A Cat, A Platypus and Ram Dass Walk Into A Video… You, Me and Everyone We Know Debut Animated New Single
You, Me, And Everyone We Know
New Album Something Heavy out
September 17, 2021
Chicago and Brooklyn Album Release Shows in October
August 12, 2021 – After announcing their first album in nearly a decade, Something Heavy (release date: September 17via Know Hope Records), indie-punk stalwarts You, Me, & Everyone We Know have released a brand new, full-band version of their cathartic single “Ram Dass Dick Pics,” along with an animated video. In addition, the band have announced two album release shows this fall: The Bottom Lounge in Chicago on October 9 with Kali Masi, City Mouth, and Tiny Kingdoms supporting and Brooklyn’s The Kingsland on October 30 with support from Best Ex, Proper., and Chousand.
“Ram Dass Dick Pics,” is an homage to spiritual teacher Ram Dass, (formerly known as Richard Alpert) whose mission up until his death in 2019 was making Easter mysticism understandable to Western minds. His teachings were impactful on YMAEWK vocalist Benjamin Liebsch (pronouns: He/Him or They/Them; Ben is non-binary) which helped them get through turbulent depressive episodes and anxiety over the last several years.
Photo credit: Connor Feimster
A member of Timothy Leary’s LSD-fueled crowd at Harvard in the late ’60s, It was around 1967 that Alpert traveled to India and studied under Hindu guru Neem Karoli Baba who renamed him “Ram Dass” meaning “Servant of Ram.” “‘Ram Dass Dick Pics’ is partly a common grounding exercise, demonstrated in the first verse and explained in the last part of the second verse,” explains Ben about the song’s meaning. “It’s a description of looking around, getting up from the couch I was seated on, and taking in my surroundings on a walk to the store.”
“The song stays pretty well zoomed into the present until we start getting to the latter half of the song, where things open up to this sort of large epiphany about what I want in life and what I wonder about the world around me on the other side of it,” Ben explains. “The song title came from this idea about being in the middle of a transformation. The notion of Ram Dass taking dick pics is absurd but it’s like living in two opposing paradigms. The platypus mentioned in the song is also an example of this. It is also a reference to being non-binary. Ram Dass’ birth name was also Richard Alpert, Dick for short… like looking at ‘Dick pics,’ (i.e. pictures of Richard Alpert) before he became Ram Dass.”
It has been six years since we last heard from You, Me, and Everyone We Know. Understandably, a lot has changed primarily with Ben’s journey with their own mental health. Through therapy, they began to learn how to unpack traumas that informed a lot of the perspective of past material and understand the impact those traumas had on their development as a person. The process of knocking down these walls that Ben forgot they even built informed a good chunk of songwriting for Something Heavy, which references the ideological teachings of Ram Dass and the philosophical musings of comedian Pete Holmes, in such a way that allowed all of the separate world’s that they’ve inhibited to bleed into one another.
Ben has said that You, Me, and Everyone We Know is what has kept them alive through all of the peaks and valleys of human existence. “Music never crossed my mind as a pursuit,” they reveal. “Nothing did. When I first started writing the songs that would be the unintended inception of this band, I thought I would be dead by now. I had no intention of doing any of this. Yet here I am 15 years later, having since found deep meaning, purpose, and fulfillment in someone else’s dream.”
Something Heavy by You Me, and Everyone We Know will be released on September 17via Know Hope Records.
Tracklisting
Something Heavy
1. I Don’t Care Anymore, I’m Enough Now
2. Better Than I Ever Was
3. Draggedacrossconcrete
4. (Still) Basically A God
5. F.I.N.E.
6. Ram Dass Dick Pics
7. The World Is Ugly
8. We’re Not Like That
9. Something Heavy
10. …But I Have My Doubts
