Blue Lake, the project of Jason Dungan, has released a new single set to be featured on the artist’s forthcoming full-band LP, The Animal, out October 3 via Tonal Union. The beautiful, contemplative “Flowers for David” presents a collage of guitars that bob and weave among each other like a gaggle of ducklings making their way through the water. Dungan teases at a tension that never quite comes, expertly raising and then burying a string section that goes from uncertain outsider to integral part of the composition in its latter half.
“This track is written for a friend who passed away last year,” Dungan explains. “He was a really brilliant, beautiful person, who was also the singer in the first band I ever played in. He was also quite troubled in certain ways, and carried around a darkness inside of him. So this song is a way of making a tribute to him and trying to understand him through the lens in which I understood him best, which was music. He had a beautiful voice and an encyclopedic knowledge of music, and I think with this track I was looking to imagine him within this space of music, where I think he was able to find temporary but meaningful moments of transcendence. I made this track as a tribute to this person that I knew, not as a sad thing related to his death, but more that I think a lot of the music on this record was made with him in mind, and as a kind of gesture towards his life and the deep love he had for music.”
The Animal was co-produced by Aske Zidore and mixed by Jeff Zeigler. Check out “Flowers for David” below, and pre-order The Animal here.
