There’s no real blueprint on how to handle creating new music through a pandemic, but Abbie Barrett seems to have locked in a solid three-year plan: 2019, write a new song; 2020, shelve new song and bang out a socially-distant Steely Dan cover (“Dirty Work”); 2021, finish the old new song. That trajectory for the Boston artist has led us to “Blood & Bone,” a sweeping space-aged guitar-rock tune that crashed back down to Earth yesterday (April 13).
“It had been kicking around in my head, and we even played it live a couple of times,” says Barrett, “but it felt like it wanted to go in a new direction. In a way, this feels like the perfect moment to release it. The song takes a look at how we as humans try so hard to cut through our own noise, and 2020 was obviously an incredibly chaotic, noisy year on so many levels.”
Aboard Barrett’s spaceship for the stargazing “Blood & Bone” are Mike Oram (guitar, synth), Ed Valauskas (bass, guitar, percussion); and Rice Edmonston (drums, percussion), who dropped one of our favorite new tracks of this young year in March’s “Last To Know”. Barrett guides the roll here on vocals, guitar, and synth. Stream “Blood & Bone” below via Spotify, and purchase it on Bandcamp, where 25 percent of proceeds will be directed to the Indigenous Environmental Network, according to Barrett.