If you're familiar with breakout band Lake Street Dive, you know something about Bridget Kearney's incredible talent.
Combine that magnetic talent with the musical genius of Kearney's longtime collaborator, Benjamin Lazar Davis, and you have certain magic. The duo are poised to drop an all new album on May 8th, but ahead of the project they've shared "Still Flying," a work of profoundly joyful camaraderie.
The new album comes from a trip the duo took to West Africa. Equipped with the most minimal of gear—a guitar, two-channel recording console, and tiny toykeyboard—the longtime friends soon struck up a collaboration with Stevo Atambire, a legendary Ghanaian musician and master of a two-stringed lute called the kologo. Master of the gyil (an African wooden xylophone) Aaron Bebe Sukura joins the group on the album as well. Less than a month later, Kearney and Davis returned to the U.S. with an entire album's worth of material. The new single reflects the album's infectious energy and unique sound.
Kearney says of the song: "'Still Flying' is about carrying treasured memories with you for your entire life. Specifically, it's about childhood and the crazy, stupid shit you do, like breaking into hotel pools (which Ben was wont to do in his youth) and skinny dipping in lakes (I may have done this a few times...), but somehow you make it through and you get to keep the thrill of those memories forever. I've been living in my memories a lot these last few weeks, to brighten up the monotony of quarantine. Sitting in my apartment, I feel so fortunate to have gone to the places I've been, met the people I've met, and done the things I've done. Whenever I need a boost, I can just dig into the treasure trove of my past for nuggets of joy! I feel especially lucky to have spent so much time in Ghana making music with Ben and Aaron and Stevo! That'll keep me flying forever."
Lazar Davis adds: "I wanted to take Aaron Bebe Sukura's gyil part and twist the beat around so he would dance to it in a different way. So I came up with a beat and harmony that would do that. It was one of the last songs to come together; it felt very disjointed until all at once it became one of our favorite songs on the record. This seems to happen to me a lot in the studio. I was listening to Bob Dylan the other day and came upon this lyric which felt like it explained my experience of how songs come together in the studio: "The slow one now will later be fast/As the present now will later be past/The order is rapidly fadin'/And the first one now will later be last/For the times they are a-changin'."