Gemma Laurence has taken some time since her last recordings, her new single ‘Adrienne‘ is the first new music since 2019’s ‘Crooked Heart‘. The Brooklyn based singer originally from Maine describes her delicate folk – tinged with an English sensibility from her time living in Oxfordshire – as “Sapphic folk”, taking as it does inspiration from poets and songwriters from the past and present such as Adrianne Lenker, Tomberlin, Elizabeth Bishop, Adrienne Rich, and Sappho to name a few.
‘Adrienne’ is an intimate folky love song inspired by Adrienne Rich’s ‘Twenty-One Love Poems’, and it sees Gemma Laurence opening up about her queerness for the first time in her music. It’s a song in which Laurence paints a picture of a past lover with disarming vulnerability and tenderness. It aims to carry the listener to the exact moment in time in which the song was set – a shared twin-sized bed at 6 A.M., sunlight dancing across the walls, coffee boiling on the stove, the taste of sweet rum lingering from the night before. The recording captures sounds such as rain falling against the windows of a window on the coast of Maine, faint chickadee songs and the soft hum of a rolling tape machine, which just add to that sense of intimacy.
Gemma shared some thoughts about the song with us: “‘Adrienne’ is about that moment when you first open up to somebody: the awkwardness, the sweetness, the vulnerability, the joy in these little shared moments of tenderness. I wrote it as a solo guitar song, but the song really came to life with the help of Jess Kerber (harmonies), Will Orchard (acoustic guitar), Matt Phillips (pedal steel, electric guitar), and Charlie Dahlke (production, mixing, engineering, backing vocals, and synth). Andrew Goldring mastered the track beautifully too. Really excited to share this song with the world – it’s my first release in over two years, and my first release ever collaborating with this many amazing artists.”
