We all have an Emily Salvi in our lives. For Nerina Pallot, her Emily Salvi was a listener, the name changed to protect the anonymous, who reached out one day and revealed that the English singer-songwriter and producer’s music was a guiding light through some dark days. It provided the catalyst and inspiration for Pallot’s forthcoming eighth studio album, A Psalm for Emily Salvi, out November 1, swirling around a heightened theme of the importance of perseverance, connection, and vulnerability.
Further illuminating this sonic compass is enchanting new single “High Time,” a lively flirtation with a weathered slice of Americana that expands nicely around the darker edges. The striking track hit the streams this past Friday (September 20), and allows us to joyride alongside Pallot as she slides classic Fleetwood Mac into the car cassette deck and cruises through inspiration both past and present to help shape her new future.
“For a few years in the early noughties, I lived between California and London,” admits Pallot. “It was during peak EMO, when everyone was losing their shit over My Chemical Romance and thought Dave Grohl was one of the good guys, and I felt like I’d arrived in Los Angeles 20 years too late. I wanted to bump into Donald Fagan at the Sunset Marquis and ask him every possible question a human could ask about Aja: I had to make do with getting side-eyed by Marilyn Manson instead. I’d drive along Laurel Canyon on a weekly basis, looking out for Joni Mitchell’s old house, the one she lived in with Graham Nash, but the only thing of note was the potholes.”
She adds: “The Laurel Canyon I’d imagined in my head no longer existed, if it had ever existed at all. ‘High Time’ was inspired by one of those late night Californian drives, but it is also a song looking for ghosts. The ghosts of songs I have loved, the ghosts of people I no longer know but once knew well; and that intangible, filmic feeling of a memory of driving through the night in the Californian desert.”
Take a ride with Pallot below…
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