“Dip me in sunlight / let it burn / let it ache,” Foxanne belts in her new single, “Let it Ache,” featured below with a stunning live performance video.
Videos by American Songwriter
“This song is about winter in New York,” Foxanne says in a statement, “and about how painful it can be to even just exist in the city when everything is grey, but how magical it feels and how it almost aches when you go outside and finally feel the sun on your skin again and start to see little bits of green start to pop up.”
Foxanne’s voice is her most powerful instrument—raspy and piercing one moment, then deep and soaring the next. “With the lyrics,” she says, “I really just aimed to conjure up the very visceral feelings of that desperate sensation that the winter in the city brings and, likewise, the saving feelings that even something as simple as a breeze or a single cloudless moment can bring during that time.”
The accompanying video—shot while Foxanne was working and living in Mars-like conditions at HI-SEAS in Hawaii—centers the New York singer-songwriter’s raw, commanding vocals.
“I wanted to play the song from ‘Mars’ because it’s about how it feels to be trapped in the city in the winter, with how grey and confining it can be, and what it feels like when the first bit of spring green starts to grow and the first real sunlight shines,” Foxanne explains. “Future astronauts will have to combat similar feelings on the moon and Mars as they will likely live underground or in habitats far from their families and far from the ‘green of spring’ and the exposure sunlight we’re used to here on Earth.”
“Let it Ache” comes on the heels of Foxanne’s recent singles “Opportunity” and “Doing it All.” All three will appear on her forthcoming debut LP, It’s real (I knew it).
“I’ve been working on it for over a year,” Foxanne says of the album, “and it includes a couple of songs I’ve released before (completely re-recorded and reimagined for the album) but mostly a whole crop of brand new songs that I couldn’t be more excited to share. I wanted to incorporate a couple less conventional songs into the record and so, in addition to 11 more traditional indie/pop/rock songs, it has an intro song which features vocals and the sounds of a rocket launch (The OA-9 cargo launch which I recorded in 2018) an an outro song which I composed and performed on piano and synthesizer.”
According to Foxanne, several songs on the record “draw from [her] experience as a science and space communicator.”
“Overall,” she says, “I wanted to make a record that, while varied, felt like my voice as an artist. I’m sure my sound will continue to shape and evolve and grow, but for right now the most I can hope with this record is that I feel like I ‘sound like myself’ and that I can make people feel something. Whether they hate it or love it, I just want people to feel something listening to it.”
“Let it Ache” is out now. You can pre-order It’s real (I knew it)—out December 4—here.
