Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers is a film that’s easy to get lost in. It’s presented with nonlinear storytelling, montages of seemingly unrelated spring breaking, and repeated lines of dialogue, all in a wash of neon colors and excess. The music helps the audience remain grounded in reality and stabilizes the chaotic world we’re immersed in.

But it’s not just the audience that needs grounding. The film follows four young college students (portrayed by Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Benson, and Rachel Korine) on their adventures to St. Petersburg, Florida for spring break. The girls desperately want a break from their monotonous reality and see the vacation as a chance for them to find themselves, let loose, and have fun. Once they arrive, the young girls get involved in some heavy partying, and then, facilitated by their new leader, Alien (James Franco), a fair amount of crime. It is a world of fantasy for them, as it is for us. To them, it is world where their responsibilities disappear and they are free to party. They tell each other to “act like it’s a videogame” before they rob a local eatery to get the money needed for the trip. But given the non-linear editing effects, use of slow motion, and the aggressive soundtrack, complete with loud gunshot noises for scene changes, one begins to question whether the events of the story are meant to be taken as fantasy entirely.

If there’s one thing Adele has reminded us in the last two years, it’s that pop listeners aren’t all mindless receptacles of EDM. We like good lyrics that we can relate to, songs with fully developed verses and choruses, and, oh yes, someone who can actually sing live, without pitch correction.

Unfortunately, it looks as if Ms. Adkins will be on hiatus for a considerable length of time, busy raising her baby boy amidst rumors that she’s heading back to the studio. Her contemporaries are few and far between: Amy Winehouse left us too soon, while Duffy and Pixie Lott both hit the sophomore slump. For listeners aching to hear blues-inflected female pop, Florence Welch and Rebecca Ferguson are currently the closest matches.

You wouldn’t expect to see Hollywood Records, a subsidiary of Disney Music Group, on a list of record companies where Adele’s audience would find an interim substitute, but it is indeed there where fans should cast their attention, to singer-songwriter ZZ Ward.

What do you do when you’re an energetic R&B/funk group really looking to make a name for yourself in these modern times? Why, you go tour with punk rockers, of course.

While it may seem like an odd pairing, a few years ago the Bad Rabbits did just that. The core group (which consists of Fredua Boakye on vocals, Salim Akram and Santiago Araujo on guitar, Graham Masser on bass, and Sheel Davé on drums) have been carefully honing on their own upbeat brand of Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis-inspired funk for years, and in order to prove themselves as both a must-see live act and a musical force to be reckoned with, the band wound up joining the Vans Warped Tour, the annual tour of non-stop punk and rock acts. Not only did the Rabbits hold their own, they also wound up earning the kudos of the other performers on tour, multiple rockers calling them out in interviews as the hands-down best act at the event.

Now, after the release of a highly-regarded EP, the band is finally putting out their long-in-the-works debut full-length American Love out to stores and touring it across the nation, starting with Karmaloop’s Verge Campus Tour sponsored by Neff Headwear and powered by eMuze, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Kendrick Lamar and Steve Aoki. To celebrate these events, Sheel Davé sat down with PopMatters’ 20 Questions, and reveals how he’s a proud first generation American, holds Glassjaw and Michael Jackson in equal regard, and how he broke one of his band member’s ankles…

Twisted in tangled sheets our narrator awakes. The calm before the storm of “The City in a Hundred Ways” was able to prolong this inevitable moment for awhile, but now that it has finally comes it seems eons ago that he was able to live without this level of suffering. “The City in a Hundred Ways” was the dream; this is the daymare. Losing a lover is an experience that many people face, but while the ubiquity of the break-up albums in popular culture prove that it’s easy to speak about this in the abstract, few, if any, ever get at the fact that the pain is rarely just cerebral. The word “goodbye” can cut with the sharpness of a swordsman’s blade and punch with the thrust of the calloused fists of a boxer. With “Things I Want to Tell You”, the core of Together We’re Stranger, Tim Bowness and Steven Wilson depict losing love as chronic pain. There are no spiteful jabs at ex-flames, sad-sack pleas for attention, or cries of anger at God, wondering why it is life must invariably come to times like this.

No, “Things I Want to Tell You” is all about realization. At first, it seems that the narrator still feels the ghost of his beloved:

Roll me over on my right side,
Roll me over slow.

Roll me over on my right side,
My left side hurts me so.

As Brand New put it in its song “Jesus Christ”, “But with nobody in your bed /The night’s hard to get through”. To use Bowness’ words, “Things I Want to Tell You” is a portrait of “death-bed isolation”. These lines are not, however, indicative of a failure to let go, which is made evident by Bowness’ wonderful vocal delivery. For the majority of the track, he sings as if he is only able to barely get out the words between swells of full-body aches; his words come slowly and drawn out. Every syllable rings loudly with his hurt. This is a picture of someone well aware of his utter isolation; he’s not calling out for his former lover, he’s calling out for anyone. This becomes especially clear when he repeats: “I’m what you left behind / I’m fading from your mind.” These are the words of a man struggling, but they also are statements of fact, which by their nature are hard to embrace, especially in a situation where every fiber of a person wants to hold on. Repeating these facts over and over again, for our narrator, is just one step in being able to hopefully move away. It’s a delicate balancing act, for these lyrics are themselves means by which he is made further solitary: “I’m fading from your mind” is a sentence that draws out the distance between the two people even further. Yet its repetition is necessary; no noble lie could ever mask this.

Mendelsohn: Today we find ourselves in a familiar position, Klinger. It’s just you, me, and another Bruce Springsteen record. Are you prepared for yet another go around? Gird your loins. This one is going to be fun.

On the record player today is Nebraska, Springsteen’s sparse, mostly acoustic effort from 1982, that finds the bleakness Springsteen had hinted at in Darkness on the Edge of Town now completely engulfing his entire world. I don’t know if there is any other way to put this so I will just say it as unequivocally as I can: I love this record. I love the sparse melody. I love the bleak tales and violence. And I love the fact that it’s just Bruce, his guitar, and a narrative and the power with which he wields his song craft.

Don’t get me wrong, I feel a little conflicted about this seeing as I’ve always been the one that could only muster a grudging respect for an artist I never felt I could connect with, especially when it came to the Springsteen that seemed to trade in mostly soaring melodramas about teen escapism and the danger of the streets. The funny thing is, if I hadn’t spent so much time digging through Born to Run and Darkness on the Edge of Town, pulling those records apart and understanding what it was about Springsteen’s music that I didn’t particularly like, I would have never been able to see how different Nebraska was from the rest of his repertoire. So there’s that. It’s now in print. I love Bruce Springsteen. Well, just Nebraska. I’m going to remain ambivalent about the rest of his catalog.