Phoebe Hunt Announces New Album 'Nothing Else Matters' With Video

05-10-2023

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(Missing Piece Group) Phoebe Hunt announces her new album Nothing Else Matters will release on July 28 via Thirty Tigers. After years of writing, recording, and touring as a band member and bandleader, Hunt's new album finds her as a woman standing alone with just her voice and her fiddle. Along with the announcement, she shares the title track, a coming-of-age debut single accompanied by a stripped-down performance video.

"This song originally came from a title that Maya DeVitry came up with on a co-writing session at my house," says Hunt. "We were sharing a cup of tea and I was lamenting the feeling of not being able to call up the guys in my band just to jam. We all used to live in Brooklyn together, but now we've all moved to different places in the country. I was sharing with her that I hadn't realized that a part of me was grieving for that. Maya took those emotions and filtered them into the first verse of the song. When she played me that first verse, I started crying." She adds, "Zooming out, it feels like it's a 'coming of age' song."

The songs that comprise Nothing Else Matters were born in 2020 at a time when Phoebe Hunt was off the road in Nashville, far from her bandmates in Brooklyn. She played for years with genre-bending folk band The Belleville Outfit, and more recently served as bandleader with her own backing band The Gatherers, but these songs were forged amidst a sense of frustration with the difficulties of scheduling and distance. As she flipped through a notebook of around thirty song ideas she'd written over the course of several months, Hunt knew that she was ready to make another record and wanted a way to express herself in spite of the circumstances.

"These songs have never even been played with a full band," she explains. "It was really a different process to work from the inside out instead of from the outside in. I just realized that there is this tiny little world inside of me, my own little reality. In the past few years, I have gotten to really spend time there, and this album is my way of sharing that tiny little world with others."

Though this is Hunt's most stripped down outing to date, there is an unmatched strength at the heart of Nothing Else Matters. Through eleven powerful and haunting tracks, all written by Hunt with co-writers including Maya Devitry, Jillette Johnson, and Dustin Welch, she grapples with existential implications of what it means to be both an artist and a human being. But while there's a fluid sense of questioning, the final takeaway is the deep, authentic expression of a woman who knows she is in fact enough. In spite of her circumstances, in opposition to the difficulties, she has the answer to all of it already-flowing through her hands and across her instrument, moving through her chest and out of her mouth. This realization came from a pivotal conversation with Lawson White, the producer and recording engineer Hunt worked with in Nashville.

"I came to see that my voice and fiddle are enough, that I am enough," she says. "And that was our rule: no bells, no whistles, no overdubs, no frills. I believed that standing on my own two feet, with the instrument I've given thirty years of my life to, singing the songs that come from my heart can be enough. And I hope this record can give that kind of permission to the listener, allowing them to find their truest expression, no matter what their limitations or circumstances look like."

Nothing Else Matters Tracklist
1. Nothing Else Matters
2. The Archer
3. Galloping
4. Molly, My Dear!
5. Walls
6. Carry On
7. I Am Not A Traveller
8. Contented
9. Who I'm Meant To Be
10. Get Along Lil' Doggies
11. Earthly Syndication