Sugar Lime Blue New Single "Burn It" off the album 'The Black Bird Sessions'

Sugar Lime Blue’s “Burn It,” shoots out of the gate with one funky, soulful groove that combines electric guitar and organ, over an insistent beat. These elements introduce an equally soulful female lead vocal. While dance-y, “Burn It” is by no means celebratory. Instead, you may call this a protest song, put to a beat.

It begins by the narrator recalling a visit to “the other side of the city.” There, she “saw all God’s children standing in line for their bread.” Right away, we realize this is a song that contrasts the ‘haves’ with the ‘have nots.’ Presumably, the narrator is one of the ‘haves,’

sadly learning how the other half of her local community lives. And these people are not living well.

The song’s chorus states: “They said: Take that house and burn it down.”

The ‘they’ in this statement, one guesses, is the government. The ‘theys’ always are, or so it seems. Call it the establishment, the government, The Man…however you want to put it, it’s the people in charge, and are ones not always looking out for the best interests of a

community’s citizens.

At the end of the chorus, the band sings, “Never be the same anyway.”

This last line expresses a rather fatalist point of view. It’s as though destroying a house – or even a whole community – won’t be any great loss – at least to some who are in charge.

The next verse talks about how the boogie man came out to get someone, only for that someone to learn how this boogie man was actually family. Could it be that these governmental entities were/are people from the same color or ethnic group being destroyed? It comes off like an indictment of government, in general. It’s not one color group against another, but is, instead, more of a class struggle. Once someone rises

above a tough life living at the bottom, they begin to treat the remaining bottom dwellers just as cruelly as they were treated. We don’t like to believe this happens, but in reality, it does. Oh, how soon some people can forget their impoverished early years. Now that they’re on top, they may only care about staying there and stepping on anyone and

everyone below them.

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About midway through the track, there’s a fine electric guitar solo.

Sugar Lime Blue sometimes gets labeled a jam band, and the instrumental playing during this part of the song reveals a little of the group’s overall approach to creating music. This solo is longer than your typical pop song instrumental solo.

The song’s next verse expresses empathy for these ones being mistreated.

“Your dreams might fly if they weren’t anchored to the ground,” one line goes. It’s as though physical circumstances are preventing some people from living truly good lives. Poverty can certainly be a prison, it’s true. The last chorus is changed to, “I say: Take that house and burn it down.” Perhaps, this is our narrator speaking, and calling out – not for burning down the impoverished ones – for the burning down of an unempathetic government. Burning down can go both ways, after all.

“Burn It” amounts to a song that burns as heatedly lyrically, as it does musically, and is truly a hot new track.