‘The Nail Beside The Door‘ is a song that was birthed in a unique way – the song of the agonies of solitude and the aches of loneliness came out of a gesture of pure goodwill. E.W. Harris was playing a gig when one of his cousins walked up to him mid-set a few years back and handed him a banjo, offering only the briefest explanation – “Here man, I’m not gonna learn this and I thought you might use it” – before promptly leaving. The result, some months later as Harris tinkered with the unfamiliar instrument under lockdown, was ‘The Nail Beside The Door‘ which would in time become the lead single for his new album ‘Machine Living in Relief’ which is itself a self-set challenge – an all acoustic recording about robots and AIs.
E.W. Harris describes the song as: “Written from the perspective of a prisoner who becomes emotionally dependent on an AI companion,” it draws on all the profound, maddening aloneness of COVID isolation with those feelings bleeding through the character loud and clear. The album is the fifth in a series of releases set within a common imagined world of Rocket City, a future dystopia – it is a world, says Harris, that is “New York City, 250 years in the post-apocalyptic future – but all the buildings have been replaced by rocket ships that never took off. It’s my Neverland, Star Wars expanded universe, or Narnia, I guess you could say. I wanted a place to tell exciting and compelling stories that didn’t have to be burdened with my own everyday existence.”
