Singled Out: Small Town Titans' Rufflin' Feathers

Keavin Wiggins | 11-06-2020

Small Town Titans are gearing up to release their new album "The Ride" later this month and to celebrate we asked Jonny Ross to tell us about the latest single "Rufflin' Feathers". Here is the story:

"Rufflin' Feathers" is 2020 frustration personified man. When the COVID-19 pandemic started in America, it was "oh sh*t" mode everywhere, and the band didn't get together for 9 weeks. When we finally decided to, we also decided not to say a word musically when we picked up our instruments. No warming up by playing a cover, or one of our tunes, etc. Let's just play. AND, everyone was so down in the dumps around the world, so we said "Hey, why don't we go live on Facebook and just f*cking jam? People will LOVE it." And that's exactly what we did.

I kid you not, the song was born right then and there. We started writing two songs for our new record without even knowing it during that live jam session for the world, and the first thing Phil said on his mic was "Can you hear me out there". You can literally go back and watch the video. After the live stream, we listened back to it, and we were like, "Damn! Let's run with that"!

We fleshed out the song, but we didn't have any lyrics yet other than the chorus concept of "rufflin' feathers baby, shaking trees", and that first line of "can you hear me out there". The rest was basically humming. The melodies were there, but that was it. And we had a week or two until we were in the studio. I took a crack at the lyrics, and for the first time in our band's career basically, we used mine. I'm pretty stoked about that!

I came up with them basically while driving home from a rehearsal. I had no problem naturally writing pretty sarcastically about social media. And the aggressive nature of the song fit the attitude of the lyrics I was coming up with. I just think it's gotten insane. Bat sh*t crazy. We can't agree to disagree any more. More and more apps are coming out that are just all about "me, me, ME". I think we are getting sick. Like mental diabetes. We're all craving attention, we're right all the time and everyone else is wrong, and we can't wait to numb out on our little screens and get pissed off. Sh*t is crazy!

Hearing is believing. Now that you know the story behind the song, listen and watch for yourself below and learn more about the album here