Daily Dose: She Keeps Bees, "Coyote"

Daily Dose is your daily source for the song you absolutely, positively need to hear every day. Curated by the Paste Music Team.

After five years, She Keeps Bees are back.

The New York rock duo are returning with a new album, Kinship (out May 10 on Ba Da Bing), their first since 2014’s Eight Houses. The announcement arrives with the lead single, “Coyote,” which is premiering today (March 1) here at Paste. Listen and watch the accompanying video below.

Kinship finds Jessica Larrabee, who lost her father in the years since Eight Houses, and partner Andy LaPlant reflecting on loss, nature and rebirth. After trading Brooklyn for a cottage upstate, the couple wrote and recorded the album in five months with help from friends: bassist Kevin Sullivan and guitarist Penn Sultan of Last Good Tooth, plus multi-instrumentalist Eric Maltz.

On “Coyote,” Larrabee takes cues from Katie Lee (whom she also references in the song), a musician and activist who penned a collection of environmentally themed folk songs in 1964 called Folk Songs of the Colorado River, in which she vocally condemned the damming of that waterway. Larrabee’s lyrics aren’t as specific, but she recognizes the power of our planet’s rivers, oceans and streams. ”“Carved by rain, by rivers, by streams,” she sings over lightly strummed guitar and beautifully restrained strings. “Flood the canyons / Drown everything / Ignore the rules of balance.” “Coyote” crescendoes as footage of canyons, brooks, birds and, then, humans floating along a river flash on the screen.

Daily Dose: She Keeps Bees, “Coyote”