Last we caught up with the artist formerly known as Flint Eastwood, she was opening for PVRIS at Boston’s House of Blues. We’ve all changed quite a bit over these past four years, and so has Jax Anderson, who dropped her stage name in favor of her birth name in 2019. Now, the prolific collaborator from Detroit has a new album out this fall — the multi-themed Songs For Every Condition, out October 8 via Neon Gold Records — and the latest is a glowing alt-pop jam featuring Yoke Lore (Adrian Galvin, formerly of Walk The Moon and Yellerkin) called “Tender.”
It’s not a Blur cover, but it’s a bop nonetheless.
“‘Tender’ is about learning to view vulnerability as a superpower because it is,” Anderson says. “It’s about how softness can oftentimes be viewed as weak, but really it takes so much strength to allow yourself to be soft. I wrote this track with Adrian while overlooking the Detroit skyline & it’s one of my favorite songs from the upcoming record.”
This new hit finds Anderson and Yoke Lore following up last year’s “Sensitive Heart,” which has racked up millions of streams. And it arrives with perspectives from each creator about what tenderness is all about.
“‘Tender’ is a song about uncertainty in the face of lies we’ve all been led to believe in,” says Yoke Lore. “One of the first lies we’re told is that uncertainty is a bad thing, that confusion is chaos and that chaos is a bad state to inhabit. But I think as we all grow and develop personal truths of our own, we learn that the absolutes that we were fed aren’t so absolute. Chaos can be a beautiful thing. Uncertainty can be the root of exploration and discovery, and that confusion is the seed of insight and the ability to find good questions in the world. The primacy of strength is another myth that we all must debunk for ourselves at one point or another. Sooner or later we are faced with the fallibility of muscle. It behooves us to find another way to interact with our struggle. To adapt, embrace, to change is to move beyond the fight.”
He adds: “How can you be happy or healthy or go to nice dinners or out with your friends if you’re busy fighting for your life all the time? Try a little tenderness. Be gracious with yourself, gentle on your hard parts. This song is about sloughing off the old truths that don’t serve us any longer so that we can all become the vanguard of a new consciousness that throws away prejudice and strong-man politics and the frantic cold-war era mindset of American freedom. We can decide our own future. And in that future, I think Jax and I would like to set up a different conception of ideas like tenderness and explore how they can be more fundamentally incorporated into our daily lives. Because we all need tenderness like we need air and water. Let’s not be so stingy.“
That’s a lot to take in! Absorb it all while firing up “Tender” via Spotify and its official music video below.
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