Stranger Cat – Slow Jam Love Letters To My Body In Pieces
Today, Miami/NYC-based musician, producer and multimedia artist Stranger Cat announces her sophomore album Slow Jam Love Letters To My Body In Pieces due out November 15 on North Street Records.
Alongside the announcement, the songstress shares the sensual, confessional track “Witness” out now. Self-produced in bed recovering from a serious accident, the track came together while in a period of deep healing and deals with big questions: Is there a God watching our darkest moments? Does this omniscient force hear our prayers? On her creative mindset, “I was thinking, show your pain but make it sexy, make it art,” says Stranger Cat. “It felt like I was in an intimate relationship with my own body, writing to it as my Lover, my Muse.”
The resonant forthcoming album allowed the artist to feel it all. Putting the pieces of their body back together, both physically and emotionally, produced a collection of work that required careful reflection and complete surrender. Delving into the challenging experience, Stranger Cat shares, “These songs were written during a three year period when I was forced to sort of drop out of life and recover, first dealing with difficult dance injury which required 1.5 years of rehab, followed by a serious accident which left me healing in a wheelchair for five months with both legs casted.” Confined to a bed, the ten tracks that emerged was an accumulation of the pain, frustration and yearning for a brighter future. “I channeled the longing for connection into these songs of desire.” The result is a cornucopia of orchestral synth pop with layered vocals, sparkly synths and 808 beat driven dance parties. “I wanted to give myself and the listener permission to feel everything–then dance and let it all go–the kind of dance you do alone when no one is looking.”
The project’s first single, out now, “Witness” is a raw, lush pop song that came together in a particularly painful period. Stranger Cat reveals, “I wrote this track when I was at the end of my line, in complete surrender. I taped a microphone over my bed to record the demo vocals. A few months later I had a period where I could be mobile and was desperate for some joy, so I flew to Paris to finish the song.” Recorded at the historic Guillaume Tell studio where everyone from Radiohead to Serge Gainsbourg recorded, the final vocals were done on vintage mics, and the musician played all the additional instruments heard on the track including: B3 organ, electric and grand piano, the echo effects and more.
The “Witness” lyric video captures the desire to be seen and the beauty of capturing one’s joy.
On how the video came about, Stranger Cat shares, “The making of ‘Witness’ the song was at such a low point of my life and health. Later on, I saw myself dancing playfully with joy, so in my essence, after my friend spontaneously took a slo-mo of me at an art party in Brooklyn on my phone. I had the idea to sync it to ‘Witness’ and it just felt right (and so light since I poured hundreds of hours into every other video for the album).”
While the track was created amidst deep pain, the video is a chance to display the artist on the other side. “The song is about all of us needing our most vulnerable pain to be seen and witnessed somehow, be it an individual or a group of people. But seeing this fancy free video, I realized I wanted my freedom and light to be witnessed, to be a celebration too. I love how the song and video were created with such different energies.”
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