3 Feet High & RISING: LA Singer-songwriter Otis English Unveils Ben Folds & Fall Out Boy-evoking "Young Kids, Old Love" (Crooked Paintings EP)



"I remember writing this song after hearing like five love songs back-to-back on the radio that were all about "staying young forever" or "never wanting to grow up." It was my first time realizing how unnatural that idea felt to me. I wanted to write a song that said, "f*ck that; let's grow old and learn together and become better with age." Nobody wants to just come out and say how sh*tty being 20 and broke is, so [I'll] do it," Los Angeles singer-songwriter Otis English recently told IMPOSE on the heels of his WHAMS-produced debut single, "Young Kids, Old Love." KLUTCH, within an emailed press release, went as far as to compare English to New Hampshire-bred singer-songwriter Ray LaMontagne and buzz-worthy English Electro-Pop band The 1975; although, I would more so compare "Young Kids, Old Love" to the likes of piano-aided Pop-Rockers Fall Out Boy, Andrew McMahon's long-abandoned project Jack's Mannequin, Swedish hit-making super-group Miike Snow, and Alt. Rock forefathers Ben Folds Five. "Otis [English's] upbringing was far from ordinary: his history reads more like a chain of mishaps and tragedies than it does the upbringing of a songwriter. From accidentally burning down his childhood home to watching his father's health drastically deteriorate while living out of his car, Otis doesn't glaze over the negative and the challenging parts of life," English's rather colorful KLUTCH press release continues. While Otis English readies his "cinematic, catchy, inspired, [yet] unapologetically gritty" debut EP for Crooked Paintings, "Young Kids, Old Love" has somehow already managed to rise to #3 (or maybe even higher, by now) on Hype Machine's digi-charts, as well as reaching #20 on Spotify's Global Viral 50 chart, which as Otis himself fittingly proclaimed "is pretty gosh dang cool!"

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"THE MCDONALD'S MAN" CALABASAS, CALIFORNIA TEXT BY KANYE WEST PHOTOGRAPHY BY NABIL (FRANK OCEAN'S BOYS DON'T CRY/BLONDE ZINE)