Aerial East shares new song and music video "Katharine" taken from upcoming album TRY HARDER out February 12th via Partisan.
Brooklyn singer-songwriter Aerial East has shared a new song and music video from her upcoming album, Try Harder (released on 12th February 2021 via Partisan Records). “Katharine” offers a touching reflection on a meaningful friendship now faded, and musically contrasts East’s unvarnished intimacy with brushes of the Avant-garde. The accompanying music video, directed by Luca Venter, follows Aerial blissfully suspended (literally) over the New York City skyline.
East elaborates on the song’s meaning:
“My friendship with Katharine was very important to me and changed my life. She is the reason I moved to New York. She was the first person I shared my songs with, and she insisted I share them with others. I wrote this song in a cab on my way to a staff holiday party at Hooters.
I'm not sure why I was thinking about her in that moment but she is still an important figure in my life even though we haven't seen each other in a while.”
On the video, East adds:
“I've always thought cranes were beautiful, so when Luca mentioned his idea to shoot someone in a slow zoom on a crane I was hooked. I thought, if we can get a crane it will be so stunning to see someone dangling in the sky like that. Finding the crane was pretty daunting and at some points seemed pretty unlikely. But one day we went down to Red Hook, drawn by the many cranes permanently perched by the water and hoping to gain access.
We were hitting a lot of discouraging dead ends when we stopped by our friend Benny's record shop and he, magical person that he is, said he knew a guy, Preston, with a homemade 30 ft crane built
by an artist to transport his large sculptures. Support your local record stores!”
Try Harder draws from East’s teenage years in West Texas, resulting in a beautiful ode to those of us who feel like our edges are rough, that perhaps we don’t always quite fit in. Through deceptively simple lyrics and a conspicuous absence of percussion, East dives into what she has known - adolescence, heartbreak, coming into a new social consciousness, and managing a perpetual feeling of unanchored-ness.
As the daughter of a military family, East spent her late childhood in Europe and teenage years in Abilene, Texas. After dropping out of community college, she moved to NYC where she’d meet a group of musicians whom she would come to befriend and collaborate with including Okay Kaya, Kelsey Lu, Wet and more.
Pre-order here