Léa Courty was angry. Coming home from work, and stuck in traffic, a pain ripped through her body. One-half of chamber folk duo Racoon Racoon, alongside Leonard Bremond, Courty decided to channel her rage into song. The band’s new entry called “Bloody You,” premiering today on American Songwriter, pairs Courty’s sharpness against a celestial backdrop.
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“Slightly growing within me / Like a thunder breaks a tree / Oh man, makes me crazy,” Courty sings. “My body aches my mind’s lazy / My head feels weird, I’m feeling numb / I shall stop waiting for you dumb.”
In depicting her exasperation over physical constraints, her words spew outward, and jazz-spun strings bubble up around her. It’s almost as if the instrumentation is there for comfort, a soothing agent to alleviate her pain. “So I’m just waiting for the strike / Tearing my insides in two / Till you show your bloody face,” her words arrive in an agonized state.
In many ways, such a juxtaposition uncovers greater depths to her story. “[I was] doubling over in pain because it was that moment of the month we women must go through, since the dawn of time,” Courty recalls of the incident which would propel her forward. “I remember feeling particularly angry at pretty [much] everyone, so I decided to release that anger and transform it into a song.”
Naturally, Bremond didn’t necessarily catch onto the song’s raw, boiling intensity. “The funniest part is that Léo didn’t ‘feel’ that anger when I presented him the song, I mean, how could he feel it,” she explains. “So, the instrumentation actually ended up being quite serene and happy, on the opposite side of how I was feeling when I wrote it.”
The process proved not only to be cathartic but enable the duo to dabble in a distinctive “Bossa nova feel” in the music. “[It] was a first for us, exploring something a little bit outside the folk register, and we’re really happy with the result. It’s Léo’s favorite, out of all of our songs, as for me, well… it’s still kind of a love-hate relationship.”
Racoon Racoon have slowly been making their name known. Their debut EP, Our Love’s Funeral, arrived in 2016 and set in motion one of the most promising folk acts today. A follow-up EP called Dawn Chorus emerged two years later. Now, the couple eye their third EP, tentatively expected later this year, which is anchored with lead-in “Birds and Daisies,” released in May.
Listen to “Bloody You” below.
Photo Credit: Yorisphotographer
