Premiere: Audrey and Hugh call upon history of violence, trauma with new song, ‘Witness (Hey Ho)’

Humanity was forged through violence. Acts so traumatic and unimaginable that’ll make your blood run cold date back centuries; tales in many ancient texts, including the Bible, contain brutal, inhumane deeds that test limits of faith and devotion. In the book of Genesis, God commands Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac high upon Mount Moriah. Before he strikes a fatal blow, his son bound to a stone altar, an angel of God intervenes and saves Isaac. Despite conflicting interpretations (some scholars believe Abraham actually did, in fact, kill his son), this account speaks to our shared history of violence. In writing their new song “Witness (Hey Ho),” premiering today, Americana duo Audrey and Hugh (Audrey MacAlpine and Hugh Trimble) had plenty on their minds.

“Describing what a song is about can feel like fitting a square peg in a round hole. Songs are extremely mysterious even to the writer themself, like being haunted by your own ghost,” they write to B-Sides & Badlands over email. “To us, [this song] shifts and seethes. We set out to write a murder ballad from the perspective of a woman. There is a robust tradition of men killing their unfaithful wives and lovers in country and folk ballads, and we wanted to offer a reciprocal narrative. We pictured a battered wife pointing her husband’s own gun at him in her shaking hands, ‘Like hell you’re going to leave me, hell you’re going to leave me now.'”

As “Witness” took shape, a plucky giddy-up driving the harrowing narrative forward, Audrey and Hugh began to examine “trauma in broader terms, about the legacy of love, and the inheritance of violence,” they explain. “The Binding of Isaac” was especially haunting and became a thematic touchpoint for their own stories. “Neither of us consider ourselves theists, or particularly religious at all, but we are continually spellbound by theological texts and stories. We couldn’t stop thinking about what a horrifying, traumatic experience that event would be for Issac. To be bound, helpless, by one’s own dagger-wielding, fanatical father. The ultimate lesson of love comes at an irrevocable psychological cost. We are all someone’s son or daughter.”

Unconditional loyalty, historically quite dangerous, ties into society’s perceptions of not only violence but the meaning of love, romantic and otherwise. With “Witness,” reading as much a hymnal as a dark piece of folklore, the Nashville pair stitch together “several characters and images throughout the verses that explore this theme: a child bride with a loaded gun; a blood-stained wedding gown; a knife pulled from a pilgrim’s eye somewhere in the Holy Lands; the distorted face of a clock; war-painted hungry children. At the heart of the song remained the refrain: ‘Like hell you’re going to leave me,’ a mantra of trauma and betrayal; abandonment by a parent, a lover, an entire generation, history itself.”

Once the song crescendoes, Audrey and Hugh turn their attention to “an ultimate violence,” they note, and its modern implications, with what is called “involuntary bystanderism. Like Issac bound on the mountain top, we regard the evils of the world every day and can do nothing about it. Or worse, we encounter violence and are paralyzed. The song is bookended by Issac’s call to arms, to action and rebellion against the legacy of this violence, ‘Hey ho we go down from the mountain side. Hey ho we go, you never should have left us alive.'”

“Witness (Hey Ho)” serves as the lead single to Audrey and Hugh’s debut album, Sisterman, produced/engineered by Mitch Dane (Jars of Clay, Sonia Leigh) and mastered by Pete Lyman (Chris Stapleton, Brandi Carlile).

Listen below:

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