SPILL MUSIC PREMIERE: SONNY FALLS – “GOING NOWHERE”

SONNY FALLS – “GOING NOWHERE”

A SPILL EXCLUSIVE MUSIC PREMIERE

As Sonny Falls, Ryan Ensley makes rollicking and resonant rock songs that feel like self-contained journeys. The Chicago bandleader combines breezy, timeless songwriting with a bracing emotional potency that sneaks up on you. There are ample power pop hooks, driving riffs, and a consistently tasteful sensibility in these tunes that he’s been honing across four sprawling albums. His latest, Sonny Falls, feels like a new era for Ensley: not for any drastic sonic reinvention but for the fact that he took his time and didn’t rush himself for the first time in his career. The resulting 11 tracks on this album are his most cohesive, engaging, and immediate yet: a testament to Ensley’s patience and maturity as a songwriter.

Sonny Falls is an album about taking stock of your own, peeling back from the surrounding pressures, and figuring out who you are. “Going Nowhere” best captures these questions. It’s a bruising rocker that grapples with being a musician. He sings, “It was summer in Manhattan / Touring on a record we made in / A Pilsen basement / Aimless ambition / I wonder if I’m going nowhere I heard that place is kinda cool.” The track is the emotional centerpiece of the record and thanks to Ensley’s band firing on all cylinders also its most potent offering. “There just comes a point where you try and see what you’ve accomplished and you wonder whether or not what you’re doing makes sense,” says Ensley. “There’s a lot about pursuing music as a career that doesn’t make sense but I’ve recognized there’s no other options that make sense in other directions either. So, at this point it’s really not even my decision anymore, it’s just what I gotta do.”

ARTIST QUOTE

“Going nowhere is about trying to reconcile the difference between where you’re at and where you want to be, while also recognizing you may be exactly where you should be. For me, there’s always been a feeling of perpetual restlessness and with this song I’m trying to tell myself that living in the moment is the only option. Once in the moment, though, I’m confronted with the subconscious realities of where the restlessness comes from, and it’s up to me to pinpoint them in order to find peace. There’s nowhere left to go — I have to go nowhere, and in that stillness I can move forward.”

Sonny Falls
Sonny Falls
(Earth Libraries)
Release Date: March 1, 2024

Artist Links

Background Photo Credit: Emma Bilyeu