Ohtis deliver flamenco-tinged country on humid new offering "Settling"

Opening with a clicking beat like flamenco castanets and the mumbling voices of a packed-out saloon, Ohtis' "Settling" is another insight into the hurdles that songwriter Sam Swinson has had to navigate through.

"Settling" introduces the twangy-guitars with ease, building to a melody that finds its feet between a lethargic country campfire song and an intricate flamenco riff that sizzles in the southern American sun.

The bustling voices in the background accentuate the personal tale, further projecting the al-fresco setting of the track and Swinson's candid lyrics and the band's tender harmonies.

Speaking in-depth about the track's core, Swinson offers:

"'Settling' was written shortly after 'Runnin' on a relapse. I was drunk out in a garage in the middle of the night when I wrote it, as was the case with many of our songs, if that’s not obvious. I’d gotten a job as a telemarketer selling timeshare tour vacations to Hilton’s Honors Club members to places like Myrtle Beach and Las Vegas. Being a drug addict had prepared me with the necessary skills to excel at pressuring dim-witted Hilton customers into buying my vacation packages, so I started making 'good money' in commissions and moved out of the halfway house. I bought a 1992 Chevy Lumina for $700 and was renting the spare bedroom at my friends Zach and Suzanne’s house across the hall from their 6-year-old son Hudson’s room, so in my mind I was living high on the hog, being a very successful person. Before long I was doing coke with my supervisor at the call center and shooting up in the handicap stall of the bathroom between calls. Probably, the moral depravity required to be a telemarketer and constant chatter of a call center is enough to drive anyone insane even without the drugs.

"It was during this time that I had a conversation with Suzanne on the front porch of the house one night where she asked me outright if I honestly believed that Jesus Christ died on the cross for my sins, and I had to accept him into my heart or I would spend eternity being tortured in hell. To which I finally admitted I did not and probably never really had. While today I consider this confrontation and admission a developmental revelation in many ways, at the time it sent me into a kind of nihilistic tail-spin. I simply could not reconcile the thought that myself and most of the people I knew and loved were carrying out our sole functions under a myth, nor could I comprehend any meaning to life beyond it. So I escaped back into the one thing I knew that made sense: oblivion.

"This song came from that. I knew it was only a matter of time before I would be back within inches of death, lying to everyone who cared about me, and dragging them into the chaos with me. Which is exactly what happened. Luckily Suzanne had the wherewithal to kick me out of her house right away, but some meth heads stole my brother-in-law’s gun and my Chevy Lumina. And then one of them stole my sister’s car too, which he was riding around in with me pretending to help me find mine. The old adage is quite true: a meth head will steal your wallet and then help you look for it. When my sister found out she said I don’t ever want to see you or talk to you again, which seemed reasonable to me, but then she probably saved my life by dragging me out of the crack house I was holed up in and having her husband drive me to the hospital. Instincts took over there and I told my sister 'you probably don’t want to see this' before going into a hysteria about being suicidal. This, I’ve found, is necessary for those without health insurance to be hospitalized. They then administered the insertion of a catheter which was the third I’d received to date (and hopefully last), and my second batch of activated charcoal.

"The next day my dad called me on the hospital phone sobbing. He said 'don’t leave me son, I need you'. I think that’s when I began to realize what life was about. Regardless of our faults and our conditioned delusions, we are capable of love. I felt like so many people had loved me, literally enough to save my life, and it was time to start learning how to love them back. That was nearly seven years ago. I’ve been clean and sober since, but this song is a good reminder of where I might go should I ever decide to settle again."