Iona Zajac releases her new single ‘Summer’ today which is accompanied by a spectral music video by Joshua Cobb. Her first release since 2023, Zajac asked fans to do some Emily Dickinson reading before it’s release, namely, the poem I felt a Funeral, in my Brain, that includes the verse:
And when they all were seated
A Service, like a Drum –
Kept beating – beating – till I thought
My mind was going numb
Dickinson’s poem, and its isolating despair casts its shadow across this powerfully melancholic new single for which Zajac returns a verse across time and hope for those looking ahead to better days.
Talking about Summer, Zajac said: “As Jack’s mother says in the fable Death in the Nut: ‘without death there can be no life.’ Summer starts with a dream as many of my songs do, and a morning penny-drop realisation that we need more than love to be good for someone. It’s about my tendency to bury sadness in order to continue. It’s about the necessary fragility of life and forcing hard feelings in to make way for the good. Emily Dickinson’s poem got inside my head like the drum that beats at her own imagined funeral march. I give a verse to her.”
“It is a song for those dreaming of better days, of wars to end, of lovers to return, of heads to leave the fog. And when Summer finally comes, we might have found enough strength from the bad to make it last.”
Stream Summer now via https://ffm.to/ionazajacsummer
Zajac is currently on a soldout full UK tour in support of Alison Moyet. She was also invited to open for and sing with The Pogues in Dublin last December making such a strong impression that this Spring she will continue as a vocalist for The Pogues on their May UK tour, sharing vocal duties with the likes of Nadine Shah, John Francis Flynn, Lisa O’Neill and Lankum’s Daragh Lynch across the dates. Tickets and details here.