After announcing her forthcoming album earlier this month and releasing two singles ‘Bloodlines’ and ‘Hedonist’, Brooklyn-based queer indie artist Gemma Laurence shares the third single off her upcoming album, We Were Bodies Underwater. ‘Harbor’ is a song about finding someone you feel truly safe with, but reaching the moment where you know it’s time to let them go, at least for now. It’s a song about trusting that if something is right, it will return one day.
On the single, Laurence shares “Harbors are inherently transient spaces. They’re safe spaces, but things are always changing in a harbor — ships come and go every day. Sometimes they return to the same harbor, sometimes they won’t. The only real constant is change, of welcoming something in and then letting it go again. I wanted to write a song about that. ‘Harbor’ is a very romantic and hopeful song, but there’s also a very deep and profound grief at the heart of it. It’s all about saying goodbye and clinging to this hope that someone, one day, will come back. In the same song, to say “I know that you love me true and through / Still you told me you wished I were someone new / Couldn’t stare down your grief when it looked at you / Buckled under the weight trying to hold me too” and then to end with this proclamation “Sweet thing, I’d wait a lifetime for you / I don’t think I could find someone who sees me like you do” is honestly just… devastating. It’s about recognizing that things aren’t working, but you’ll still do anything to hold onto this person. This song really finds me grappling with this huge uncertainty in the aftermath of a breakup. And it was a breakup with someone I truly believed to be the love of my life for a long time. It’s hard to listen back to this song where I am now, but I’m glad I captured the feeling when I did. Because like, how beautiful is it to feel that deeply at all? What a gift.”