Singer Elihu Okay lets off steam on ‘Friday Night’

Date: 5/23/2023

Friday night is at once the peak and the valley of our traditional capitalistic work week. It is the point in our lives where we can wind down, turn up, meet some friends, enjoy a glass of wine — maybe do a little of each.

For those who experience a traditional five-day work week, Friday night is a boundless playpen, where the sky can feel just as much of the limit as your bed, where connections are made and lost, and where life feels its most unrehearsed. Friday night is us at our most unfettered, a time and a place where we can let off steam.

For Elihu Okay, the ambiguity of Friday night is a fascinating concept.

“I think that the idea of Friday night sort of encapsulates a lot of the ideas about that feeling of desperation, that feeling of looking for some sort of a release or feeling,” Okay told Reminder Publishing in an interview over Zoom.

This notion manifests itself in Okay’s new album, aptly titled Friday Night, where 10 songs function as a space to vent, ruminate about human connection and learn about ourselves through fleeting moments of introspection.

“I think the idea of Friday Night sort of encapsulates all of those things,” Okay said.

The album is a knotty encounter with an artist traversing through the instability of living life in one’s early 20s, where the search for the next thrill can seem circular.

For many like me, the 20s are a crucial juncture in our lives. The looming promise of adulthood is upon us as is the incessant feelings of uncertainty and vulnerability. Your 20s can feel equally exciting and terrifying and filled with endless opportunities if you are so lucky. They can be invigorating yet emotionally draining, kind of like a Friday night.

Okay, now 26, grew up in Western Massachusetts playing DIY shows at various houses and venues throughout Hampshire County and the East Coast, including at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the Flywheel in Easthampton. He grew up listening to stuff his dad listened to, including a hodgepodge of artists that included The Ramones, A Tribe Called Quest, The Grateful Dead and The Who.

Upon entering high school, his tastes transitioned to the blogosphere, where indie rock became the dominant genre of his choosing.

When listening to Friday Night, one can hear Okay’s melting pot of influences, manifested through heady flourishes of indie rock, alternative pop, piano balladry and rap. Cresting guitars function as the backdrop for Okay’s evocative lyrics, which often mirror misty-eyed melodies.

Very rarely does Okay fall into mawkish territory, though, and that is mainly because he is brutally sincere and openly candid throughout the project. He deftly captures the chaos of feeling uprooted upon his official move from Western Mass. to Brooklyn in 2019 on the lead single “Camel Crush,” whose propulsive chorus and rustic guitar work evoke a wanderlust feeling.

At the time of the song’s recording, Okay said he was frequently moving between Western Mass. and Brooklyn with his fellow bandmate Gabe Gill. “We were back and forth pretty often, and we just had this feeling of not being content in either place,” Okay said. “I had this real feeling of being disconnected both from other people and not being grounded geographically. I was feeling resentful about that and feeling a real sense of me against the world.”

You can feel that energy in the song’s first few lines, where Okay sings, “My hometown is a heartache, all the skies are gray,” but even more broadly speaking, the song is a microcosm of the album, where the desire for a new rush can feel frustratingly mundane or unfulfilling.

“There’s a feeling on this album of being a little disoriented while trying to figure out a bigger sense of direction,” Okay said. “And I think that across the whole album, there’s a real geographical sense of that disruption.”

Those areas of disruption are reflected in many different vignettes throughout Friday Night. Okay uses this album almost as a time capsule for thoughts and feelings he experiences across the past four years, waiting to be unearthed later when we all look back and ruminate on the chaos.

“There was a desperate desire to get outside of myself somehow, and I think being in New York really accentuated that because there was so much going on,” Okay said. “I live a much calmer life now, but I also feel nostalgic and sad about the idea of these things that once were so much fun for me, that maybe will never be fun for me again.”

For all the unbridled energy Okay exudes here, the album’s greatest strength is its ability to capture the post-graduate malaise, which is often reflected in the geographical disruption Okay spoke about and the heady nights he portrays in multiple facets of the album.

On the folksy “Teenage,” Okay contextualizes the places he has encountered throughout his time in the new city “Every week, I make a new map of the city/everywhere a different place than the last month”), and on “Snow Angels,” he brings a singer-songwriter temperament when describing the drifting snow that makes him feel like he is back in Hadley, and the dreary feeling of having to go to work after a long night of drinking.

There is also the opener, “A Little Money,” which sets the tone for Okay’s desire to find himself through the ups and downs of nomadic tendencies. “I need to learn to expect constant drifting/constellations shifted now/I need to figure out how to make a little money in this town,” he sings in bleary autotune.

There are other moments of gained and lost connection, fantastical love — the “Friday Night” demo, and instances of dredging through dead-end jobs while maintaining a sense of whimsy and imagination.

It is in these songs, and many more on the album, where we find the restlessness and wonderment of our 20s, along with the duality of making little money while having fleeting moments of fun.

Eventually, as Okay says, “We’ll never be that young again.”

Listen to Friday Night below at soundcloud.com/elihuokay/sets/friday-night.