#Julie Byrne and Jefre Cantu-Ledesma Share New Song “Love’s Refrain”: Listen
“#Julie Byrne and Jefre Cantu-Ledesma Share New Song “Love’s Refrain”: Listen”
Julie Byrne and multi-instrumentalist Jefre Cantu-Ledesma have shared “Love’s Refrain,” a single they created for Mexican Summer’s Looking Glass series. They also released a corresponding music video, made with Byrne’s friends Thea and Lydia Kegler. “In the earnestness of creating this video with an iPhone to record and torn up party streamers as our lone prop, we reached to represent this transit,” Byrne said of the video. “We wanted the video to feel like the cathartic break in a process unseen and to convey a solitude that is ultimately the site of renewal.” Watch the clip below.
“Jefre Cantu-Ledesma’s original version of ‘Love’s Refrain’ is a song that always felt limitless to me,” Julie Byrne stated. “When I first started writing the lyrics for the collaborative version, I would walk and listen to the song at dusk, sometimes I would walk for hours, playing it over and over again on headphones like I did with music I loved when I was a teenager.”
Byrne continued:
Initially the song was written about desire, the requisite distance embedded in the experience of desire, the feeling of really believing in someone and risking oneself in order to be guided by that belief. But as I moved through that time, it became clear that the experience of writing these lyrics and making this video had so much more to do with the healing of aloneness. The walks in and of themselves had become a therapeutic process for me, a space where I would practice my aloneness. I would set out to walk a distance not for the sake of destination but to feel embodied. At this pace I sought to restore the breaks in my spirit, cast another illusion onto the pyre, feel the necessity and possibility in that, where I would turn my words over and over again in my mind until they became deliberate, where I would sometimes so clearly feel a sense of horizon breaking through me.
Julie Byrne’s last studio album was 2017’s Not Even Happiness. Jefre Cantu-Ledesma released Tracing Back the Radiance last year.
Revisit Pitchfork’s Rising feature “Julie Byrne: Seeking Serenity in an Insane World.”
