[Cover photo credit to David-Simon Dayan]

David Franklin Courtright has has shared his new single “in a tangerine light” (ft. Angel Olsen), the final single from his new album, Brutal Tenderness, out this Friday, August 8th, 2025, via TODO. The new album is “a work about radical tenderness and joy in the face of sadness, loss, and fear.”

Written and recorded over a span of eight years and three continents, the work “seeks to explore the seemingly opposing forces (or bipolarity) of brutality and tenderness”.

Courtright says:

When I toured Europe with Angel Olsen I usually closed the set with ‘in a tangerine light’, and at our last show on the tour in Santiago de Compostello, (which is also the end of the Camino trail) she made up her part backstage and came out and sang it with me. About a year later she tracked her vocals in my Echo Park bedroom with my friend, the late great Eric Littmann, who engineered. I still can’t believe it happened at all, and every time I hear her voice with mine it still floods me with emotion. I feel so lucky to have her on the song!

Courtright continues about the new track:

It’s about the wisdom and perspective that comes after a relationship falls apart, where you are able to forgive your partner (and yourself) and acknowledge the person you’ve become because of how the relationship shaped you. Who would I be if we had never fallen in love?’ When you’re able to put your weapons down and know the love was real even if it didn’t work out. It felt like the perfect end to the record.

Brutal Tenderness is described as “a process of reckoning with a life as a queer boy who couldn’t pass and was never allowed to hide, of setting free that gleefully expressive cartwheeling child who was put into hiding, locked beneath a veneer of false masculinity, and entombed in a character to avoid persecution. It is a triumphant and harrowing reclamation.”

Tour Dates:
8/7 – New York, NY – Union Pool
8/14 – Atlanta, GA – Commune
9/22 – London, UK – Elephant’s Head