HAILING from Lafayette, Louisiana, Renée Reed has followed up her excellent first single, “Fast One”, with a French language track, “Où est la fée” today.
It’s the first song she’s released in French, reflecting her roots in the culture of her home state; and we’re told it’s one of two such on her self-titled debut album, out next month on Keeled Scales.
It’s a dreamlike number, Renée’s voice clear in unspooling a tale of backwoods magick over a crisp organ riff with a minor key shadowiness, shot through with the darker mysteries of the land that brought us Dr. John.
“J’avais envie de la voir / C’était cachée dans le bois … Quand je l’ai trouvé sur la terre / Ça disait viens-ois ma chère, et écoutez,” she sings, entranced in a land which maybe belongs to older beings than ourselves; or, to translate, “I wanted to see her / It was hidden in the wood … When I found him on earth / It said come on my dear, and listen.”
Renée says: “‘Où est la fée’ is a dream sequence, a narrative in which I am walking in the woods and find a letter on the ground: ‘Where is the fairy? It’s in your head.’
“The letter has possibly been written by an ancestor/guardian angel figure or perhaps another version of myself, sent to point out what I’ve not been recognizing in myself, that I’ve been dealing with life, or rather not dealing with life, by escaping into fantasies.
“As dream logic does, the narrative focus of the letter and the song bends and blends seamlessly from the personal outward to other people in my life.”
‘Où est la fée’ follows Renée’s first single, “Fast One”, of which we said: “It has, by turns, a sleepy blurriness, a pillowside intimacy, the sort of mantric guitar approach you might find elsewhere in a Tim Buckley or a Ryley Walker. It’s homespun and simple, but still has the feeling of an odyssey.”
Both tracks point towards a wholly intriguing and lovely debut album, which Renée summates as follows: “This album is a collection of songs about toxic relationships, seeing ghosts, ancestral baggage and blessings, and daydreaming about love.
“It is about certain feelings and experiences I’ve had over my life coming to fruition in the past three years.
“It was all made on a four-track recorder at home, in a place and in a way I feel most natural, and I believe that quality comes through in the sound.”
Renée Reed’s self-titled debut album will be released by Keeled Scales digitally, cassette, CD and LP on March 26th; it’s already available for pre-order here.
Follow Renée on Instagram, at her official website and on Bandcamp.
