[Cover photo credit to Tasha Miller]
Roots duo Allison de Groot & Tatiana Hargreaves have released a new single, “I Would Not Live Always”, from their upcoming album Hurricane Clarice. The new single is taken from a mysterious shape note song that Tatiana discovered in her research.
Here’s what Hargreaves has to say about the song:
We originally wanted to name the album “I would not live always” because it captures the dark apocalyptic vibe. The lyrics feel very surreal and have some almost sci-fi like imagery: “and see soft unfolding those portals of gold, all around us arrayed in their beauty behold”. We picked and chose our own lyrics from the poem to kind of create our own story line. I feel like it is about our own smallness in this world —again, in reference to climate apocalypse. Death is near, I would not live always…
The duo recorded their new album, Hurricane Clarice, which arrives on March 25th from Free Dirt Records, last summer during an unprecedented heat wave as Portland, Oregon burned under the sun. With the threat of climate change surrounding everything (and at the suggestion of their producer Phil Cook), they turned to their own families’ history, including Allison’s Ukrainian roots in Canada and Tatiana’s Jewish roots, and to the stringband music community which has always “held them aloft”.
The album became a “direct infusion of centuries of matrilineal folk wisdom, a fiery breath of apocalyptic grandmother energy”.
