Watch Kevin Devine Play “If I’m Gonna Die Here” at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn for “Neighborhoods”

Devine debuts a new track from his forthcoming LP Nothing’s Real, So Nothing’s Wrong at an apt location in NYC.
Neighborhoods

Watch Kevin Devine Play “If I’m Gonna Die Here” at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn for “Neighborhoods”

Devine debuts a new track from his forthcoming LP Nothing’s Real, So Nothing’s Wrong at an apt location in NYC.

Words: FLOOD Staff

Photo: Lila Neugebauer

March 08, 2022

Photo by Lila Neugebauer

When we last checked in with Kevin Devine, he was keeping busy by dusting off deep cuts from his early days as a recording artist and re-releasing them under the album title Matter of Time II, a worthy endeavor and perfectly good excuse for not releasing any new new album-length material since 2016’s Instigator. That all changed back in January when Devine announced the album Nothing’s Real, So Nothing’s Wrong, which will arrive on March 25. Having previously shared the single “Albatross,” today we’re hearing a second new track from the album in the form of a live “Neighborhoods” performance in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery—the track, aptly, is titled “If I’m Gonna Die Here.”

“Green-Wood Cemetery has sprawled magnificent and ruminative and historical and expansive and indifferent within two miles of various addresses I’ve held for 32 of my 42 years alive,” Devine shares of the site’s significance for him. “I’ve spent more time wandering around there (mostly with two of my oldest friends, and with my daughter) in the pandemic than I had in all that time prior, by a wide margin, and it’s been miraculous and restorative.

“When FLOOD approached me about this series,” he continues, “it was the first—sorta the only—place I thought of, and “If I’m Gonna Die Here” was the obvious and intuitive song choice. I didn’t want to be disrespectful to the grounds, to the occupants, to the visitors, so I wanted to do something short, to minimize the potentiality of disruption. And the content of the song, written in December 2020, made performing it unavoidable. 

“My partner Lila, a legitimately brilliant artist with her own depth of connection to the location, very enthusiastically slummed it to shoot the performance, doubling the crew size, serving as location scout and director of photography and measuring light and finding the frame (all of this under 45 minutes so as to not rankle security/respect-paying family members). She said she thought it was beautiful to sing there, because who wouldn’t want music at their grave, and I like that thought. I hope they enjoyed it, and you do, as well.”

Watch the performance below.