Will Stratton’s new album The Changing Wilderness is to be released on Bella Union on 7th May. By his own admission, his music is as much a source of pleasure as it is exploration and this new release finds him shifting away from the introspection of earlier releases to focusing on the outside world…factors such as Donald Trump’s Presidency, and rising right-wing extremism finds him interrogating his country’s present crises.
Musically, some of his songs are said to evoke the lushest offerings from Sandy Denny and Richard Thompson while others take on the intimacy of artists like Ted Lucas and Joni Mitchell. Our first taster comes in the form of Tokens and while those above comparisons may excite some of you, I think the strength of this first single is enough to convince anyone that this album carries a uniqueness that surpasses resemblance.
Of the track Stratton says: “Tokens is a song addressed to the fraternal twins, the most frequent subjects of songs since songs were created: time and love. The afternoon that I was writing it, the weird weather we were having that summer was on my mind. I was thinking about how my perception of time is so tied to my perception of the changing seasons, and consequently, how my perception of time hasn’t been quite as sharp as it once was. I was also thinking about the ending of one of my favourite movies, the 2014 Paul Thomas Anderson film Inherent Vice. The way time shimmers and shifts in that movie is fascinating to me, verging on hypnotic, and I was trying to evoke a little of that feeling in this song.”
‘Tokens’ is taken from the album ‘The Changing Wilderness’ by Will Stratton, released by Bella Union in 2021: http://smarturl.it/WS_TCW
Photo Credit: Josh Goleman