Grandaddy - Now It's On (Official Music Video)

The Song: "Now It's On"

"Now It's On" is a quintessential Grandaddy track, merging crunchy, mid-tempo guitars with a slightly off-kilter beat and shimmering synth effects, all in service of Lytle’s elongated, Neil Young-esque melodies. The lyrics evoke a sense of transformation and liberation, with lines like: “Bust the lock off the front door / Once you’re outside you won’t want to hide anymore / Light the light on the front porch / Once it’s on you never wanna turn it off anymore.” These suggest a breaking free from constraint, a theme that resonates with Lytle’s recurring motifs of escaping the mundane, perhaps reflective of his roots in Modesto, California, a town he once likened to a prison.

The song’s raw authenticity, marked by some spontaneous flourishes, aligns with Grandaddy’s ethos of embracing imperfections, as described in Rock and Roll Globe: their music prizes “distortion, drones, flubs, frequency wobble,” proof of “music made by normal people working within their limitations.”

The Music Video

The music video for "Now It's On," directed by Jake Wynne and Jim Canty, produced by Juliette Larthe, and edited by David Webb, is a lesser-documented artifact, with sparse details available.

The video captivates me nearly as much as the song itself, its enigmatic imagery weaving a spell that rivals the track’s melodic allure. What compels that weary, older man to toil endlessly in a hamster wheel, chasing the flicker of electric light?

The hamster wheel is a potent allegory for the song’s theme of liberation through effort. The older man’s struggle to generate electricity mirrors the lyric “Bust the lock off the front door.” Freedom requires grueling work, a breaking of internal or external chains. The wheel, a symbol of Sisyphean toil, suggests the repetitive, dehumanizing routines of modern life. Beyond this, I entrust the viewer to weave his or her own interpretations, as befits the liberty of thought.

Lyrics

Now that the cay's in place
Where the sea used to be
It seems that I'm seasoned to be
In the season of the old me

I wouldn't trade my place
I got no reason to be
Weathered and withering
Like in a season of the old me

Bust the lock off the front door
Once you're outside you won't want to hide anymore
Light the light on the front porch
Once it's on you never wanna turn it off anymore
And now it's on
Now it's on

Now that the lake's in place
Where the dead sea used to be
It seems that I'm seasoned to be
In the season of the old me

I wouldn't trade my place
I got no reason to be
Weathered and withering
Like in a season of the old me

Bust the lock off the front door
Once you're outside you won't want to hide anymore
Light the light on the front porch
Once it's on you're never wanna turn it off anymore
And now it's on
And now it's on