Track Premiere: Laura Rabell “Immortal”

It’s safe to say that Laura Rabell is acquainted with the machinations of Momus, the personification of satire and mockery in Greek myth.  For he surely had her marked down for an encounter with irony when she announced in 2019 that her debut album would be entitled ‘Immortal‘.   But we’ll let her explain.She laughs darkly at the recollection: “I guess you shouldn’t call the Titanic unsinkable. I guess you shouldn’t call your first album ‘Immortal’. You’re just asking for it.”  It, in this case, was the cancer diagnosis that Rabell received three weeks later.  The album release was pushed back, but with Laura Rabell’s successful treatment it’s ready to go this year.

The title song – like all the songs – were of course written and recorded prior to Rabell’s diagnosis, but they took on a different context as time elapsed.  That’s doubly true for the title track, premiered here today – as Laura Rabell explains ” ‘Immortal’  was about imagining a worst-case scenario where you lose someone you love, and it’s terrifying. The thought would come out of nowhere and make me cry. But when I wrote the song, it was still an exercise in fiction. It was me saying to my husband, ‘I never want to lose you.’ Just lie to me and say we’ll always be immortal.”

That’s still there of course, but lines like “I’m not scared of anything – except for death” carry a heavier weight now, in a song that was already touched with darker tones.