It’s one thing for an artist to call music-making “spiritual.” It’s another thing entirely to have a random psychic intuit the name of a song that’s so new, that same artist’s band hasn’t even learned it yet.
But stranger things have happened, and Jill McCracken experienced just that after a show at Auspicious Brew in Dover, New Hampshire. At the time, the Boston soul-pop artist had a new song up their sleeve called “do it.” The jaunty tune — released last month — is a rare, gleeful surrender to the grind that’s anchored to a pledge of “I’m gonna do it, do it, do it, do it, do it / ’Til it does me in.”
It’s a dogged sentiment that will resonate with anyone who lives for their craft — and apparently, whatever unseen forces are listening. According to a story McCracken posted to Instagram, a psychic they met after their set in Dover received a barrage of messages upon their meeting.
“She took my hand and visibly reacted, like an electric surge through her body,” McCracken wrote in the post. The psychic’s explanation? “It’s like the voices are screaming at me, they’re so loud. . . They’re just like, ‘do it. DO IT! DO IT! That’s all they’re saying.”
McCracken was “taken aback” — “do it” was brand-new, and they had never played it live before.
“I totally believe in connections with what we can’t physically see and I feel pretty tapped in to the spiritual realm – especially as it pertains to making music, which is a spiritual experience for me in itself,” McCracken tells Vanyaland. “I don’t find it at all unrealistic that ‘do it do it do it do it’ was absolutely bouncing off of me; my compulsion to lock in and absolutely gun it towards the life and career that I want often feels like bursting at the seams. That’s how I felt when I wrote the song, and that’s why I wrote the song.”
“It feels wonderful and mystical and magical to have it affirmed by whoever or whatever is looking out for me,” they conclude. “So I trust that it was real.”
Well, go on and do it tune in already, and catch McCracken live with Melissa Ferrick at Bellforge Arts Center’s Pride Festival in Medfield on June 13.
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