Expect greatness from Melissa Ferrick’s new single, but don’t expect a release.
Zip yourself into the Boston artist’s “Black Dress” and you’ll be thrust into a fidgety alt-rock tussle between lovers and states of mind, stuck without the satisfying smash of a crash cymbal. “Production-wise, we took a cue from The Wallflowers’ ‘One Headlight’, and Phoebe Bridgers’ Motion Sickness (among many others), by not hitting any cymbals,” Ferrick notes.
A tease is one way to describe it; thorough mood-setting is another. The single — Ferrick’s first original music in eight years — arrived last week (August 15) to announce her recent signing to Kill Rock Stars.
“‘Black Dress’ came at me the way many of my favorite songs do, with the first line,” she explains. “’You say I’m either too much or not enough’ is my inner critique talking, and the next line, ‘you say I’m self-obsessed / A borderline narcissist,’ came from the woman I was seeing at the time who enjoyed half-jokingly diagnosing me — she is a therapist.”
The strain fuels Ferrick’s infectious stomp, as the wrestling match between her characters goes from pointed to playful. “Keep me on the edge of us / Stare me down start me up / Take me home take it off / Kiss me full on my mouth,” she commands on the second verse, the bitter words from earlier suddenly discarded across the floor.
“I knew I needed a short line to end the first verse in order to paint the protagonist and antagonist as equals,” Ferrick adds. “I thought about what was the same between us and I wrote, ‘But you can’t stop yourself.’ Yes! It felt so good to get that line because it clarified that in this song, there is no bad guy.”
Dress to the nines with Ferrick below.