited by some as helping propel the so-called "emo revival" currently underway in the States.

Into It. Over It. holds a very interesting place in my musical rotation. Whereas I generally listen almost exclusively to complete albums, front to back, that was not the case with IIOI for a long time. Proper contained three truly amazing songs ("Midnight: Carroll Street," "Connecticut Steps," and "Where Your Nights Often End"), along with a handful of other okay-to-good tracks, but I did not feel the album as a whole was particularly strong. So, those three songs, along with his Daytrotter Session and various other acoustic sessions (including his exceptional Smoking Popes cover) got played often, and that was about it for a while.

With last year's Intersections, however, he finally produced a cohesive album that matched the brilliance of the three aforementioned songs. This collection is one whose songs work much better when played together than when played separately, which I believe is the hallmark of a great album; the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, so to speak. So, while I highly recommend giving Intersections a few good listens (Weiss recommends listening to it through headphones), none of the individual songs would appropriately represent the album's merits in a format such as this.

Therefore, I leave you with "Where Your Nights Often End" off Proper, which was the song that originally drew me to Evan Weiss' work. This song contains some of Weiss' signature guitar riffing that seems to somehow exist in its own universe, and it has a vaguely Death Cab-ish vibe that I dig. Hope you dig it, too!

Courage, so careful where
Your nights often end
For someone so lonely you
Got a lot of friends
And they're still all waiting their turn
It's your approval they need to burn on
Outside of day jobs there's cigarettes
That seem to follow up with it

But I can't make the lines out
To carry you alone

A patient, so sterile
Where your night's will never end
In a cadence of plans which
We never could pretend or begin to act out inside here
On the bar stools and discount beer
Within the chorus lines of hand-picked songs
I see that I just don't belong

You play the part of the thoughtless romantic in
The busy rotation of what goes wrong
But I can't make the lines out
To carry us alone

You play the part of the thoughtless romantic in
The busy rotation of what goes wrong
But I can't make the lines out
I'm never gonna make the lines out