Wilmington Songwriter, Reece Ratliff, Releases “Checkered Vans”
For 17-year-old pop singer-songwriter Reece Ratliff, COVID-19 and quarantine has not slowed down his ambitions and career. On Friday, July 17th, Ratliff will release the first single off his debut studio album Compass, titled “Checkered Vans.” The melodic indie-pop track has all the ingredients for a hit summer song: anthemic choruses, synth melodies, and vulnerability and heartbreak.
Co-written with producer Matt Kass and renowned Nashville songwriter Chris Roberts, “Checkered Vans” tells the story of a classic teenage relationship. After finding a pair of shoes left behind in a breakup, Ratliff is forced to relive the memories of the time spent in love. Between pleas for a second chance, he remembers “The ones that made you dance on the hood of your dad’s new Benz / In the rain, our song on the radio, you and me holding hands / Damn those checkered vans.”
Ratliff shares that the song is not based on a true story per se, but the shoes represent all the little movie moments you experience when you fall in love for the first time. “The ‘buried deep in my closet, with the notes you used to write’ line, for example, was inspired by a girl I dated who would always leave these cute little origami notes for me to find,” he explains. “I love having little references like that in my songs where even when we’re writing on a much larger, more universal theme, there are still little pieces of my own story for people to pick out.”
This February, Ratliff started writing and recording the 12-track album in Nashville with producer Matt Kass, who Ratliff met on a Nashville songwriters retreat. A native of Wilmington, Delaware, Ratliff fell in love with Nashville’s music scene. “Nashville’s really special because it’s such a collaborative town, everyone wants to write together and help each other out, it’s just a super positive vibe all around. It’s also crazy coming from Wilmington, Delaware, a city with a handful of venues and a few hundred musicians, to a city where every Uber driver has a regular gig at one of the hundreds of venues in town and everyone has their own professional home studios. It’s a town that lives and breathes music,” he says. He also hopes to attend college in the area.
Unfortunately, Ratliff only finished about half of the album before COVID-19 changed life as we know it, and it became impossible to travel back and forth from Wilmington to Nashville. Instead of pausing the process, he persevered on and built a remote vocal studio at his father’s office space in West Chester, Pennsylvania.
Compass was inspired by Ratliff’s East Coast tour last year supporting his first EP, I’ll Take The Fall. “Every night, I wrote down the stories from my travels in a journal with a compass emblazoned on the front, and those stories became the inspiration for a number of the tracks on the record,” he explains. “The album is a coming-of-age, a celebration of this crazy journey we call life. I would say this is both the most proud and the most nervous I’ve ever been about a set of songs: proud because I’m confident that these songs represent me and my narrative, but also nervous because this is the most true, authentic representation I can put out into the world.” Compass will not be released for another few months, but Ratliff plans to release an additional two singles after “Checkered Vans.” Find out where you can hear Ratliff’s new music by visiting his website here. Follow him on Instagram and Twitter. Listen to “Checkered Vans” below:
Lauren Silvestri has been a music journalist for the past 10 years.
She has a huge passion for rock n' roll, the Philly music scene and independent music venues.
Twitter / Email
Leave a Comment