Widowspeak Announce New Album The Jacket, Share “Everything Is Simple”
Photo by Alexa Viscius
New York City duo Widowspeak announced their sixth studio album Tuesday, sharing lead single “Everything Is Simple” ahead of The Jacket’s March 11 release on Captured Tracks. The contemplative new track from singer/songwriter Molly Hamilton and guitarist Robert Earl Thomas arrives alongside an OTIUM-directed music video, in which Hamilton performs the song at a rodeo.
Written in the months surrounding the release of Widowspeak’s acclaimed 2020 album Plum, The Jacket began as a concept record about a fictional band called Le Tex, becoming more abstract as it rounded into form, but remaining deliberately self-referential. Hamilton and Thomas recorded it at The Diamond Mine in Long Island with co-producer Homer Steinweiss (Daptone Records), with contributions from founding drummer Michael Stasiak, bassist J.D. Sumner and piano/keyboard player Michael Hess.
Widowspeak say of “Everything Is Simple” in a statement:
At the beginning of something (a relationship, a project, a job, a new place) you have this very pure feeling toward it. Everything feels less complicated because you’re oriented wholly toward that potential. It’s undefined, and that makes it easier to understand, because you can’t see the problems yet. As time goes on, you learn more, you experience more, and you see where the limitations exist: not even necessarily ones imposed upon you, but where you draw your own lines. Maybe you can’t see what was holding you back until it’s in the past, and by then others’ perspectives contradict your own. Everyone is constructing their own versions of reality. The song was originally going to feed into the drama of the imaginary band, but it’s about our own band, too. I was thinking about how I’m an inherently unreliable narrator about my own life, and at the same time maybe there are no “true” stories.
OTIUM adds of the “Everything Is Simple” video, “The concept is centered around the idea of trying, knowing that even if things turn out differently than you intend, the very act itself is what you are striving to achieve.”
Having recently concluded a fall 2021 U.S. tour alongside Turnover, Widowspeak will support Clairo at select shows this April, with a headlining tour of their own soon to be announced.
Check out the “Everything Is Simple” video and Widowspeak’s 2021 Daytrotter session below, and find the details of The Jacket and the band’s tour dates further down.
