Halloween is traditionally a time to scare and be scared, but– let's be real, nothing is more terrifying than the reality we face today. This is the thrust of Hunter's Moon, a digital 7" composed of two songs, Eat the Rich, by Johanna Rose and Cold Ones, by Sugar Ransom. Though they found themselves thousands of miles apart, the two long time collaborators realized they had everything they needed to engineer, record, and mix these two songs of a common thread: the current reality, the shared global grief, heightened poverty, social unrest, and the unanimous anxiety surrounding the unforeseeable future. Yet both songs deliver this doom in a bittersweet molotov cocktail: c'est la vie... let's burn it down.

Johanna Rose spent their summer building and living in a treehouse in the remote Green Mountains of Vermont. With no electricity or running water, they hardly imagined recording while there, but serendipitously stumbled into a unique opportunity to do just that. "I found myself in a corner bar that had been shut down since March. Jason Jack, one of the owners, set up the stage for recording and I went in to play some bass with my cousin's awesome band, The Scalawags, and ended up putting a solo track down during a smoke break." They say, "He liked it, so I started going down on the weekends and recording stuff, sleeping on the stage at night and recording by day. It was kind of a crazy place to record: it was frozen in time, with stacks of newspapers from March, posters for events that never happened still on the wall. I couldn’t imagine a better place to record Eat the Rich."

Johanna reinvents the French Revolution epitaph "let them eat cake," concurring with Roman satirical poet Juvenal's societal evaluation of panem et circenses, ‘bread and circuses,’ while nodding to contemporary rapper Busdriver's ‘Eat Rich.’ Rose’s chorus bellows "If you're hungry, we can eat the rich/ if you’re cold, we can burn their houses down," concluding with some relatable content for many Americans this summer, "if you're tired/ yea I'm tired/ we can go to sleep/ to the sound of sirens." All sung over a dreamy, harmonized, unburdened waltz. A lullaby, rooted by the deep swells of their bowed upright bass and gentle chimes of guitar.

Johanna Rose is from Milwaukee, WI where they played upright bass and sang in notable groups, Calamity Janes and the Fratney Street Band, RuthB8r Ginsberg, New Boyz Club, and the internationally renowned duo, Nickel&Rose. Rose will also be releasing an illustrated lyrical zine for Eat the Rich, which will be available on Bandcamp along with Hunter’s Moon.

Meanwhile in Texas, labs closed when the pandemic hit, and everything went virtual for Sugar Ransom, who is currently pursuing a PhD in Phonetics & Phonology at UT Austin. For sanity, she started a virtual songwriting collaboration with L.A. based Rick Wood (The Earth Satellites). “We wanted to write a song with some of these horrific news stories coming in– bodies being stored in U-Hauls, hospitals running out of beds and ventilators, medical professionals dying in droves. We wrote this as sort of an ode to the last responders, imagining the rough days had by coroners, morticians, and others directly dealing with the body count” The song eases its way in as a light fingered piano ballad, but the lyrical content is sobering, sparing no grim detail, punctuated by a choir of “fuck”s. The refrain bemoans the weakness of beer’s ABV to the present situation, comparable to the ill-funded healthcare system in the US. The song offers no silver lining, no shimmer of hope. Cold Ones is a space to acknowledge the gruesome reality in hopes of inspiring responsible behavior in those who may be experiencing caution fatigue.