Part folk-rock opera, part personal exploration, Daylight, the long-awaited, full-length album from indie-folk artist Angela Josephine, is scheduled for release on May 4, 2018. Featuring Josephine’s talents on a host of instruments (guitar, mandolin, hammered dulcimer, piano, Wurlitzer, organ, synth), the album’s songs range from the cinematic to the subdued, inspired by a season of care-giving and subsequent loss. Josephine gravitated to her origins, the rugged landscape of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and her childhood home.
Recorded in Detroit and Ann Arbor with producer Chris Bathgate, the experience gave Josephine the chance to plumb the depths of her creativity and explore soundscapes to which she is naturally drawn. Today, she unveils “Go Easy,” a track from Daylight, featuring vocals contributed by Bathgate. “Originally, ‘Go Easy’ was a punchy, sexy, guitar-driven song, and words just emerged as I sat playing one night,” she explains. “What presented itself was a conflict that seemed to have a masculine and feminine voice. The masculine was saying ‘go easy on me’ as in, ‘whatever is coming around the bend, take it slow.’ The feminine was contending ‘it ain’t easy on me’ as in, ‘I’m going around that bend, and I’m going now.’”
“My songs tend to be self-fulfilling prophecies where I am getting at deeper truths, and if this was about a relationship, I was mildly concerned what it meant for my marriage,” she reveals. “Did I have some sort of nascent need to move on? However, as the album concept evolved, I dug into the truth of the narrative and saw how it fit with the internal ‘push and pull’ that happens when I have to let go of old ways and embrace new. Eventually, those opposing forces come into a kind of symbiosis allowing me to move forward. This goes for relationships as well. Who knows if the characters are breaking up or getting back together? It may seem like they are splitting up when speaking on their own, but when their voices come together with the major shift, you don’t know,” she adds. “They could be in agreement, and then, maybe not.”
With spare instrumentation and unfussy production that evokes the heaviness, as well as the tenderness surrounding relational conflict, “Go Easy” is a contemplative heartstring-tugger of epic proportions. Without further ado, Mother Church Pew proudly presents “Go Easy” by Angela Josephine featuring Chris Bathgate:
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