While we all seem to have different concepts of when quarantine ended, most of us are far enough removed from the isolation that defined 2020 that we can look back on it with rose-tinted lenses as a period of focused self-reassessment rather than, you know, policy failure and mass death and stuff. While many of us made virtual friends we may not otherwise have connected with, there also seemed to be a trend of reconsidering the connections we’d made in the past with figures who represented an outdated version of ourselves who we realized we didn’t necessarily need to carry with us into the future.
Not only is this the subject matter LA-based songwriter Kacey Johansing addresses on her new track “Old Friend,” but the feeling of freedom that comes with shedding old skin seems to propel the piano ballad to otherwise-unattainable heights instrumentally. “This song isn’t only about letting a friendship go, it’s also about letting an old version of yourself go,” Johansing confirms of the track, which raids a similar vintage palette as Weyes Blood’s music. “I became obsessed with monarch butterflies while writing this record and watched many of them transform into a chrysalis and then hatch out of their cocoon. I feel that I went through my own metamorphosis during the lockdown and this song honors that transformation.”
The track lands ahead of Johansing’s forthcoming collection Year Away, which will arrive in full on October 13 via Night Bloom Records—the label the songwriter runs with Real Estate’s Alex Bleeker. Check out the new single below, and pre-order the record here.
