LISTEN: Looms Share ‘On My Back’

New EP, Big Dream, out Sept. 19

August 15, 2025August 15, 2025 Ron Hart 0 Comments Big Dream, Brooklyn, Looms, Nels Cline, Paper Garden Records

Today, Brooklyn indie rockers Looms have released “On My Back,” the wistful second single from their forthcoming Big Dream EP.

The song itself was buoyed by personal battles frontman Sharif Mekawy was experiencing with alcoholism.

“Before, during, and after COVID, my drinking ramped up to a really scary point,” he explains. “There’s a good five years of my life that really slipped away from me in a lot of ways. Thankfully, I was able to quit, and wrote this song as a recounting and reminder of what I was going through with my drinking and how it affected my relationships.

“Writing this song was a big part of how I processed my experiences of recovery and self-reflection,” he continues. “It was a dark time full of many unknowns. It’s one of those songs where I didn’t really understand what I was writing about until much later. At the time, I was just trying to get through it.”

Looms “On My Back,” Paper Garden Records 2025

The Big Dream EP sees the band — rounded out by Harry Morris Jr., A. Hammond Murray, Louis Cozza and Fred Copeman — returning to their go-to studio Gearbox Recording to work with longtime engineer Ryan Ball. And one of the most exciting moments of the sessions was the incorporation of an unused 2018 guitar overdub from Wilco’s Nels Cline that appears on “I Killed a Man.”

“The energy was really great,” Mekawy asserts. “We always record live and overdub as needed, and it was the first time we had Fred in the studio for one of those sessions since he joined the band. The contribution from Nels actually came from a session back in 2018 when he guested on ‘Eclipse’ from [the band’s 2019 LP] The Way Up. I was messing with a take that was barely used in the original song, but just happened to be in the same key as ‘I Killed a Man.’ The rhythm and timing of it just matched so well, it was almost as if it was written specifically for this song, and not seven years earlier. I asked Nels if he was cool with me recycling this take, and he said ‘go for it!’”

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