Frankie Rose - L.T.Leif - Annie Stokes
Frankie Rose - Sixteen Ways.
"Counting the ways that things can unexpectedly fall apart on you before anything has even happened yet! The song 'Sixteen Ways' is about anticipation and getting your hopes up while simultaneously making lists in your head about how it can’t possibly work in out in your favor” -Frankie Rose
"Sixteen Ways" (out today) is the second single from Frankie Rose's new LP Love as Projection, her fifth overall, due March 10.
After spending nearly two decades establishing herself across New York and Los Angeles independent music circles, Frankie Rose returns after six years with a fresh form, aesthetic, and ethos embodied in her new full-length album Love As Projection, out March 10 on Slumberland. Celebrated by countless critical and cultural outlets over the years for her expansive approach to songwriting, lush atmospherics, and transcendent vocal melodies and harmonies, Love As Projection is a reintroduction of her established style through the new lens of contemporary electronic pop.
Painstakingly written, recorded, and engineered through some of the most tumultuous times in history, this new collection of songs harnesses the power and propulsion of Frankie’s early DIY-centric punk days without losing sight of the immersive, dreamlike world-building she’s been known for in recent years. Her love of new wave hooks and post-punk drive remain omnipresent, elevated by her utilization of modern production and an improved, polished palate of state-of-the-art instrumentation.
It’s more than a rebirth, a refinement, a resurgence – it’s a culmination of influence, a newly-defined scope using the tools at her disposal, a long-form project that was heavily considered for half of a decade – resulting in the most personal and accessible collection of art-pop that Frankie has delivered yet, propelling her signature melodies and dense, ethereal harmonies into the future.
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L.T.Leif - Gentle Moon.
Musician and artist L.T.Leif has shared "Gentle Moon" the opening track to the new LP, Come Back to Me, but Lightly, out now on Lost Map Records and OK Pal.
"Gentle Moon" is a long-distance love song, sung across lockdown and two seas. There is both an acceptance of distance, and a deep, unspoken longing for something different. It speaks to the push and pull of relationship, the elliptical and powerful movements of coming together and moving away again.
Ultimately, it's about getting thrown off of your own orbit by the needs or ideas of others, and that hard work of finding yourself again through your own body. Long treasured collaborator, Dallin Ursenbach, recorded this duet onto his cell phone while in isolation. I love how it touches on the spookiness of digital interactions, especially with someone known deeply, tangibly, and through your real life lived.
Come Back to Me, but Lightly is in large part inspired by the Northern sun, with references to celestial objects and the distances therein contained, from the perspective of a human here standing and thinking on the earth. I was drawn to these as both symbols of longing and warmth, and of shared experience or connection across the abstraction of distance.
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Over the course of the pandemic, during Annie’s first pregnancy, she took an online course on medicinal herbalism and learned that the vast majority of what Western gardeners consider "weeds" are actually medicinal plants with physical and spiritual attributes. “At the time, my community was struggling with political and cultural differences that seemed destined to tear us apart,” shares Annie. “I started to think about what it would look and feel like to love the weeds in your yard, and the people in your life, without trying to curate or change them.”
“Goldenrod” comes from Annie’s upcoming EP, Wild Rose, out March 2023. Annie Stokes is a dark Americana songstress and folk lyricist from the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in northern Virginia. Raised on musical theater and her mom's oldies, she began writing poetry and short stories at a young age. When she picked up a guitar at age 20, everything clicked and she fulfilled her destiny of becoming an emotional millennial troubadour.
"I like a hook, and I like a song that dredges up specific memories and feelings, rather than generic rushes of serotonin," she says of her songwriting style. "From the beginning, I would get inspired by snippets of conversations I would hear, or certain smells, or little moments."
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