Today's Song of the Day, as chosen by John Richards, host of the Morning Show on KEXP, is "Everything is Simple" by Widowspeak, from the 2022 album The Jacket on Captured Tracks.
Brooklyn-based duo Widowspeak are gearing up to release their sixth studio album, The Jacket, on March 11th via longtime label Captured Tracks. Initially intended to be a concept album based on a fictional band, The Jacket morphed into a more personal and biographical meditation on performance and past lives.
The record’s lead single, “Everything is Simple,” is a gentle alt-folk strummer that sees frontwoman Molly Hamilton wistfully ruminate on constantly shifting perspectives. “Everything is simple 'til it's not,” is the phrase that Hamilton hauntingly bookends the song with, describing a whole variety of possible situations. She had this to say about the meaning behind the “Everything is Simple”:
“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.”
The song comes with a bullriding-themed video directed by OTIUM. Watch it below.
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