Last we heard from Nashville songwriter Liza Anne, she was fine but dying. It seems her conditions have improved slightly in 2020, as she’s recently announced a follow-up to that 2018 LP with the less existentially titled Bad Vacation, set to be released July 24—right in the middle of our summer of socially isolated free time. With four of the record’s twelve tracks already made public, it’s no surprise that the newly unveiled penultimate track is another soothing gust of indie pop clocking in at under three minutes.
Despite the breezy nature of “I Wanna Be There,” the track, like the rest of the album, wrestles with the heavy topics the songwriter dealt with in the interim between records. “When something is being outgrown or something is just not meant to work out—those growing pains of separation feel impossible,” Liza shares. “They can cause such uproar of sadness and isolation and if you’re not the first to feel the “I think we should just leave things off here”, then you’re left to fill in the blanks on your own time.”
She continues, “Losing someone you love to their own pain is a really strange thing because you might still have that person around physically but the emotional distance you feel looms like a dark cloud in the room. This song is about feeling the weight of someone else’s sadness and feeling it, inevitably, bring you down too because when you love someone, sometimes you wear their emotions like your own.”
You can stream the track below (which comes with a Vine-length music video, looped a few dozen times), and anticipate the full album out July 24 via Arts & Crafts.
