Like many artists since the onset of the pandemic, Brooke Annibale reached a crossroads when she realized that continuing to create music and maintaining her mental health felt mutually exclusive. Yet the past month has seen the Rhode Island–based songwriter’s return to live music as she not only played SXSW but also announced an in-progress string of dates in support of San Fermin that will give way to a short East Coast tour at the end of the month. And today, she’s revealed that this busy touring schedule aims to support her unannounced forthcoming LP soon to arrive on her new label home of Nettwerk Music Group.
Ahead of that release, she’s sharing the immediately catchy single “What If You,” an acoustic-guitar-led baroque-pop tune which, in a way, depicts the thought process that led to the creation of new music. “I was wondering whether or not I could carry on making music the way I had in the past,” she shares. “I thought, is diving back into my music career gonna knock out any mental-health progress I've made? Can I put out a record, be vulnerable, and do the whole cycle again? And then I realized: It's a double-meaning metaphor. What if everything that I loved loved me back? What if I just did this? And it worked.”
The strange visual that arrives with the track contains a set of images of the songwriter that have at least one thing in common: a backdrop of clouds, stars, or some sort of aerial imagery. Watch it below, and pre-save the song here.
