Flock Of Dimes – The Life You Save
Today, Flock of Dimes’ The Life You Save, her gorgeous and intimate new album, is available worldwide from Sub Pop.
The 12-track long player features the highlights “Long After Midnight,” “Afraid,” “Defeat,” and today’s new offering, the luminous official video for “Keep Me in the Dark,” directed by returning collaborator Spence Kelly.
Flock of Dimes’ Jenn Wasner offers this on the video: “To celebrate the official release of The Life You Save, I’m so happy to share what is perhaps my favorite song I’ve ever written. ‘Keep Me in the Dark’ is a love song–the type of love rooted not in control or selfishness, but grace and acceptance of each other’s mutual imperfections. To heal in a relationship is to learn to see yourself with greater clarity and compassion through the eyes of someone who sees all of your bullshit and loves you anyway.”
Across the last few decades – whether it be as Flock of Dimes, as half of beloved duo Wye Oak, or via one of her many collaborations with Bon Iver, Sylvan Esso, and a sprawling list of other musical juggernauts – Wasner’s extensive catalog displays her gift for balancing authenticity and directness with an unmistakable left-of-center sensibility. Her songwriting has always found her as a keen-eyed observer, a deeply empathetic and thoughtful storyteller with a skill for probing memory, heartbreak, and unhealed trauma, a shroud of syncopation or off-kilter guitar taking a song somewhere quietly prodigious.
Her last solo album, the critically lauded Head of Roses, took on heartbreak from a dualistic perspective, following a winding thread of intuition into the unknown and into healing. Her new album, The Life You Save, takes that a step further; put simply, it’s the most honest, intimate, and personally revealing record of Wasner’s career. As heart-wrenching as they are hopeful, its twelve tracks delve the depths of addiction and codependency, inherited and experienced trauma, and the process of finding peace in the face of others’ suffering. The Life You Save is resonant, unflinchingly exposed – like a missive from the eye of a storm. But while it somehow manages to feel both viscerally raw and vulnerable, above it floats a sense of quiet peace, a sheen of hindsight, or perhaps of acceptance. It is the story of how it feels to be trapped between two worlds—the one you came from, and the one you’ve escaped to; about the belief that somehow, you can take the ones you love with you to this place; about the grief of realizing that the only person you can save is yourself.
The Life You Save was produced by Jenn Wasner and recorded at Betty’s in Chapel Hill, NC, and Montrose Recording in Los Angeles, CA. The Life You Save also features additional production from Nick Sanborn (tracks 2, 3, 4, 7, 8, 11), is engineered by Adrian Olsen & Alli Rogers, mixed by Adrian Olsen, and mastered by Huntley Miller.
US Tour Dates
Fri. Oct. 10 – Long Beach, CA – Fingerprints (Free! 7PM)
Sat, Oct 11 – Pasadena, CA – Healing Force of the Universe (Free! 2PM)
Thu. Nov. 06 – Philadelphia, PA – Johnny Brenda’s
Fri. Nov. 07 – New Haven, CT – Space Ballroom
Sat. Nov. 08 – Brooklyn, NY – National Sawdust
Sun. Nov. 09 – Somerville, MA – The Rockwell
Tue. Nov. 11 – Washington, DC – The Atlantis
Wed. Nov. 12 – Saxapahaw, NC – Haw River Ballroom
Mon. Dec. 01 – Seattle, WA – Barboza [Sold Out]
Tue. Dec. 02 – Portland, OR – Mississippi Studios
Thu. Dec. 04 – San Francisco, CA – Rickshaw Stop
Fri. Dec. 05 – Los Angeles, CA – Zebulon
#flockofdimes