Some memories stay with you long after childhood ends. For Pawnshop Motel, “Hole in the Screen Door” takes one of those memories and turns it into a song about family, repetition, and the helpless feeling of watching the same patterns play out again and again.
The Denver indie rock duo, made up of Matt and Stew, have built their music around real stories and lived experiences. Since forming in 2021, they have developed a guitar-driven sound influenced by the likes of Cage the Elephant, The Black Keys, Kings of Leon and Spoon, while keeping honest songwriting at the center.
“Hole in the Screen Door” takes that honesty to a particularly personal place.
The song was inspired by an incident from childhood, when an argument between one member’s parents ended with his father shooting a hole through the computer his mother was working on. But rather than focusing entirely on that single moment, the track looks at what came afterward. The same arguments continued, the same tensions resurfaced, and, from a child’s perspective, there was little choice but to watch the cycle repeat.
That feeling of being trapped became the emotional center of the song. Pawnshop Motel isn’t trying to leave listeners feeling equally boxed in. Instead, “Hole in the Screen Door” offers recognition to anyone who grew up watching unhealthy patterns repeat around them, turning an intensely personal memory into something others might see their own experiences within.
The track also shows the collaborative approach behind Pawnshop Motel. Both Matt and Stew are songwriters, alternating who takes the lead on each release before bringing an almost-completed song to the other to finish together.
For “Hole in the Screen Door,” finding the right version took time. The duo worked through five different arrangements, experimenting and reshaping the track before settling on the final result. That willingness to pull a song apart and rebuild it has become part of a productive year for the band, with this marking their seventh release.
The previous single, “The Haunting” explored the difficulty of escaping memories after a relationship ends, but “Hole in the Screen Door” reaches much further back. It’s another reminder of what Pawnshop Motel do particularly well: taking the experiences that are difficult to talk about and finding a place for them inside a song.
https://open.spotify.com/track/4NbnVcrpFR7q43RbI3W4hn?si=2f11ff886c2b4616
