On album highlight ‘Winter Constellations’ Odetta says, “This was the first to track, last to crack. The early demos of this song were always built around a banjo accompaniment but the lack of quality home studio resources left the chordal content feeling limp and metallic. Freedom’s bag of tricks – including crayola-colored boom whackers & a homemade xylophone with slate and glass panes – brought so much life and whimsy to the arrangement, requiring a warmer layer of support than my cheap-o-banjo could offer. Luckily, Wyatt had fallen deep into the rabbit hole of synth magic, and with a mad-scientist’s grin, suggested we “feed the DNA” to his Moog, then scroll through our options. This breakthrough moment was an ultimate game-changer for the record, and frankly, my personal musicianship: by converting the banjo audio to midi, we were able to twiddle knobs til we found the most perfectly warm digital texture while keeping my finger-picked gestures and individual impulses intact. The solution arose from being absolutely stumped and subsequently inspired many revisions on the record – an excellent reminder of why we love the craft!”

The post Odetta Hartman shares new single ‘Winter Constellations’ appeared first on She Makes Music.

When discussing the new single, Odetta says: “This Grimes-inspired track first originated as a sassy banjo ditty, written backstage in-between sets in San Francisco. Its next phase jumped into an early 2000s rock vibe (å la The White Stripes) with the help of bandmates Lucy Arnell & Wyatt Bertz while on tour with Lola Kirke. In its final combined iteration – saturated with lyrical references to fairy tales & my favorite musical, Gypsy – it became a bombastic dance bop, a tongue-in-cheek pep talk, a vaudeville striptease, a whip cracking manifesto.”

Speaking of the accompanying video, Odetta continues: “Inspired by the Wizard of Oz technicolor transition, the music video for ‘Goldilocks’ opens in the same black & white locale of ‘Dr. No’, but now the developing swansongsworld blossoms from Catskills Gothic to Vaudeville Gimmick. The lyrics to the femme power anthem directly reference Gypsy (“let me entertain you, let me make smile, I can do a few tricks, some old and then some new tricks I’m very versatile – and if you’re real good, I’ll make you feel good, I want your spirits to fly”) so we wanted to bring some old school stage silliness into the visual accompaniment.”

The post Odetta Hartman shares new single & video ‘Goldilocks’ appeared first on She Makes Music.