Singled Out: Sara Milonovich & Daisycutter's What We Did with the Place

Sara Milonovich has given fans a taste of her forthcoming album with the release of the new single "What We Did with the Place." To celebrate we asked her to tell us about the song. Here is the story:

This song started as an incredibly sarcastic retort that I really wanted to say out loud in the moment, but didn't. Sonically it's meant to be a rocking honky-tonk soundtrack to a moving party - picture artists being priced out of places they helped make trendy, all having a dance party while loading a moving van.

I moved to the lower Hudson Valley nearly 20 years ago, when the town demographics were rapidly shifting, artists were constantly creating new works, events, and gatherings, and money was not ubiquitous. You could go see friends' gallery openings or bands on a weekend and run into Pete Seeger in the post office on Monday. It wasn't long before the New York Times started declaring certain towns in the area a "weekender's upstate paradise," and between the resulting influx of tourists on the weekends and young families moving up from the city, things started changing pretty fast.

The town embraced the attention, the boost to the economy, and the investment dollars, but nobody really thought about what the long term might look like. It wasn't long before the price of housing was no longer affordable for the artists and blue collar residents, including service industry workers and children who literally grew up in the area (right now the rental market is almost at Manhattan-level prices), and the city now feels far less like a community and more like a playground for the affluent looking for an upstate getaway, at least on the weekends. Typical Gentrification 101, which seems to be happening more and more, whether Beacon or Kingston or Asheville or Nashville or Austin.

Having grown up on a farm in a rural part of upstate New York (my hometown is still a very depressed former mill town), seeing the hipsters moving in (usually from Brooklyn/sometimes Manhattan/occasionally from elsewhere) "cosplaying" country life in brand new Carhartts and vintage feed jackets was something I found incredibly jarring. I ran into one guy years ago who had a Dekalb seed jacket. I said, "Oh, cool jacket." He said, "Yeah, I got it because it says Dekalb, like the street in Brooklyn, but I don't know what it is." I told him, "It's a seed company. My father used to plant their corn. They got bought out by Monsanto in the late '90s and are now owned by Bayer." Him: "Oh, whatever. I just liked the color." That's where I got the "lumberjack Kerouac" line - and the story about "last time I saw a jacket like that I was back on the farm" - it was true.

Now older couples and second homeowners are part of the equation, and it was probably one of that crowd that I overheard while sitting at a coffeeshop one day a few years ago. They were just taking up every inch of space they possibly could, gushing to the person behind the counter about what a "cute" place this is to visit, how it's so nice to have all these "adorable" shops - which apart from coffee, didn't really sell anything that serviced the locals; it was more like candles, succulents, and trite home furnishings - and how it's such a wonderful "artsy" town to visit for the weekend and just the perfect getaway. They were being so entitled and totally obnoxious about it, and I just wanted to yell, "HOPE YOU LIKE WHAT WE DID WITH THE PLACE!" I didn't at the time, but I get to do it now, only louder and set to music.

The song also hopefully deals with the ambiguity and the very grey areas of not being a totally separate onlooker - artists are part of what drives gentrification in any area, and that always means displacing someone else who was there first, before we ourselves get priced out. And the whole concept of "settlement" for hundreds of years has been based on the displacement of Indigenous peoples who were there first. So there's really no such thing as an innocent bystander, and I wanted to address that in the song, too.

It's meant to be a bitingly sarcastic commentary on gentrification, change, time, identity, and who thinks they're entitled to a place.

Hearing is believing. Now that you know the story behind the song, listen and watch for yourself below and learn more here

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