Check out the new single from POSTDATA, the solo project of Paul Murphy (Wintersleep, Frightened Rabbit). ‘Look to the Stars’ is a finely crafted and constructed song, based around a light, brightly tuneful strum. Murphy’s vocal is pure and engagingly melodic as he delivers his understated words. As ‘Look to the Stars’ builds, sweeping sonic layers give depth to the song and draw the listener in. The Gerry Home-directed video is well matched to the music, reinforcing the ethereal atmosphere generated by all the images of starry skies and Murphy performing.
Murphy says of the song: “The melody and chorus lyrics for this song started as a lullaby for my son. I still sing for him a lot but there were times where it was like 30 minutes of singing and he wouldn’t be sleeping… you sing the same songs a lot but there are points where that’s just boring or there’s just a nice feeling in the room and you just venture into writing mode, I guess. I’d do this thing where I’d sing about natural world ‘outside’ things and try and make a catchy lullaby type song around it, just painting pictures of sort of peaceful images and meditating on those… like you could sing about a spaceship or a boat voyage or about waves crashing against the shore, and sometimes it would just turn into white noise (though that resulted in waking him up once. I think I freaked him out; his face was like, ‘what is this strange man doing making these weird wave sounds so close to my ear!!!’) — but anyway, this one had a nice melody and a sort of easy melody to visualize ‘look to the stars…they tell you who are…look to the stars, yeah, you never know..they all burned out so many years ago…we only dance in the afterglow.’ I developed the rest of the lyrics from that point but that’s the starting point of it and the song ended up actually being about a voyage, as well.”
The single is from the brand new album ‘Run Wild’, which is out now on Paper Bag Records. It’s the follow up to the critically-acclaimed 2022 release ‘Twin Flames’. Murphy shares: “I felt like it was time to take POSTDATA someplace new, and be a little more free with what it is. I was trying to go all-out stylistically, and trying to flesh out all the different places that it could actually take it. I wanted to give it more space, allow it to go wherever it needed to.” Indeed, ‘Look to the Stars’ floats up and away. Enjoy.
