[Cover photo credit to Dave Decker]
Cult favorite Tampa, Florida band Pohgoh have announced the November 4th, 2022 release of the band’s third album titled du und ich, German for “you and I”, from Spartan Records. The album sets out to be an “us-against-the-world sentiment” that reflects on time spent being locked up with a loved one in recent years. The album’s first single, “Weeds“ reflects on Susie Ulrey’s daily fears of living with Multiple Sclerosis, and learning how to live through the uncertainty of a global pandemic.
On the very personal single, Ulrey says:
After my Multiple Sclerosis diagnosis one year into our marriage, Keith and I became an ‘us against the world’ kind of couple. We’ve been in the weeds together since 2001, ducking every curveball MS throws at us. ‘Weeds’ is about living with illness and loss and the uncertainty that the pandemic brought into all of our lives. It’s about how we were all locked down with our families with that strange combination of reconnection, tedium and the unknowns that we were faced with. It’s also about the people we love that are grieving, too, and how grief doesn’t ever really go away. You have to make space for it and carry it with you.
The ending reintroduced a part from a song I wrote in 1997 about my mom’s diagnosis of MS. We’re all singing together in an attempt to reassure ourselves that we can hold on.
Twenty-seven years into their band-life, Pohgoh’s third full-length is a “collective anthem of survival”.
