Filmed in the dry and dusty desert of the American Southwest, the new video from Eve Adams is brilliantly atmospheric. Those big skies and vast landscapes evoke epic tales of life: uncompromising, isolating, dramatic stories of love and loss. Beautifully arranged, with lush instrumental layers, the languid ‘Nowhere Now’ reflects the intense heat of the desert. Adams delivers an intimate vocal performance; her voice weathered with a gritty edge and perfect for this reflection on heartbreak: “Stop saying I’m pretty; it makes me feel so mundane.”
Fittingly titled “American Dust”, Adams’ new album is due out on 22nd August. It’s an ode to the timeless desert landscapes, slow pace, solitude and lives of the Southwest, full of powerful, stark imagery and ideas – dust storms, intense heat and weathered lands. The follow-up to 2021’s “Metal Bird” focuses on the people who populate the region, particularly the grit, hardships and romance of the women at the heart of domestic life. Adams says: “There’s something very radical about domestic life. So many women live their entire lives behind closed doors, completely in the shadows. Within those lives is such sacrifice, devotion, and love. I wanted to honor that: the poetry in the mundane, the longing in the repetition. The way love survives boredom and dust and time.” Just as there’s poetry in these experiences, there’s real poetry in Adams’ language and lyricism.
A few years ago, Adams moved into the middle of nowhere and feels a personal connection to the timeless plains and their sense of permanence beside the impermanence of human lives. She says: “The same swirling dust that clung to the covered wagons of my ancestors as they crossed the Great American Desert is the same dust my great-great-grandmother swept off her porch during the Dust Bowl of 1936 in Oklahoma, is the same dust that blows in through the cracks in my windows here in the desert, carrying stories from a time long gone. It’s not just dust—it’s American Dust, the kind that settles into the bones of a family and never leaves. I think about that dust as a symbol of the passage of time. I hope this album will be part of that same current, carrying forward for the next generations of my family to find. I’ve been lucky enough to have journals and poetry from my ancestors that document their lives during times of pure hope and pure hardship. I’d like to think of this album as a contribution to that family history.” So beautifully put. This is music to lose yourself in.
