Sometimes I ask my wife for help in writing these things. Sometimes I ask my cat for help, but tonight Fluffy had a previous engagement to stare out the front window at the bugs on the other side of the screen. So when I ask my wife what I should say about this song, she said, “Just tell them it’s a good song.” I’m going to turn the volume up a stroke – this blog goes to 11, you know – and say “You’ll Never Know Me,” by HOTEL, is a very good song from a great singer.

“You’ll Never Know Me” is dirt simple, lo-fi bedroom rock: just a couple of guitars, one acoustic and an electric with the chorus pedal – like this blog – turned up to 11, and a vocal that is defiant with just enough charm to make it beautiful. There’s a statement of fuck you independence here. If you ignore it, you’re missing the point of the song. But at its core, “You’ll Never Know Me” is power pop with a classic riff.

HOTEL is… well, I dunno who HOTEL is, other than a youngish person who makes, to quote the Bandcamp profile, “angsty bedroom rock in Nashville, Tennessee.” I’m not sure about the angst; I don’t hear it. I hear a person who is very confident, especially on the musical side. Like many new artists, HOTEL may have a slight identity issue name-wise. There are at least ten artists on Bandcamp recording under some variation of “hotel,” including a hip-hop Hotel in Memphis and a captialized improvisational version in Tokyo. Oh well, all the good names were taken a long time ago. For those of you keeping score at home, this is the HOTEL with the good voice.

“You’ll Never Know Me” was released last month as a single. It reappeared today in the new Sematary Records compilation, Sematary Forever. It’s an interesting 11-track collection featuring a plethora of musical styles. Like HOTEL’s voice and the number of songs on the album, my vocabulary goes to eleven. In addition to “You’ll Never Know Me,” we recommend “Beater” by Noah Roth (get ready for some noise rock!), “Mood Ring” by Graves, and “Blue” by Dog Mom, which we previously featured as a Song of the Day.

You can support deserving independent musicians like HOTEL by visiting the artist’s Bandcamp page and downloading your favorite tracks. Which, in HOTEL’s case, would be all of them. Also check out the releases from Sematary Records, “a record label focused on giving Queer and POC youth a larger platform to distribute their art.” There’s some good music in there.

Be sure to follow HOTEL on Instagram. And follow Sematary Records on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.