Spotlight: Exploring the Emotional Impact of Fleeting Relationships, Widowspeak Releases ‘The Jacket’
FORMED BY A CHAIN-STITCHER FROM AN ELUSIVE SATIN DISTRICT — The fictional band Le Tex serves as the main character of Molly Hamilton’s original concept for her band Widowspeak’s newest album, The Jacket, released March 11. The unnamed protagonist of the story finds belonging and excitement in their new-formed band and relationship with their bandmate. “The vibrational energy that got things moving is the same that shakes the whole thing apart,” their album bio reads. “The relationship, and the band, disintegrate upon finally reaching their destination, the end of the road. The chain-stitcher heads back to the city, settling back into the rhythm of work, old standards and a familiar place.”
The rise and fall of Le Tex has uncanny parallels to Hamilton’s own band. “The deeper we got into the process, the more all of the airtight narrative pieces just sort of started falling apart,” Hamilton says. “I found it harder and harder to tell that story specifically, because it did become more personal and more about experiences I've had: being in a band, but also just having relationships with people where you're thinking about how your goals match up with theirs, and about doing any sort of representation of who you are in a performative way.”
The most obvious distinction between this fictional band and Widowspeak is that Widowspeak is still very much alive, and they are not going anywhere any time soon. The band, consisting of Hamilton and guitarist Robert Earl Thomas, holds an extensive history under its belt. In the COVID-stricken year of 2020, they celebrated their 10-year anniversary as a band with a livestream show as they were joined by their original drummer, Michael Stasiak, who left the band in 2011. That same year, Widowspeak released their critically-acclaimed LP Plum, a delicate and masterful reflection on Hamilton’s existential angst at the time. Now, the band is coming back with The Jacket, an effortless and contemplative project that captures a lifetime of emotions in 10 tracks.
Often deemed as a comfort band by critics, Widowspeak uses The Jacket to gold-pan the emotions we bury in the dirt. The band includes subtleties like buzzing organ melodies, fluttering flute whistles, and brooding piano overlays to embellish the mellow record. The band has historically been at its finest in its simplest moments, something that the artists used to their advantage for this record. Sometimes the most common experiences — burnout, growing pains, homecoming — can be the most emotional. “Everything is simple ‘til it’s not,” Hamilton sings in “Everything is Simple.”
“I think ‘truth’ was in my mind a lot with this record, because time has passed since the early days of our band,” Hamilton explains. “I'm not telling stories that are true. You know, they're always going to be a little bit colored by the memory of the past and distance. It's important for me to think about how you're never going to be able to tell the whole truth in a song — you're just going to be telling the whole truth in that moment and be true to how it felt.”
A theme that flows throughout The Jacket is how the most impactful relationships often come and go, that even the fleeting ones can have a permanent place in your heart. The album’s titular track sits at the heart of the tracklist, telling the tale of an old jacket left backstage. The narrator sings in the persistent chorus, “I could never let it go.”
Hamilton, fondly calling upon her history as a visual artist and her degree in interactive design, spent time “idiosyncratically mood-boarding” concepts for The Jacket.
“Things start becoming symbolic of ideas I have for songs or moods I want the record to have,” Hamilton describes. “And so I think when I started to pull pictures and write songs, a lot of what I was drawn to were ephemeral objects. Found pieces of paper or little scraps of things, and also a bunch of old T-shirts and jackets and things like that.
“The song ‘The Jacket’ was going to be an album track… It was a live record that we made in the studio, in that we didn't really do a lot of overdubs,” Hamilton continues. “A lot of the vocals were just the take where I was singing and everyone was playing, and we kept most of the instruments. I think that, in that sense, the record itself is like this artifact or this ephemeral relic of a time. To me, [‘The Jacket’] was like [a] paper trail. It's this object that holds all of this meaning, but eventually, you leave it behind or you sell it or you grow out of it and give it away. Or, you know, someday it won't exist at all.”
Although Hamilton doesn’t consider The Jacket a firm concept album, the narratives of Le Tex and Widowspeak intertwine like the same self from two different dimensions. The band returned to New York to record The Jacket, recording some songs with Stasiak. The chain-stitcher — when they eventually dismantle the band — returns to the satin city where the story began. Without ever name-dropping the fictional band, the lines between the narratives are blurred — is Hamilton singing as the chain-stitcher, or as herself?
“I think, for me, it was just kind of a songwriting tool,” Hamilton explains. “With this record, it was really useful to try a different approach and see that there's a way to talk about things that are real and that are personal without having it be incredibly confessional or incredibly specific. It can feel cathartic to me and still be cathartic for somebody else and have whatever meaning or truth is necessary to the person listening.”
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