Rachel Bobbitt – Swimming Towards the Sand
Rising Canadian artist Rachel Bobbitt recently announced her long-awaited debut full-length album. Swimming Towards the Sand will be out October 17th via Fantasy Records, and Bobbitt has shared a string of singles previewing the album throughout the year.
Today she shares one final taste of the record with “Hush,” a gorgeous track unlike any other that Bobbitt has released before.
The dreamy, wistful song is borne from a demo comprised solely of Bobbitt’s vocal layers, placed upon a bedrock of a drum machine and keys, capturing the ache of a love story that never quite was.
Swimming Towards the Sand was made in Los Angeles with producer Chris Coady (Beach House, Future Islands, DIIV), but it is rooted in Bobbitt’s childhood in Nova Scotia. Written between call centre shifts, hotel rooms, and fleeting homecomings, Swimming Towards the Sand is a reflection on loss, girlhood, coming of age, the thrill of new infatuation, and the confusion and discomfort that accompanies it.
Raised in the windswept Annapolis Valley of Nova Scotia, Bobbitt first found an audience through the lens of internet virality. Growing up in a musical household, where her mom’s side hosted kitchen fiddle parties, Bobbitt amassed a large Vine following, performing covers and originals to hundreds of thousands of followers, leading to Shorty Award nominations and being crowned by Buzzfeed as one of “13 Amazing Singers You Should Follow On Vine.” But instead of running with the fame, Bobbitt took a step back, overwhelmed by the onslaught of opinions—opinions on her career, appearance, voice, image—at an age when she was still figuring out what those things meant for herself.
A dozen years later, after studying Jazz and Vocal Pedagogy at the renowned Humber College, learning the rules of the road while touring with the likes of Men I Trust, Indigo de Souza, and Blonde Redhead, and navigating the music industry from her home base in Toronto, Bobbitt arrives at Swimming Towards the Sand with an unwavering sense of purpose. It’s an album that revisits her roots with the clarity of perspective, the wisdom of experience, and the lessons of resilience that can only come with time. It looks back with an eye both clear and nostalgic and reflects her memories via sharply contemporary music. On this album, Bobbitt wields her jazz-trained voice like a guitar or keyboard, layering harmonies in conversation with herself, for a poignant exploration of grief, girlhood, memory, and return.
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