It’s been a hot minute since we last heard from Boston’s Lost Film, Jimmy Hewitt’s project that blurs the lines between solo venture and full band. Any plans around supporting the release of late-2019’s Zero Summer were, of course, laid to rest by the pandemic, so it wasn’t certain when (or if) we’d hear from him again. Lost Film lay dormant for a while before sparking back to life last year with “Big Talk,” a tantalizing glimpse into a forthcoming new record put together by Hewitt in a log cabin in the midst of a blizzard in rural New Hampshire—hardly ideal conditions, but he made it work.
Album number four arrives in a couple of months. The foundations of its buoyant lead single have been knocking around for a while, according to Hewitt, who found inspiration in an unexpected source: “For someone who plays pop music on the guitar, I avoided listening to Fountains of Wayne for way too long. It’s probably a direct result of being in high school during the ubiquity of ‘Stacy’s Mom’ and dating someone with the titular name at the time. Having said that, FoW and Ivy were about all I listened to during the final stages of writing Keep It Together. The timelessness and range of appeal of those bands are undeniable and I was striving toward a sound like that.
“It’s been four years since the last record so I definitely spent a lot of time picking and choosing a cohesive batch to record when the time came,” Hewitt continues. “The main ‘Little Things Forever’ riff has been what I first play when picking up a guitar for about as long as I can remember so it was really satisfying to finally record it. The album title was grabbed from the lyrics of this one, which touch on finding solace in seemingly mundane moments and thematically sums up the collection as a whole too.”
With a lean 25-minute runtime, there isn’t a speck of wasted space on Keep It Together, which lands September 15 via Western Massachusetts–based label Relief Map Records. Hear the new single below.
