John Singer, Staff Writer

“The value of a human being resides in their ability to give, not in their ability to receive, which makes every human being here as valuable as a human being can be, because you’re giving each other to one another just by being here, so thanks for coming out.”  Perpetual Care frontman Norton Lucas greets his crowds with this speech before each performance, as a thanks and a reminder.  

The band has racked up a small local following playing bars like The Wormhole and Barrelhouse South, as well as local house venues such as The Cake Factory and Morningwood Los Angeles and is planning to release their first single Making Friends by November.  

Lucas is joined by Molly Messinger on keyboards and harmonies and Darien Converse on bass, all of which attended Armstrong, Messinger and Convers pursuing Applied Physics degrees, with Lucas studying Sociology.

The group’s talents may come from the fact that the trio have been playing music individually most of their lives.

“I’ve been singing forever, since I was like two, as soon as I could talk I was singing. I took piano lessons when I was like 7, but I wasn’t really into it, then when I was 15 or 16 I started playing piano again, and wrote some songs, then I met Darien.  But I think I wrote my first song at age 11,” Messinger says.

All three say they enjoyed their time at Armstrong, Lucas with particular enthusiasm,

“I think Armstrong is a great college, I would like to see their Liberal Arts program expand, but what’s there for Liberal Arts is fantastic, the professors they have are incredible. I don’t know what they’ve got for Calculus and Physics but Rinalducci, Kevin Jennings, Erik Nordenhaug… you know, Laura Seifert, Estabrook, all of them know what they’re doing, and I really love it there,” Lucas elaborated.

When asked why they chose to pursue degrees outside of music, Messinger replies, “I don’t want to teach music.” Converse adds, “As much money as you’re spending for a college education, I can teach myself music, and how to play music, but physics, I tried to look into it myself, and it was just too difficult, so when it came time for that, it was the help from the professor as well as being in that environment with other people who are interested in physics, and want to talk about physics, that really helped me to understand it.”

The subject matter of the group’s songs takes most of their inspiration from real life events and deal with topics spanning from international politics to struggles with addiction and religion. The bands Facebook page describes them as “A globally conscious acid folk-rock band that points to the absurdity of the evils of consumerism.”

“All the songs are pretty much about how I don’t really like the way that humans are behaving and how I’m behaving,” Lucas remarks.

When asked about the inspiration for the song “Serious Nonsense”, Lucas says “as far as Serious Nonsense goes, Imani who I met in New Orleans, she said Serious Nonsense a lot.  If some really messed up stuff happened in society, she would say that’s some serious nonsense.  So I wrote this song Serious Nonsense while I was there about that kind of revolutionary spirit, looking at the world and seeing all of its inadequacies.  And that’s what we’re looking at right now is just a bunch of serious nonsense because it’s nonsense, but it has serious detrimental effects on human lives, there are men that have to hold their sons without any arms and legs, dead from an explosion in Iraq, or the middle east, because of all of this bullshit and nonsense that’s around us right now. The shirts on our backs and the food that we eat, just like us, these things are cheap. And people get killed over the bullshit, you know, people get killed cause we want to get to work faster, people get killed over the fact that we want to buy a pair of shoes for twenty dollars, and that’s why this song is called Serious Nonsense.”

When asked if there’s anything they’d like to add, Messinger chimes in, “definitely mention that we’re going to have things like moon bounces and dunk tanks at all our upcoming releases. It’s gonna be a party.”  

“It’s going to be a Perpetual Care Fair,” Converse affirms.

You can catch Perpetual Care at the Foundery Coffee Pub in downtown Savannah on September 10 at the Suicide Prevention Day benefit.