Jude Brothers will release Dogwood Maiden Voyage on September 25th via Gar Hole Records, and today shares its first single, Desire & Devotion, with a puppetry video. It’s the Arkansas-born, New Mexico-formed songwriter’s first full-length since 2023’s render tender / blunder sunder, the album KLOF’s Erika Severyns reviewed on release, calling Brothers “a fearless vocalist that refuses to be complacent.”
Desire & Devotion began at the sea. Brothers wrote it on the cliffs above the water in Northumberland, wanting to be free of the pull of wanting itself — a feeling rooted in the first time they saw the ocean, and in a relationship that came apart on the same shoreline years later. In their own words:
“I had just turned 22 years old the first time I saw the ocean. I was so thrilled, magnetically pulled by its force, and I jumped in without any fear or consideration for the dangers of this big and powerful water. The undertow grabbed me, swirled me around and spit me out wherever it liked, over and over again. I didn’t even know to be scared until I made my way back to shore, shaking and crying- ecstatically happy, humbled, and completely terrified all at once. This was right before I entered a deep and all encompassing partnership with the person I’d spent years pining for, who I was madly and dangerously in love with. A while later, as our love fell apart, we would visit that same beach, where I found myself no longer able to just fearlessly throw myself into the waves- I had changed. I had learned the cost of surrendering entirely to the immense powers of desire and devotion.
“When this song came to me, I was walking along some cliffs overlooking the sea in Northumberland, and felt completely overcome with desperation to be free of the ceaseless cycles of wanting. I played pretend like I was in a Brontë-esque novel, stood amidst the windswept gorse and fantasized flinging myself off the cliffs into the sea. Remembering the younger version of myself, their bravery and their heartaches- my whole being yearned for everyone and everything I’ve ever loved. What if I could throw this feeling into the waves? What if I could cast this hunger, this loneliness, this longing into the sea and let it sink all the way to the bottom?”
The video was directed and edited by Adeliza Jane, from a story by Brothers and Jane, with puppets and a ship crafted by Sabrina Griffith and cinematography by Allen Hrynick. The puppetry is a return: the same hand-made approach shaped the video for practising silence / looking for water!, from the last record.
On Dogwood Maiden Voyage, Brothers leans into fuller harmonies and arrangements, and into studio experiment and collaboration, without shedding the acoustic, hand-built feel of the earlier work — an orchestrated collection that still answers to a freethinking folk vision. It runs long enough to have earned Gar Hole’s first double LP. Pre-orders are up at the Gar Hole webstore, where the double vinyl sits alongside CDs and bandanas, some of them hand-dyed by Jude with natural pigments. Label-mates Two Runner and Creekbed Carter Hogan have releases lined up too.
Pre-Save/Order: https://judebrothers.garhole.co/DMV
