Single Review: Thots and Prayers w/ Golden Plates

Golden Plates from San Diego, California and DateMonthYear from Hamilton, New Zealand have teamed up for a new single song release called Thots and Prayers. DateMonthYear’s Trevor Faville wrote an instrumental track to which Golden Plates’ Elder Brycen added the vocals and lyrics. Apparently the song was originally going to be a happy one, and Brycen was struggling to find the path within the music and then Uvalde happened and he knew what the song was going to be about. As is normal, I played this before reading the press release, and had thought to myself that if it wasn’t about that massacre then it certainly fitted, so I was not at all surprised to see this was indeed the case.

This is a protest song, a song calling out the reality of gun control in America and the way the police responded, or rather didn’t, to a gunman in a school. We even get one of the favourite comments from NRA, saying it is impossible to find “a good man with a gun”, yet what makes this work so incredibly well is that it is catchy, with Trevor providing a complex underlay in which the threads keep moving with Elder then putting his words over the top. Due to it being such a catchy number, with strong hooks it is both powerful and frightening as one can easily sing along with this while at the same time understanding it is about a massacre that should never have happened, with 19 children and 3 adults dying as a result. Music designed to make you think, to provoke a reaction, and on all levels this succeeds.