NYC Scene Report – November Girl, Daisy The Great, & Fake Fever

This week’s NYC Scene Report features November Girl reminding themselves there’s “No Crying in Baseball,” Daisy The Great remembering feeling the need to be a “Tough Kid,” and Fake Fever diving into the “Unknowable.”

* Have you ever heard a song for the first time and immediately gone into your best Stone Cold Steve Austin voice, and exclaimed, “Oh hell yeah!”? That’s how I felt when November Girl’s “No Crying in Baseball” first hit my ears.

Frontwoman Willa Rudolph described the song, which is filled with ‘90s alt-rock vibes, in a statement, saying, “‘No Crying in Baseball’ is about what it feels like to have made a mess of something, like a relationship, or a situation, and you’re feeling all sorry for yourself, just sitting there on the floor covered in spilled milk and cracked eggs, but the voice in your head – in my case, it’s my Dad’s voice – says, ‘There’s no crying in baseball!’ You gotta get up, and fix what you broke. It’s that, in dialogue with still just really loving and wanting the person you just acted like a fool in front of. The combination of feelings – shame, desire, whatever it is – is almost too much.”

November Girl will continue to release singles throughout the fall, with an EP on the way before the end of the year. For now, step up the plate … err … play button, with “No Crying in Baseball,” and enjoy this home run.

* I’ve been keeping an ear out for NYC-based indie pop duo Daisy The Great ever since their fantastic “Record Player” collaboration with AJR back in 2021. They’ve been releasing a steady stream of singles, and projects, since then, the latest being the song “Tough Kid.”

The second single off their upcoming EP, due out October 6th (the EP is untitled as of the writing of this column), “Tough Kid” is actually quite the beautifully gentle tune. Daisy The Great expounded on it in a statement, saying, “The song is about feeling scared that you’re not able to keep up, like you’re all scrambled up and overwhelmed and ten steps behind everyone else. It’s about wanting to be able to handle everything, and not understanding how it seems like everyone else can do it all. The song is a wish to talk yourself out of your insecurities. We hope that it can be a safe spot for anyone feeling that way – we’ve been there, and we hope the song can be a reminder to trust your own instincts, and believe in yourself, and allow yourself space to mess up.”

Daisy The Great haven’t been messing up at all musically, and they’re currently on tour in Europe through the 26th. While we wait for their return, we have “Tough Kid” to hold us over.

* If you’re looking for something wonderfully bouncy, and soulful, you’ll want to get to know Fake Fever’s latest, “Unknowable.”

“Unknowable” is the third single from Fake Fever’s recently released sophomore album, Inside The Well, and he explained how the song came to be in a statement, saying, “This song is a perfect example of a happy accident. I had spent hours piecing together some upbeat sunny song idea that was not hitting at all for me when I played it back, and I was just sitting there frustrated, and dejected about having to scrap it, and start over. All of a sudden, after the main track had stopped playing and it was just a gap of silence for a while, there was some random two-note dark synth layer I had accidentally recorded at the end of the project file on my little cheap Casio SA-46 that immediately made my ears perk up. I isolated that, deleted everything else I had made in the session except for the drums, and every layer just started immediately falling into place right after, forming the majority of what you hear on the finished product.”

Whether it’s the paintings of Bob Ross, or the music of Fake Fever, I think we can all agree that happy accidents are pretty great.

For more of the best of NYC’s indie music scene, come back next Wednesday, and check out the archives for previous columns.