Savages’ Jehnny Beth and Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie Come Together on “Remember We Were Lovers”

Their collaborative full-length “Utopian Ashes” is out July 2 on Third Man Records.
Savages’ Jehnny Beth and Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie Come Together on “Remember We Were Lovers”

Their collaborative full-length “Utopian Ashes” is out July 2 on Third Man Records.

Words: Margaret Farrell

March 31, 2021

Out on Third Man Records this July, Savages’ Jehnny Beth and Primal Screams’s Bobby Gillespie have teamed up for a collab album titled Utopian Ashes. The first single is a yearning, slow-burning ballad called “Remember We Were Lovers.” Beth and Gillespie first met in 2015, and over the years have performed alongside Suicide and the rest of Primal Scream.

For Utopian Ashes, the two explore fictional characters with a revived sense of ache. Inspired by classic country songwriter duets like Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris’ “Grievous Angel” and George Jones and Tammy Wynette’s “We Go Together,” the two put themselves in the scenario of a crumbling marriage, one that continues to erode with emotional  inarticulacy and misperceptions.

“I wanted to put pain back into music. I wasn’t hearing a lot of it in modern rock music,” Gillespie said of the project.  “In the same way you create characters for a novel, we’ve created characters here,” Beth shared. “But you put yourself in it, because you’re trying to understand the human situation. The singing has to be authentic. That’s all that matters.”

“When you write a song you marry the personal with the fictional and make art,” added Gillespie. “I was thinking about two people living alone, together but apart, existing and suffering in a psychic malaise, who plough on because of responsibilities and commitments. It’s about the impermanence of everything—an existential fact that everyone has to face at some point in their lives.”

Listen to “Remember We Were Lovers” below.